VBC PhD Symposium 2016

At the beginning of this month, I had the pleasure of attending the VBC PhD Symposium. The symposium is a two-day scientific conference organised by a committee of students from the VBC PhD Programme and, this year, led by Jillian Augustine. Just like last year, I acted as a volunteer to help with the set up and running of the event. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite as helpful as I had hoped to be as it happened not only at a very busy time for me but when I was sick — and lost my voice for almost two weeks!

The focus this year was “Mind the App: Applications that Bridge Biology and Technology” and had talks that covered a variety of topics from using spider webs to study virus survival to brain-computer interfaces to the history of biological warfare. I do not mean to cover the entire symposium in detail and will merely focus on a couple of aspects which were of particular interest to me.

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VBC PhD Retreat 2016 Report

This was something I wrote about two months ago. It was meant to be published on the VBC website but it’s been delayed so much I figured I might as well just put it out here. It seems a waste to just forget about it otherwise. I would’ve included some pictures but I’m not sure where my pictures are. When it gets posted on the VBC website there should be some pictures from other people.

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Aim

A few weeks ago, the merry students of the VBC set off for the 2016 PhD Retreat – two days of science, fun and camaraderie – that was organised by the PhD representatives. This year was my second retreat and the location was the Schloss Hotel Krumbach , just a short distance outside of Vienna. Subsequently, Ines asked me if I would be willing to write a short report on the retreat and what follows are my thoughts. As I was not taking detailed notes, rather than just a run-down of what happened I have chosen to take some main events and expand upon them and how I feel they fit in a larger context.