Upcoming Events

 
Date: Wednesday 26th May - Tuesday 1st June 2021

Location: online

Trainer: Rick Scavetta

Description: This workshop enables life scientists to effectively and rapidly analyse their data using the R software package.

Participants learn how to:

• operate R using variables, functions, indexing, and packages.
• import their own data regardless of size or format.
• perform standard statistical tests on large data-sets.
• produce plots and highlight specific data-points.
• begin programming in R using the apply functions.
• use split-combine-apply strategies for calculations and data manipulation.
• begin to adopt a bioinformatician’s perspective.

Date: Wednesday 9th June - Friday 11th June 2021

Location: online

Trainer:  Karin Bodewits

Description: Conflicts are a normal part of our daily communication. Why does this term have such a neg-ative connotation? What keeps us from confronting conflicts head-on, before they become real problems? Most topics of this seminar will be introduced by brief and realistic examples and general principles will be showcased. A core part of the seminar are the case studies by the participants themselves. In addition, case studies by the trainer and exercises will be used in order to go deeper into the topics according to the wishes and questions of the par-ticipants.

This seminar should help to sensitise how conflicts emerge. Participants will learn to prevent conflicts. For the cases when this didn´t happen, they learn to deescalate and resolve conflicts (as conflict party or as mediator) and finally also to escalate, if there is no other solution.

Date: Thursday 17th June - Monday 21st June 2021

Location: online

Trainer: Viola Kraus

Description: This course, comprised of online group workshops and brief self-study, aims to equip you with skills for your future work life.


In our evening online sessions you can expect short lecture sequences followed by break out sessions and moments of reflection around the following topics:
•    Insights on how the work environment is due to change (“Future of Work”) based on technology and innovation
•    What are „new work“ methods: how are you potentially using already these methods  
•    Skills to be adaptable and flexible for an ongoing change in the workplace

Date: Wednesday 23rd - Thursday 24th June 2021

Location: Large Conference Room, 1st floor, T-building, MPI of Biochemistry

Trainer: Verena Resch

Description: This workshop teaches basics in graphic design, thus giving you the tools to create your own visual identity as a scientist and communicate your results. First module focuses on the basics of graphic design. These include colour theory and colour systems, image formats (e.g., vector and pixel format) and typography. Furthermore, we will get to the bottom of modern graphic design and break it down to the basic concepts. The goal is to learn how to apply these concepts to your daily life as a scientist.

Second module will cover basisc of 3D-rendering. Most of you taped into this topic when using, for example, Pymol or Chem3D for rendering. These programs are perfect when you only want to create one single 3D molecule or protein. However, if you want to spoil your molecule or protein with a complete “photo shoot” including perfect lighting and a suiting surrounding, we need some advanced rendering technique.

Date: Friday 9th - Saturday 10th July and Friday 16th or Saturday 17th July 2021

Location: Small Conference Room, 1st floor, T-building, MPI of Biochemistry

Trainer: Ruth Willmott

Description: In the Career Mentoring and Management: Applying for Jobs on the Wider Market workshop, you will receive comprehensive career mentoring about the wealth of alternative career paths that are open to you as well as advice on how to best find and access these jobs. You will also be armed with key communication skills that will prove to be a prerequisite for career success on the wider market. You will be given advice on how to optimally build your CV and resumé as well as on how to write convincing personal career mission statements and strong core competencies summaries that will be attractive to a wide range of future employers. You will also learn how to best present your skills and talents in attention-grabbing application letters. Finally, we will role play questions that regularly come up during interviews to ensure that you gain the competitive edge over other application candidates.

Date: Monday 19th July 2021

Location: online

Trainer: Viola Kraus

Description: Knowing yourself, your skills and what you can offer in the work environment is an essential step towards navigating your career. In our half-day workshop we spend time on revisiting your skills and then, with the help of the branding canvas (a „Design Thinking tool“), you will put it on paper. Through mini-presentations with your peers and iteration, this tool will be a living and breathing document you can take away after the workshop (as a hardware tool or digital format) and continue to work with it.
By the end of this workshop you will have a clearer understanding of your brand and you will have practiced to present yourself.

Date: Monday 13th September 2021

Location: Small Lecture Hall, 1st floor, T-building, MPI of Biochemistry

Trainer: Karin Bodewits

Description: As a scientist, we often work in a cross-cultural setting. Our research groups are interna-tional, we collaborate around the globe, and most of us will spend part -or even all- of our career abroad. We can and should feel privileged to work in such a diverse and intercultural work environment. But these cultural and -of course- also individual differences can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings. These misunderstandings can lead to a broad variety of unde-sired consequences, such as failed collaborations, frustrations, feelings of hurt, anxiety and anger, culture shock and missed opportunities for knowledge transfer.


Cultural awareness is the first step in sidestepping these undesired consequences. We can improve our cross-cultural relations, and tap from the full potential of your intercultural teams.

Date: Monday 4th - Tuesday 5th October 2021

Location: Large Conference Room, 1st floor, T-building, MPI of Biochemistry

Trainer: Andreas Kist

Description: Programming is a highly desirable and applicable skill in science. With the open-source and universal programming language Python, you can acquire, analyze, and present your data easily without leaving one programming environment. In this introductory course, students will learn how to write small Python scripts using Jupyter notebooks. We will cover why Python is an ideal programming language to learn, the Python syntax, data types, conditional statements, loops and file I/O. We glance at scientific Python packages and version control.

 
Date: Wednesday 6th October 2021

Location: Large Conference Room, 1st floor, T-building, MPI of Biochemistry

Trainer: Andreas Kist

Description: Programming is a highly desirable and applicable skill in science. With the open source and universal programming language Python, you can acquire, analyze, and present your data easily without leaving one programming environment.

A lot of daily tasks are easy to reasonable difficult to automate or simplify. In this one-day workshop, students will learn how to batch process files, interact with CSV and Excel files easily and create paper quality plots with ease. Further, part of the course is dedicated to the needs of the students and we will work us through some issues course participants are faced with.

Course aim:
Learn to rename, read and process files dynamically, use the pandas and seaborn package for data mining, statistics and plotting.

Date: Monday 25th - Tuesday 26th October 2021

Location: Large Conference Room, 1st floor, T-building, MPI of Biochemistry

Trainer: Kai Hüwelmeyer

Description: Scientists have to give arguments in many different contexts: in their publications, in grant applications, in lab meetings and in conference presentations. Nevertheless, the bases for strong and correct arguments are not always fully clear to them. Logic provides extremely helpful tools for scientists to develop their arguments in a coherent, well-structured and convincing way. The seminar gives an introduction to the most important concepts of logic: premises and conclusions of arguments, validity and soundness of arguments, deductive vs. inductive reasoning, common types of inferences and fallacies.

The idea of the seminar is to use these concepts as a toolbox which provides very useful techniques for everyday scientific work. The participants learn how to reconstruct arguments from scientific texts, how to give well-structured and logically valid arguments, and how to avoid misunderstandings. There are two main sets of exercises: one for written argumentation and one for oral argumentation.

Contents:

• basic concepts of logic (validity and soundness of arguments etc.)

• inductive and deductive arguments

• common types of fallacies

• reconstructing arguments from texts

• tips and exercises for written argumentation

• tips and exercises for oral argumentation

Date: Thursday 11th - Friday 12th November 2021

Location: Small Conference Room, 1st floor, T-building, MPI of Biochemistry

Trainer: Ruth Willmott

Description: Knowing how to design a well-structured, visually attractive poster is a must for every researcher. However, due to insufficient know-how and inexperience, you may fail to get your message across and also not present your poster optimally.

To overcome these problems, the Designing and Presenting Posters Workshop focuses on the key dos and don’ts of strong poster design using your own poster as material. In addition, you will be coached on how to effectively make your key points and convey your message as well as on how to make the best impression on interested parties. This workshop will, therefore, enable you not only to design and present a poster competently but also to represent yourself and your Institute more professionally.
The Designing and Presenting Posters Workshop is ideal for early-stage research scientists with no or little poster designing and presenting experience.