Upcoming Events

Speaker: Émilie Macé  |  MPI of Neurobiology

Date: Thursday 11th March 2021 at 5 pm (CET)

Location: online event

Link to meeting: https://mpi-biochemistry.zoom.us/j/99259023225

Meeting-ID: 992 5902 3225

Password: 456947

The IMPRS-LS Lecture Series is open to the public. We are looking forward to welcoming all those who are interested in attending.

Confrimation of lecture attendance:
Due to very high numbers of external students, a confirmation of lecture attendance can only be issued for students who are enrolled at one of the universities located in Munich, Germany.

Details about "Proof of attendance" & "Lecture netiquette"

 
Program of the IMPRS Lecture Series

Date: Wednesday 17th - Monday 22nd March 2021

Location: online

Trainer: Amani Said

Description: The Career Booster Program Workshop Series has been specifically designed to support PhD candidates, Postdocs and other academics to leverage their PhD by making a successful career transition, whether within or outside of academia.

The main challenges PhDs struggle with when it comes to career development are:

•     lack of clarity, not knowing what the next career step should be
•     not knowing where to start and the strategies to use
•     not understanding their own value, skills and the results they can create and more importantly how they can transfer their research training to another field
•     not having a long-term plan or career vision
•     fear of the unknown (especially if outside of academia)
•     where to find positions and how to network

As a result of taking the Career Booster Program, candidates experience clarity on their career path, they gain the confidence and learn the tools to create their desired careers. The programs 4 workshops and group coaching help scientists tackle the main challenges mentioned above.

Date: Tuesday 23rd - Monday 29th March 2021

Location: online

Trainer: Rick Scavetta

Description:  This workshop enables life scientists to understand the purpose and uses of classical statistics as an integral part of the scientific method. 

The workshop consists of three sections: Collecting, Describing & Inferring. Practical tools and the theoretical background to understand how they work will be introduced. Mathematical equations will be used when helpful and are provided in the reference book, but they will not be the focus of the workshop. Our goal is to enlighten via intuitive understanding, not confuse via math.

Topics Covered:

• good experimental design and sources of bias.
• systematic versus random error.
• the distinction between samples and populations.
• the most appropriate ways to describe samples.
• estimation and the principle of hypothesis testing.
• the standard error of the mean and confidence intervals.
• understanding and reporting uncertainty.
• power, type I and type II errors.
• standard parametric tests and their interpretations, including p-values, test statistics, and associated distributions.

Date:     Thursday 8th April 2021  |  time tba
               Friday 9th April 2021       |  time tba

Location:  online |  closed event, open only for IMPRS-LS students

The IMPRS-LS Seminar is a great opportunity for our students to showcase their innovative research to their peers in a friendly environment. IMPRS-LS students will have the chance to present their projects in either talk or poster format.

Our poster sessions provide the perfect opportunity for IMPRS-LS students to network with colleagues and discuss their most recent findings (no poster session due to online format). Students additionally have the chance to vote for their favorite talk, with the winners from each category being announced at the end of the seminar.

Date: Monday 12th - Tuesday 13th April 2021

Location: online

Trainer: Michael Gordian

Description: More than ever, the ability to develop fresh ideas, to formulate new questions and to explore uncharted scientific areas are vital to one's professional career. True creativity is key to success in academia and, of course, beyond. The main goal of this practical webinar is to familiarise you with some of the best-practice techniques of creative thinking for your scientific work and research. We will focus mainly on the concepts and exercises developed by Sir Edward de Bono, one of the greatest experts on the subject worldwide (who, however, is largely unknown in Germany). We will also explore some other famous creative techniques, for example 'oblique strategies' which David Bowie has famously used while composing one of his albums. You will get to try out and practice these techniques in various individual and group exercises, applying them to your own work. Furthermore, you will learn about the do's and don'ts of creative thinking, discussing and reflecting on key concepts such as the 'inner censor' and the 'diamond of creativity'. At the end of this workshop, you will have a 'toolbox' with various techniques which you can use independently in your daily work and research.

 
Date: Monday 19th - Wednesday 21st April 2021

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

Trainer: Ruth Willmott

Description: Do you have data to publish, but keep putting off writing that paper because you don’t know where to begin?

How to get started and keep going as well as what goes where and in which tense will be the starting point of this workshop. We will also review key scientific sentence structures as well as strategies to keep your text concise and precise. Issues such as how to create flow and generate the correct level of emphasis will also be discussed. Together we will explore how to make scientific writing understandable and readable and begin the process of integrating these factors into your own scientific writing style. Finally, we will formulate a plan on how you can improve your scientific vocabulary and writing style for future writing tasks. The Scientific Writing Workshop is ideal for non-native English-speaking early stage research scientists.

Date: Wednesday 5th - Monday 10th May 2021

Location: online

Trainer: Amani Said

Description: The Career Booster Program Workshop Series has been specifically designed to support PhD candidates, Postdocs and other academics to leverage their PhD by making a successful career transition, whether within or outside of academia.

The main challenges PhDs struggle with when it comes to career development are:

•     lack of clarity, not knowing what the next career step should be
•     not knowing where to start and the strategies to use
•     not understanding their own value, skills and the results they can create and more importantly how they can transfer their research training to another field
•     not having a long-term plan or career vision
•     fear of the unknown (especially if outside of academia)
•     where to find positions and how to network

As a result of taking the Career Booster Program, candidates experience clarity on their career path, they gain the confidence and learn the tools to create their desired careers. The programs 4 workshops and group coaching help scientists tackle the main challenges mentioned above.

 
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 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: 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