Report on 1st PhD Conference of CRC 1371 & DFG Research Unit miTarget 5042

“From North to South – Microbiome connects”

We were not only surprised but also highly excited when doctoral students from CRC 1371 of Technical University of Munich (TUM) invited us for a “PhD/Postdoc only” conference in Freising from 19^th to 21^st of September. Soon after the invitation, PhDs from CRC 1371 and miTarget started to organize the conference together.

The conference started in the evening after our adventurous journey with the Deutsche Bahn which took about 10 hours of travelling. We started off with a networking-dinner-event on the 19^th of September where we got to meet some doctoral students from TUM and already chatted a lot about our beloved and shared research field: the microbiome. Our stay at Gasthof Lerner in Freising was only 10 minutes away by foot from the Atrium and DG01 iGZW in TUM and we got to see the city from above with a nice rooftop view from the seminar room where we had our talks and poster sessions.

The main part of the conference was done on 20^th of September where we had three talk sessions, two poster sessions and very interesting keynote talks about “how to optimize your CV” held by Jörg Wunderer and a Junior Scientist Career Talk by Marijana Basic.

We stayed longer after dinner that day to play some networking games (e.g. human bingo with topics in our field) and chat about work and life.

As one of the organizers, feedback has been an important topic for me. We organized this event for the first time and got a lot of positive feedback about this new type of conference. One major point was the “PhD/Postdoc only” requirement. For all of us this conference did not only create a safe space for PhDs and Postdocs to talk openly about any issues in their job or private life, but we were also more open for discussion on our research questions.

All of us got the chance to present our projects as either a talk or a poster in front of other PhDs and Postdocs in the field which led to a high frequency of questions and suggestions as well as very interesting chats.

We are really looking forward to a “From South to North” networking event next year in Kiel.  

Facts:

Date: 19^th-21^st September

Where: TUM in Freising

Talks from miTarget:

1. Kathrin Schäfer: Discovering the functional potential of Bacteria in IBD
2. Arunabh Sharma: Linkage analysis identifies novel genetic modifiers of microbiome traits in families with inflammatory bowel disease
3. Juliana Schramm/ Irene Victoria Bermúdez-Pérez: Alterations of the intestinal microbiome by cigarette smoking and its potential risk of IBD

Poster from miTarget:

1. Rahul Unni: Bacterial evolution during chronic inflammation and its potential for ancestral state restorative therapy
2. Victor Lopez-Agudelo

Author: Juliana Schramm