1st SyMoCADS Alumni & Visitor Workshop
On Monday and Tuesday (February 10th and 11th), our first Alumni & Visitor Workshop took place at the training and conference center Vierzehnheiligen in Bad Staffelstein. Despite the rolling wave of flu and some last-minute cancellations, most of us made to the workshop on Monday and was able to enjoy interesting research updates from the RTG and very interesting discussions. Since we only just started last year and there are no SyMoCADS alumni yet, our associates – Maike Scherer (doctoral researcher, BVT) and Dr.-Ing. Maximilian Schäfer (postdoc, IDC) – took on as role models and presented some insights from their work. Maike Scherer gave a talk about media modulation testbed developed together with Lukas Brand (doctoral researcher, IDC), followed by their testbed demonstration. Maximilian Schäfer presented his research on the choriollallantoic membrane model, which won the best paper award at the last year’s ACM NanoCom last year in Milan, Italy.
On the morning of the second day of the workshop, we had the great pleasure of listening to the guest lecture of Prof. Cornelia Palivan, who took us on an incredibly fascinating journey through the world of biohybrid materials and their interfaces with biological molecules and/or cells. She not only managed to impress us all with her great scientific achievements, but also with her warm and open-hearted personality. Thank you very much, Cornelia, for participating in our Workshop!
Next, Silvana Zurmühl (P2) took over and we enjoyed some team building activities. After a short activation with “Super Mega High Five” we got abducted by some aliens… Fortunately, all teams took the right decisions, were freed and even “earned” some money by selling alien artifacts to the imaginary government agency. The team building games, perfectly prepared and organized by Silvana, will certainly remain in our memories for a long time.
To sum it up, it was another great SyMoCADS event that gave us all a lot of positive impulses and a great motivation for future work. I think I can say that we are all very much looking forward to the next SyMoCADS event.
(AMB)