1st Retreat 2012
The Location
For this first Systems Biology PhD retreat, we chose the countryside hotel external pageL’Orée de Vignes in Gilly-les-Citeaux in the Burgundy area in France.
Even though the location was quite remote (4 hours from Zürich), the hotel was extremely nice, featuring a good seminar room, three-course French meals and of course, local French wine… This made it a perfect place for a PhD retreat.
The scientific program
This being the first LSZGS SysBio PhD retreat, we tried to focus on introducing ourselves, and the different fields of research within the program. To do so we decided to have five sessions with keynote speakers from each field. The keynote speakers were more “senior” PhD students in their 2nd or 3rd year.
The sessions were entitled: Metabolism, Computational Metabolomics and Proteomics, Experimental Systems Biology, Computational Systems Biology, and Synthetic Biology.
We invited speakers from both within the LSZGS SysBio PhD program and external to it for some of the scientific sessions. We were happy to welcome Sai Reddy (ETHZ, Switzerland) and Yaakov (Kobi) Benenson (ETHZ, Switzerland) as internal speakers as well as Bart Deplancke (EPFL, Switzerland), Alfonso Jaramillo (Université Evry Val d’Essonne, France), and Francois Képès (Université Evry Val d’Essonne, France and Imperial College London, UK) as external speakers.
Even though the time was limited, the student and invited speaker presentations enabled everyone to present their work and to get to know what other PhD students in the Systems Biology program were working on.
The social and cultural program
Being in the wine district of Burgundy, we of course had to have a wine degustation. In the wine cellar of the hotel, a sommelier from the area introduced us to five different wines. He explained their different properties coming from the fact that they were made of grapes growing at different heights of the wine hill. This was remembered as a fascinating excursion into the science of Oenology.
To complete the cultural program, we also visited the nearby town of Beaune where the city tour guide told us about its history as the wine capital of Burgundy.
Feedback
This first retreat was a successful experiment and we are looking forward to future retreats, which will hopefully be just as interesting and enriching as ours.
The organizers
Andreas Kühne (Sauer Group), Laura Prochazka (Benenson Group), Kristina Elfström (Stelling Group)
Sponsoring
