4th Retreat 2015

For the 2015 Systems Biology PhD Retreat, students from Zurich and Basel spent three days on Reichenau, an island very close to Konstanz, famous for its monastery. It was therefore a highly suitable place for the students to contemplate science, although here there was no vow of silence - discussion among the students and invited speakers was very much encouraged.

Before contacting speakers, we surveyed attending students on areas which were of particular interest to them. This identified, among others, computational approaches and discussion of scientific careers both within and outside academia, and we sought to invite a range of speakers which would cover this.

Academic speakers included Marc Folcher (ETH Zurich), Guillaume Beslon (LIRIS Lyon), Florian Stengel (Uni Konstanz), Lutz Brusch (TU Dresden), Hidde de Jong (INRIA Grenoble) and Dominik Grimm (ETH Zurich). The talks spanned modelling of metabolic systems, spatio-temporal patterning during tissue development, in silico experimental evolution, and biocybernetics. Prof. Stengel also talked about his experience as a recent PI, setting out the pros and cons of this career path. This complemented the insights of Susanne Rohrer, an ETH alumnus now working in the pharmaceutical industry. We also enjoyed a talk from Tim Fugmann (Philochem AG) on translational aspects of systems biology, working towards novel immunotherapeutics.

In addition to hearing about the present state of science, students also spent some time thinking about where science could go in the near future. On the last morning of the retreat was the 'Reichenau BioScience Expo 2030', in which teams of students took ideas from their own PhD projects, and imagined where these could lead over the next fifteen years. The wild and futuristic projects were assessed by the invited speakers, and prizes were awarded on the basis of creativity, plausibility and presentation.

The social activity made use of the location and beautiful weather, in a GPS-based murder mystery game, where teams had to solve clues at specified locations in Konstanz, aiming to identify the final location ahead of the other teams. Teams had to use their ingenuity to find narrow down the list of suspects, locations and murder weapons, and the competition was won by the team which decided to solve the travelling salesman problem (which is NP hard but this isn't such a constraint when n = 13). The winning teams were given prizes, not least of which was the time to enjoy their victory with a beer in the sun.