5th Retreat 2016

The Scientific Program

The selection of speakers was guided by the different career paths that one could follow after a PhD and a survey of the research interests of students in the program. The final program reflected the multidisciplinarity of systems biology, including both experimental and computational approaches.

The first talk was given by Prof. Berend Snijder, a newly appointed assistant professor at ETH Zurich. Other academic speakers were invited from abroad – Kiran Patil (EMBL Heidelberg), Ian Stansfield (University of Aberdeen), Oliver Serang (Freie Universität Berlin), and Duncan Odom (University of Cambridge). They presented their research on image-based screening, metabolic interactions in microbial communities, translational regulation, optimizations in computational biology, and transcriptional regulatory evolution, respectively. We greatly enjoyed their talks, which were supported by nice follow-up discussions. In addition to the guests from academia, we hosted postdoctoral fellow Ken Wang from Roche, who talked about her research in systems pharmacology, and Romilde Manzoni from hfp consulting, who taught us valuable skills on dealing with people.

To spice things up, we had a career discussion where Duncan, Oliver, Ken and Romilde illustrated their careers through decision trees. After adding branches with their choices, possible choices, and choices that they should have considered at the time, they told us how their personal lives influenced their decisions. The long round table discussion was followed by smaller one-to-one discussions with the students. We are very happy that they joined us and gave us such insights into their own lives.

Lastly, the students had their creativity and scientific thinking challenged by working in groups and developing a small scientific project. They were guided by randomly assigned scientific applications, biological fields, platforms used, and type of presentation. The students produced posters, cartoons, sketches, and models of the future, and their creativity, presentation, and plausibility of projects were assessed by invited speakers and the whole audience. Prizes sponsored by SystemsX.ch were given to the best projects.

The Social Program

Since we were granted with amazing autumn days, it was natural to spend our social time outside. This year we decided to bring back the ancient art of archery! A team from eventerlebnis.ch taught us how to use the bow, how to shoot properly, and eventually how to hit the target (although in some cases it was pure luck!). It wouldn’t be a complete joy if we wouldn’t make a competition out of it – we made four teams which were competing for almost an hour, collecting points with each miss or hit. And imagine this – the winner team won by a difference of 1 point! After all the excitement, we went for a walk to the nearby suspension panorama bridge. And if you think it lacked the excitement, you were wrong – some people had fun moving the bridge and scaring the rest away!