The young investigators' science blog
A quick guide on becoming physically and mentally active for your Phd. You’re in the final year of your PhD and feel like you are just a few steps away from a total burnout? Your PI wants you to do more experiments to finally generate significant results after two or three – more or less – chaotic years of PhD? You want to start writing … Continue reading If you can’t work it out, do a workout!
Quizzes are becoming more and more popular. Conferences often have an immunology quiz on their agenda and at Christmas parties we like to torture our PIs with some difficult lab questions. 😉 So – we thought now it’s YOUR turn!!! Solve our ImmunoSensation Quiz! This quiz will reveal whether you’re an expert in immunology, show how familiar you are with our lab instruments, and might … Continue reading It’s Quiz Time – the first ImmunoSensation Quiz
A heartfelt laugh helps us to learn and remember things – that’s scientifically proven! Thus, I recently started our new series on lab fails. We’ve all been there and we’ve all done that – life in general but especially as a lab beginner is tough. Luckily, failure and – even better and probably way more amusing – studying other people’s misfortunes is a precious educational … Continue reading Lab Fails – your pain is our gain! (part 2)
Success is everywhere. At least this is what everybody likes to tell me. Grants are permitted, experiments work, history is made. Still, it’s 2018 and even three years after the predicted launch of hover boards I find myself walking to my work place by foot – how frustrating is that? The reason for this delay in scientific progress is very simple: Success is always also … Continue reading Lab Fails – your pain is our gain!
Jonas Möcking is a PhD student participating in the Bo&MeRanG project, a joint programme of the Universities Bonn and Melbourne. After two years of research in Prof Matthias Geyer’s Lab in Bonn working on the molecular basis of the inflammasome complex, he continues his studies in Melbourne with Prof Seth Masters. We accompany Jonas on his journey, which began on Wednesday, 28th February, and his … Continue reading Blogging live: Jonas goes Down Under – part 2
Jonas Möcking is a PhD student participating in the Bo&MeRanG project, a joint programme of the Universities Bonn and Melbourne. After two years of research in Prof Matthias Geyer’s Lab in Bonn working on the molecular basis of the inflammasome complex, he continues his studies in Melbourne with Prof Seth Masters. We accompany Jonas on his journey, which begins on Wednesday, 28th February, and his … Continue reading Blogging live: Jonas goes Down Under
My first encounter with the workshop series “Antigen Processing and Presentation” (APP) is quite a long time ago. It started more or less by accident. While I was looking around on the EMBO homepage for some financial support for the next conference participation, I found an immunological workshop named “Antigen Processing and Presentation” which was exactly what my research is about. This workshop series had … Continue reading A workshop series traveling around the world
It’s a somewhat common assumption that you have to pay a certain toll to be successful: For a PhD this can mean heaps of frustration in the lab, but also limited contracts, extra hours and a lousy pay. This last point was subject to a recent, US-centric feature in Nature. There, the author had one suggestion for those who cannot afford their PhD: Take on … Continue reading The price of a PhD
I guess many young scientists know that feeling: They collected their first useful data in the lab and are finally allowed to go to their first big conference in their field. But what is going to conferences all about? You must spend a lot of money in advance, you have to arrange your travels by yourself, you spend much time on preparing your data … Continue reading Catch the moment – Networking at a conference
Have you ever doubted your decision to pursue a PhD? We’ve found that most PhD students we’ve talked to, at one point or another, experience uncertainty of some kind. Have you ever doubted whether you correspond to what a “typical PhD student” is supposed be? Because we know that life as a graduate student can at times be chaotic and taxing, we’ve set out to … Continue reading Are you a typical PhD student?