Solid Training for Excellent Research

Photo: Sandra Meyndt

Green light for an own Graduate Program

The BrainLinks-BrainTools Teaching & Training Committee’s endeavours to establish a Graduate Program for the junior scientists were successful: PhD students will receive a well-structured training including secondary skill courses. Together with the M.Sc in Neuroscience, it forms a new offensive to strengthen Freiburg as a central location for Neuroscience and neuroscientifical research.

Neurotechnologies emerge from exchange across disciplines and yet depend on the know-how of single specialist fields. For scientists who have worked on one subject for years, orienting themselves in an interdisciplinary research environment is not always easy. Physicians speak another language than computer scientists, an engineer would approach a problem in a different way than a philosopher. However, since a couple of years, they have been working together successfully in the cluster of excellence BrainLinks-BrainTools. Prime example is the NeuroBots project of Tonio Ball’s and Wolfram Burgard’s research groups dealing with a robotic drinking assistant.

Working together more closely, more long-term, more efficiently requires a more sensitive awareness for common interests: Where are we? Where do we want to go? What is possible? How are we going to get there? To carry this awareness into subsequent generations of researchers, to provide an incentive to bond oneself to one’s topics and the location of research – this is what the BrainLinks-BrainTools Graduate program is striving for. Besides acquiring expert knowledge and laboratory techniques there will be room for personal development and career planning. For instance, through workshops, career dinners or soft skill courses. The program does not follow a rigid structure. Quite the contrary – participants are permitted to actively shape the curriculum „bottom-up“.

They benefit from linking up with local partners and from getting subject-specific offers. There are the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine, the Bernstein Center Freiburg’s PhD Program "BrainDisC", the Graduate School of Robotics as well as the courses of the International Graduate Academy. Beyond that, Freiburg is part of the trinational initiative NeuroCampus, in which neuroscientific expertise at the Upper-Rhine will merge. If Alsace or Switzerland seem too near, participants might also consider a research trip to one of our international partners, such as the CSNE in the United States.

Graduate Program FLYER

For further information please contact Dr. Luise Goroncy