October 19-21

How do hormones influence personality? How are emotional facial expressions encoded in the brain? And how can we improve cognitive testing of rhesus monkeys in the lab? These were some of the questions that the PhD students of the Leibniz ScienceCampus discussed during their annual retreat at the Akademie Waldschlösschen.

It is an established tradition for the Göttingen PhD students in psychology and behavioral biology to meet once a year without their supervisors. For three days, they retreat from the hectic office hours at the University and the Primate Center, to focus on their research and discuss it with their peer group at the Akademie Waldschlössen. The ScienceCampus continued this tradition and funded its second PhD student retreat in October 2016. Wiebke Hammerschmidt, Julia Jünger and Elisabeth Volk took over as organizers and drafted the scientific, but also the social program. As usual, the organizers selected and invited several guest speakers according to their own interests and demands. This year’s selection of special topics reflected the changing scientific world. Thomas Schultze-Gerlach (University of Göttingen) discussed with the PhD students the challenges and advantages of “Open Science”, while Gregor Bucher and Christiana Werner (University of Göttingen) talked about an important, but unfortunately still sometimes neglected topic: how to combine a scientific career with a private life and children.