PostDoc Retreats

The Heidelberg Postdoc Symposium 2024 took place on June 7th, 2024 at the DKFZ communication center. Sponsored by the Health and Life Science Alliance and with support from the DKFZ and DKTK, we welcomed Postdocs from 13 different research sites both in person and online. 

Our keynote speakers included Prof. Dr. Daniel Mertens who shared AI tools for grant writing, Prof. Dr. Dieter  Henrik Heiland speaking about AI assisted analysis of high demensional data and the new crowd based research effort (HematoTrac), and Delia Braun and Stefanie Houwaart from the Patient Advisory Council encouraging patient involved research. 

Congratulations to all our presentation winners!

Poster Presentations

1st place - Victoria Damerell, Heidelberg University Hospital presenting Associations between tryptophan-kynurenine pathway metabo-lites and inflammation markers among colorectal cancer patients: Pilot study from the PerMiCCion Consortium

Tied 2nd Place - Jannis Wißfeld, HI-TRON presenting mRNA-Based Strategies for Targeted Tumor Microenvironment Modulation to Enhance Antitumor Immunity

Tied 2nd Place - Vanessa Arfelli, Univeristy Hospital München presenting ZBTB7A knockout accelerates hematopoietic malignancy in RUNX1-RUNX1T1 background in vivo

Short Talk Presentations

1st Place - Timothy Tempus, DKFZ presenting PyCuRT: An Automated Data Curation Workflow for Radiotherapy Big data Analysis

2nd Place - Hyeyoon Lee, DKFZ presenting R-Spondin 2 governs left-right body axis formation by establishing an FGF signaling gradient

3rd Place - Meggy Suarez-Carmona, HI-TRON presenting Visceral adipose tissue proximity as a biomarker of response to immunotherapy in epithelial ovarian cancer

We had a fantastic turnout at the DKFZ Postdoc Symposium 2023. There were a total of 39 participants and the event featured a mixture of talks and posters, with engaging discussions and insightful questions from the audience.

We had an excellent talk from the keynote speaker (Elias Eckert, Scientific Alliances Director of BioNTech) with an inspiring presentation. Very good talks and poster presentations from all the postdocs. The event was possible thanks to the casino and catering people and AV people who worked hard in making the event a success.

In May 2022, the 10th Postdoc Retreat at DKFZ with postdocs from DKFZ, DKTK, and IARC took place as a hybrid event. We had two days full of exciting events and would like to thank our keynote speakers Lisa Sevenich and Moritz Gerstung, the presenters of our workshops on "Storytelling", "Towards your future career", "Effective Communication", and "Taking Decisions", our round table representatives as well as all of you for presenting your work and discussing interesting topics and issues.

Our 2020 Retreat had to be postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic situation.

In November 2019, the PDN organized the PostDoc Retreat onsite at the DKFZ in the Communication Center jointly with the Young Academics Conference (YAC). In parallel the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut (PEI) Information Day was taking place. 

Besides an interesting scientific programme, a very insightful workshop on "Communicating Science with Pen and Paper" was held and the event closed with a group dinner at Braustädel.