Summer & Winter Schools

From 20 to 25 August 2017 16 international PhD students and Postdocs with a diverse background took part in the summer course 'What about the Family? - An interdisciplinary course on Ethical Issues in Health and Social Care'.

The main focus of the course included the following research questions: (1) what family means; (2) why families matter; (3) negotiating responsibilities; (4) familial roles in decision making and (5) justice within families.

The U4 lecturers were Prof. Veerle Provoost (Ghent), Dr. Ulrik Kihlbom (Uppsala), Dr. Katharina Beier and Dr. Sabine Wöhlke (Göttingen) and other members of an international network on Family ethics. Prof. Marian Verkerk (UMC-Groningen) initiated and coordinated this summer course.

From 20-24 August 2017 36 participants from 20 countries took part in the 'AMR' Summer School, focusing on antibiotic resistance, and the threat to modern medicine.

The combination theory and clinical and lab practicals was highly appreciated. This format increased the interactivity and created the awareness that AMR can only be tackled by interdisciplinary teamwork. The need for interdisciplinarity was illustrated by six international study consortia who presented their work-in-progress at the end of the Summer School.

In the margin of the Summer Schoool the U4 partners agreed during a business meeting on a number of future joint actions, including the exchange of students and staff with the aim of getting familiar with new techniques.

A workshop on Metagenomics was scheduled for 2018 in Groningen and the next summer school for 2019 in Göttingen.

From 14 – 18 August the first U4 Summer School Religion was held at the Centre for Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. The central theme of the Summer School was “Religion, Conflict and Peace”.

Hosted by Dr. Joram Tarusarira, who took care of all practical matters together with Mr. Willard Bouwmeester, the Summer School offered an intensive five day program for U4 PhD students and advanced Master students.

Aside from a stimulating key note lecture by Prof. Bjorn Krondorfer (Northern Arizona University), postdocs and professors from Groningen, Uppsala, Göttingen and Ghent gave lectures which approached the central topic from different disciplinary and thematic angles: (1) Historical approaches, (2) Interreligious conflicts, (3) Religion and Identity, (4) Gender Studies, (5) Sociological, Theological and Psychological perspectives.

Within the scope of a research cooperation between the Archaeological Institutes in Ghent and Göttingen the two PhD students Sven Brandt and Mario Rempe from the University of Göttingen participated in the archaeological survey of Thorikos in Attica, Greece.

The survey has been conducted for several years now by an international team of archaeologists led by Prof. Dr. R. Doctor and the Archaeological Institute Ghent.

Research fellows and students from Belgium, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands are working side by side to shed light on ancient Thorikos.

This year's "Hadron Collider Physics Summer School - HASCO 2017" took place from 16 to 21 July 2017 in Göttingen, Germany. Founded in 2012, this is the sixth consecutive year that this dynamic, international school, primarily aimed at Master's students, has been offered.

This year 60 undergraduate students from 28 different institutes in fifteen countries came together for a full week to learn about hadron collider physics. The institutes involved include: Lund and Uppsala in Sweden; Bratislava in Slovakia; Bayreuth, Bonn, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Freiburg, Göttingen and Heidelberg in Germany; Lecce, Rome and Pisa in Italy; Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela in Spain; Bucharest in Romania; Bern and Geneva in Switzerland; Ioannina in Greece; Rochester and the Colorado School of Mines in the USA; Bergen in Norway, Cambridge and Oxford in the UK, the Chinese Academy of Science in China; Krakow in Poland; McGill in Canada; and Delft and Groningen in the Netherlands.

Within the cluster for Science and Technology, a U4 Summer School cycle on Energy, Sustainability and Society will be launched. A first edition, dealing with the the central theme of 'Sustainable use and re-use of biomass', will take place at Ghent University. 

The summer school will take place in Ghent from 11 until 13 September. It is primarily aimed at PhD students.  

Each day of the programme will focus on a specific theme, and will include contributions of leading scientists in the field, coming from all U4 partner universities and the Ghent University based International Thematic Network 'GREEN-CHEM'. Day one will focus on biomass production. On the second day, the summer school will focus on technological processes, which are considered to transform biomass into useful end products (by thermal, thermochemical, chemical, microbiological, ... processes). On the third day, legal, economic and political aspects of the (re)use of biomass are dealt with. The third day will also include a visit to a company. 

During evolution animals have conquered the most extreme habitats and have evolved astonishing capabilities and a fascinating diversity of forms. Moreover, animal pests lead to significant crop loss and threaten human health directly or by transmitting diseases. However, it has remained a challenge to understand the genetic mechanisms underlying many zoological phenomena because functional genetic work has been restricted to a select number of highly developed model organisms.

With modern molecular methods, many organisms are now amenable to functional genetics: next generation sequencing can reveal genome sequences and expression profiles, RNA interference allows transcript levels to be knocked down to study gene function, new genome editing tools allow the genome to be modified with precision, and gene activity can be visualized in situ.

The medical students from Ghent University are proud to present the 7th edition of the Summer School 'Health & Migration' in Ghent, Belgium. This 10-day educational program is packed with interesting lectures, altered with social and cultural activities.

Our goal is to introduce medical students to the reciprocal concepts of health and migration in an international context. To reach this goal, we aim to attract students from different backgrounds and nationalities as much as possible. We try to stimulate a culturally diverse debate and broaden the participants’ view on various subjects.

The 8th U4 Winter School on Antiquity was held in Napels on the 'Interactions between Text and Object in Antiquity'. The event was held in collaboration with L'Università degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale, which is specialized in the Humanities. The institution generously offered their conference venue and access to the rectorate, located at Palazzo Du Mesnil, which is named after the well-known Belgian architects.

The U4 delegation was greeted by Prof.ssa Elda Morlicchio, Rettrice dell'Università L'Orientale and afterwards, participating U4 students had the chance to interact with Neapolitan professors D’Onofrio, Gallo and Genito, as well as with postdocs and PhD’s from this university.

The HASCO Summer School 2017 will take place at the Georg-August-Universtät Göttingen from 16 to 22 July 2017.

The main focus of the hadron collider physics school (HASCO) includes introductory topics in elementary particle physics, in particular in hadron collider physics as relevant for research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The summer school combines lectures and tutorials on theoretical foundations of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics as well as experimental techniques to test it. Furthermore, a focus is placed on statistical data analysis and an introduction to the software package ROOT as well as pp-physics at 13 TeV. In addition, students will have the opportunity to discuss state of the art measurements and results with senior scientists in the field.

Travel has long been a subject of inquiry in the history of science and scholarship. In recent years, the changes and development of the practices of travel, especially collecting and inscription during the long 18th century, have received special attention. Many studies focused on the changing aims, objectives and perceptions of travel, the collection of data and objects, the visualisation of observations and the collaborative nature of these practices. It has become clear how an earlier encyclopaedic attention was slowly supplanted by specific disciplinary interests and how this also shaped many fields of academic inquiry. Working "in the field" became a requisite of newly developed disciplines, like ethnography and the biological sciences. Indeed, these practices seem to have been instrumental in making scientific and scholarly careers.

This Summer School 'Historical Linguistics' for advanced BA students, MA students, beginning PhD students will be organized by the University of Göttingen in cooperation with partner universities in Europe, the United States and Japan.

The international Summer School will welcome up to 20 advanced international students working on (or interested in) diachronic aspects of grammar and semantics/pragmatics, with a special focus on the interfaces between morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. Participants should have a background in diachronic syntax and/or semantics/pragmatics, preferably of Romance and Germanic languages. We offer three main theoretical courses, a two-week course on linguistic methods, a practical activity, and poster presentations by students.

This Summer School 'Data Science' for advanced BA students, MA students, beginning PhD students will be organized by the University of Göttingen in cooperation with partner universities in Europe, the United States and Japan.

The use of the term "data science" is increasingly common, as is "big data". But what does it mean? What is unique about it? What skills do "data scientists" need to be productive in a world deluged by data? And what are the implications for scientific inquiry?

The fast adoption of advanced technologies by research communities enables new ways for generating, processing, structuring, and the collaborative use of data. This does not only have a profound impact on the amount of data produced, but also on the variety of data formats and the velocity of data generation and handling.