News

This year’s annual U4Society Summer School ‘The Ageing Brain’ will be hosted by Uppsala University from 25 to 31 August 2019. Each of the programme days focuses on a different theme such as Ageing Research, neurodegeneration or protein aggregation.

The participants have the opportunity to attend interesting lectures, to take part in workshops and to discuss their own research with experts in their fields. The programme is aimed at Master students and junior PhD students, who have a specific interest in neuroscience and the challenges of ageing.

For further information please see the programme.

The SPIRIT Summer School on 'Molecular Genetics in Zoology' will take place at the University of Göttingen from 16 to 19 September 2019 (see poster). The Summer School offers 3-days of hands on training on the use of RNAseq, RNAi, CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing and situ hybridization. It is targeted at PhD student or postdocs who work on projects with an emerging or novel animal model with a focus on protostomes. All participants will develop their own experimental plan and have the opportunity to discuss their projects with experts from Göttingen and other invited speakers. Basic skills in molecular work are required.

The Göttingen Symposium on ‘Frontiers in Molecular Zoology’ takes place from 19 to 20 September 2019 immediately following the SPRIT Summer School. At this 2-day symposium, we bring together renowned international scientists who study genes and their involvement in all kinds of zoological phenomena. All PIs, postdocs and PhD students interested in Zoology are invited to participate.

From 14 to 16 May Ghent University's International Office opens its doors to the world and offers a programme about 'Staff Mobility'. The aim of this Staff Training is to welcome both teaching and non-teaching staff to share experiences with regard to improving the implementation and recognition of staff mobility, as well as to promoting and supporting staff mobility.

As an explicitly transcultural genre premised on encounter and exchange, travel writing provides ample opportunities for the study of cultural transfer across the centuries. As diverse as the forms and purposes of travel writing are – covering reports of exploratory journeys, scientific expeditions, pilgrimages, educational tours, or leisure trips – they all involve the acquisition, processing and mediation of cultural knowledge. However, contemporary studies in the fields of intercultural transfer and exchange (Lüsebrink 2005, Greenblatt 2010) have pointed out the instability and contingency of any cultural transaction. In addition, discursive constructions of the self and the other are shaped by particular ideological, aesthetic, gendered, social and institutional contexts (Leerssen et al. 2007).

From 16 to 18 January 2019, the final session of the third round of the U4 Leadership Programme took place in Göttingen. Under the title 'Managing change and preparing for the future', participants from all four partner universities learned about different frameworks facilitating the management of change and reflected about success factors and obstacles in change processes.

The U4 Leadership programme is a training course targeted at top-level executives in academia and administration. One cycle consists of four meetings, each hosted by one of the U4 partners. This year’s programme started with a session on developing academic talent in Groningen (February 2018), followed by a session on creating transparency and accountability in European universities in Ghent (May/June 2018) and a session on leading top quality universities in Uppsala (November 2018).