Review: The Second Summer School Of The RTG

At the beginning of October, our second RTG Summer School took place at the beautiful monastery of Schöntal. Our members met for three days to expand their knowledge, exchange experiences but also to get to know each other better during our Leisure Activities. Thank you again to everyone who helped plan our Summer School and to everyone who participated!  

Again, we invited three guest speakers to present their research or work on Approach-Avoidance from different perspectives. 

After our organizational session, Stéphane Ciocchi from the University of Bern gave the first talk on “Neuronal circuits of anxiety in the ventral hippocampus”.

Our second day was kicked off by Karin Roelofs (EPAN lab at the Radboud University Nijmegen) who spoke on “Human defensive reactions and their role in approach-avoidance decision making”.

To round off our second day, our last talk was given by Neil McNaughton from the University of Otago who despite the big time difference and distance joined us via Zoom to give us a preview of the 3rd edition of “The Neuropsychology of Anxiety”.

Thank you to our guest speakers and our PhD-hosts! 

After the talks, there were PhD-and-speaker-only wrap-up sessions to give our PhD students the opportunity to ask the guest speakers more general questions about academic life and their careers to also get to know the person behind the impressive research. 

Not only our guest speakers got to present their current work - our PhD students did so too in our Poster Session! Afterwards everyone got to test their knowledge and understanding of the presented posters in a fun pub quiz style poster quiz! 

On our last day, we had a Workshop on scientific presentation skills with a focus on rhetoric aspects and story telling by Stephen Wagner. In this workshop, our PhD students not only got feedback on their science pitches and got to ask questions about public speaking practices but also learned tools to integrate storytelling into their presentations.

In our Closing Session our Poster Awards were presented to Sabrina Gado, Janna Teigeler and Jasper Bischofberger. The awarded funding can be used for any research related expenses. 

In addition the Supervision Award was given to Matthias Gamer and Esther Asan was awarded the Jour Fixe Award. Congratulations!

We are already looking forward to our next Summer School in September next year - Save the Date: 25.-27.09.2024 in Rothenfels!