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Summer and winter schools Within the framework of the IRTG, an annual summer schools is planned to foster training, co-operation and dissemination within the CRC-TR and externally. The school program is organized in cooperation with the existing structured graduate programs (MAINZ, MPGC, Ingenium) and with the CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) node SMSM (Soft Matter and Sta-tistical mechanics, see http://www.cecam.org/node_smsm.html), which is run by MPIP, JGU, TU Darmstadt and the university of Stuttgart. Participation in the schools is not limited to doctoral students but it is open to all the members of CRC-TR and to external scientists, so that these events represent a way to bring together all the contributors to the CRC-TR and interested members of external groups. PIs of the CRC-TR are expected to contribute to the schools with oral presentations and students with poster presentations.

Focus seminars In addition to the summer schools and the annual retreats, more focused meetings bring together young members and PIs of the CRC-TR from closely interacting subprojects and, where appropriate, external guests. These smaller scale seminars are organized on a regular basis. The participating groups present their projects to each other and discuss further opportunity of collaboration. The focused meeting provide the attendees with an opportunity for advanced training and exchange and for expanding their scientific network. Every student in the IRTG is be expected to participate in the organization of at least one such event during the time of the thesis. The CRC-TR office and the PIs of the participating sub-projects also provide support for the organization of these activities.

Complementary training To complement the solid scientific preparation of the members of the CRC-TR, and to prepare the young members for a job in the industry or academia, transferable skills courses and career development initiatives are organized within the framework of the IRTG in cooperation with the other graduate schools in Mainz (MAINZ, MPGC, the center for computational science) and Ingenium in Darmstadt in order to provide an integrated complementary training offer. The topics mainly covered within the transferable skill umbrella range from ‘project management’ to ‘intercultural communication’, from ‘scientific writing’ to ‘oral presentation skills’, from ‘scientific data management’ to ‘good scientific practice’. Further career development initiatives include discussions with guests from the industry (i.e., chemical companies, publishing companies, patent lawyers etc.) as well as excursions to external companies of interest. The students of the IRTG choose the topics of their transferable skill courses themselves, according to their interests, and […]

Research stay abroad This activity is meant to provide further advanced training and to foster the internationalization of the education of the PhD students of the CRC-TR, as well as opening opportunities for the corresponding CRC-TR subproject to establish new links and collaborations abroad. Students of the IRTG are strongly encouraged to spend up to 6 months in a renowned lab abroad, where they will have the possibility to acquire more independence, learn new skills, create/strengthen collaborations and expand their personal scientific network. The research stay abroad is fully funded by the IRTG. The choice of the external lab is made individually by the students together with their advisor.

Student initiatives The IRTG encourages doctoral students to pursue own ideas, take own initiatives, and to prepare and submit corresponding short proposals. This aims to foster student’s independence and scientific vision of their field of research, and also help them to gain first experiences with preparing proposals in order to obtain support for their research. Two specific sets of student initiatives described below are supported explicitly. Applications for research assistants The IRTG encourages the doctoral students to apply for undergraduate student research assistants. This will help them to develop their supervision skills. Applications to fund an undergraduate student research assistant in connection with a project are considered by the IRTG once per year. Groups of students and postdoctoral researchers need to prepare such projects on topics of shared interest. Each project will be presented to the assembly of students and discussed, e.g. after one of the students’ seminars. In addition […]

Short term doctoral fellowships To allow for flexibility in the recruitment process, a pool of 31 months of short-term doctoral fellowships per year for national and international PhD students has been established. Each fellowship provides funding for a doctoral student for up to 1 year maximum. The doctoral fellowships will serve two purposes: First, they will allow PIs to accept applications of excellent candidates even if a position is not available immediately. Second, they will be used to promote international exchange. Graduate students from abroad can get a fellowship to visit the CRC-TR for a period of up to one year.

Project C7: Dense active suspensions in the chaotic regime Active matter has become a quickly evolving field spanning from biology and physics to chemistry and engineering. Its defining property is the directed motion—translational, rotational, or both—of its constituents. This directed motion requires the steady input of free energy. Freed from the constraints of thermal equilibrium, active matter exhibits a wide range of novel phenomena; on the level of its single constituents up to emergent many-body collective and dynamic behavior. Extensively studied have been the aggregation of active particles into clusters, swarms, and other highly collective and dynamics states; but also spontaneous flow states where sufficiently high activity triggers the transition from a quiescent to a flowing fluid. At high densities, chaotic behavior has been reported in suspensions of bacteria and in numerical simulations. The aim of this project is to develop a comprehensive multiscale framework that bridges the properties of […]

Project B3: Coarse-graining of solvent effects in force-probe molecular dynamics simulations The study of the conformational kinetics of biomolecules and supramolecular complexes using molecular simulations often is complicated by the fact that these processes are very slow. Various simulation techniques have been developed in order to resolve this issue. One very efficient way to investigate the atomistic details of conformational changes is provided by force-probe molecular dynamics (FPMD) simulations. In the most common realization of this technique, one end of the (supra)molecular system under consideration is fixed in space and the other end is pulled apart with a constant velocity via the application of a harmonic potential. From the distributions of the forces needed to unfold the system important information regarding the kinetics and the thermodynamics of the relevant conformational rearrangements can be obtained via a statistical analysis. The direct comparison to the results of experimental realizations of force spectroscopy […]

Admission and Qualification Admission Students funded directly by the TRR146 are automatically admitted to the IRTG. External students can apply for admission by presenting a CV and a one-page project plan to the TRR146 Office where they explain how their project fits TRR146 topics. The application will be evaluated by the PIs of the IRTG. We anticipate that workshop and conference travel funding for admitted external students will be limited and accessible only upon application. Qualification plan The most important training element of the IRTG is the research on the project, assisted by efficient supervision . In addition, the integrated training group serves as a mean to provide students and young postdoctoral researchers with the training required for working within the CRC-TR. The training is made necessary by the interdisciplinary nature of the CRC-TR, where chemistry, physics, mathematics and computer science are intertwined in a non-standard combination, which is usually […]

IRTG – Activities The IRTG fosters its objectives through a series of activities (see items below), which the members can attend/exploit in relation to their needs. Participation to the activities of the IRTG should not require more than 15% of a student’s working time. The activities are coordinated by the coordination office of the CRC-TR together with the elected student/postdoc speakers.