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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 B7: Automated model building and representation learning for multiscale simulations Project B7 addresses applications of machine learning techniques to multi-scale simulation of soft-matter systems. Multi-scale methods address the problem that the complexity of high-resolution base-line models grows too quickly for problems at relevant scales. Thus, they assumed that there is a coarser-resolution structure emerging from the details that can be efficiently computed with many fewer operations but that can still inform us about relevant behavioural aspects of the system. Machine learning can help in discovering such simplified surrogate computations by fitting a restricted computational model (such as a parametrized model, a kernel regressor, or a deep feed-forward network) to example results obtained from a full-resolution simulation. Conceptually, this involves two aspects: The first is to build a coarser-grained (CG) model. Learning of a CG model can take the form of just parametrizing a force-field or a mapping procedure motivated […]

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.

IRTG Organization Currently, the student/postdoc speakers are • Rebecca Steiner (further information) • Fabio Frommer (further information) • Niklas Wolf (further information) • Maarten Brems (further information)