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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 G: Central soft matter simulation platform The goals of project G in the second funding phase of the TRR 146 have been the implementation of new methods of general interest into the molecular dynamics simulation environment ESPResSo++ Guzman et al. (2019), which can be used as foundation for research projects inside the TRR 146, and the optimization of ESPResSo++ to efficiently use modern HPC resources and therefore to become performance competitive with state-of-the-art MD environments like LAMMPS. Project G has been successful integrating new simulation methods by coupling ESPResSo++ with the ScaFaCos library Hofmann et al. (2018), Arnold et al. (2013) to provide fast parallelized long-range interaction algorithm (e.g. P3M / multipolar P3M), developing and implementing a new approach for Lees-Edwards boundary conditions to provide a fast parallel implementation of shear boundary conditions. The performance optimization of the ESPResSo++ environment included to change the memory layout to benefit from […]

Project B4: Equilibrium and non-equilibrium processes in open systems via adaptive resolution simulations Computational soft matter constitutes a major application area for simulations, with extraordinary conceptual and practical relevance. Due to the systems’ intrinsic complexity, a considerable effort in this area has focused on investigating somewhat idealised models, e.g., consisting of a few essential molecular species in explicit or implicit solvent. In reality, even the simplest experimentally relevant systems, such as (bio)macromolecules in aqueous mixtures and nanochannels, are far more complex, involving many interacting species, evolving under open-boundary and non-equilibrium conditions. Increasing the complexity and detail of the computational model for these systems poses a significant challenge. Indeed, the interplay of interactions and processes spanning a wide range of length and time scales requires a multiscale approach, including methods resolving quantum, classical, coarse-grained and continuum degrees of resolution. However, it is often the case that a high-resolution method is only […]

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) • Moritz Mathes (further information) • Maarten Brems (further information)