December 2020: Award of Excellence
Congratulations to our alumna Sabine Felkel! She received the 3.000 Euro Award of Excellence by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research for her PhD thesis in the Wallner group "Y-chromosomal evolution in Equids: Deciphering the history of horses using Y-chromosomal NGS data" that she defended in September 2019.
December 2020: Faculty meeting
The faculty members met online on December 7.
October 2020: Monthly virtual dinner
In an effort to alleviate the missing social interactions during the crisis, we held a first virtual Zoom dinner with 30 participants. After the "plenary" welcome, we randomly divided into smaller groups for informal and much appreciated conversation while having dinner. Looking forward to our next monthly dinner night out in!
October 2020: PhD defenses
Two successful PhD defenses:
Congratulations to Kerstin Spitzer (Futschik group) on successfully defending her thesis "Improvement of statistical methods used in population genetics" online.
We also congratulate Gökce Aköz (Nordborg group) on successfully defending her thesis "Rediscovering Aquilegia as a model system while chasing chromosome four" during a virtual exam.
October 2020: EMBO short term fellowship
Congratulations to Aglaia Szukala! Aglaia received an EMBO short term grant for her upcoming 3-month research stay at the ETH Zürich.
October 2020: Seminars go online
Due to the pandemic, our international seminar series was turned into virtual visits and webinars for the upcoming Winter term. As the semester progresses, we’ll post webinars to our Youtube channel. The webinars started off with a talk by Günter Wagner (Yale Univ.), and as many as 50 people had tuned in! If you’d like to sign up, please have a look here:
https://www.popgen-vienna.at/news/seminars/
September 2020: DZG Graduate Meeting
Faculty of PopGen Vienna organized the 25th DZG Graduate Meeting Evolutionary Biology. It was planned to hold the meeting at the Vetmeduni Vienna campus but due to the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic we were forced to hold the meeting online. Nevertheless, the meeting attracted many PhD students and interested colleagues. More information about the past meeting is available here. Several talks have been added to our YouTube channel.
August 2020: Erasmus+ grant
Congratulations to Aglaia Szukala! Aglaia received an Erasmus+ grant for her 3-month research stay at FU Berlin.
August 2020: Evolution explained to kids - online
The 2020 edition of "Kinderuni" (Children's University) could unfortunately not run "live" due to the Covid-19 crisis. Nevertheless, three of our students joined the efforts of Kinderuni to provide a fun, safe virtual contribution. Christina, Burcin and Elif prepared posters about evolution of horses in three languages for curious young researchers. "We were disappointed that we couldn't interact with the kids, and show them evolution under the microscope. It was a challenge to come up with a concept but it turned out to be fun to collaborate for the poster from our individual home offices."
August 2020: PhD defense
Congratulations to Christos Vlachos (Kofler group) on the successful (online) defense of his thesis "Towards the optimization of E&R experiments"
May 2020: Marshall Plan Scholarship
Congratulations to Marta Pelizzola on receiving one of the prestigious Marshall Plan Foundation grants to support her planned 6-month research stay at the Univ. of Chicago.
May 2020: SAB meeting
The faculty members met online on May 12.
May 2020: SAB meeting
This year's SAB meeting had to be carried out online. We enjoyed four afternoons of student presentations and interactions with our board members. We're grateful for their invaluable feedback, particularly during these demanding times.
April 2020: Alumni career News
We're proud of our alumnae Claudia Bank and Polina Novikova on their career advances:
Claudia Bank (currently PI at Gulbenkian Institute) was appointed professor at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution (University of Bern) and will move there in Autumn 2020.
Polina Novikova (currently PD at Gent University) will join the Department of Chromosomal Biology, MPIPZ Cologne as group leader in September 2020.
Congratulations to both!
March 2020
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, PopGen Vienna moved into home office mode. We stay connected during seminars, journal clubs and project discussions using online tools. Some cheering up is happening during virtual coffee breaks and beer hours - we wish all our friends and colleagues in the world to stay safe!
February 2020: Alumni career news
PopGen Vienna alumnus Christian Huber (currently ARC DECRA fellow at the University of Adelaide) accepted a faculty position at Penn State. His lab will be opening January 2021. Congratulations!
Alumna Ana Marija Jakšić (currently PD at Cornell Univ.) accepted a group leader position at the EPFL in Lausanne to work on experimental evolution of the cognitive brain in flies. Congratulations!
January 2020: New Year celebration
December had brought a sad closure to the year 2019, so we tried to welcome the new year with a positive outlook. 34 members and friends of the Vienna Graduate School of Population Genetics met for a creative night out to paint mugs for each other and enjoy dinner together.
