IRB BCN – ICFO PhD Joint Cool-Off |

Recently the first joint event between PhD students of two BIST institutes took place. For Thursday June 21st, 2018 the student council of IRB Barcelona and the ICFO student chapter ICONS had teamed up to hold a joint cool-off event sponsored and hosted by BIST.

Straight from the laboratories around 50 motivated PhD students headed to the BIST venue in Barcelona. They were warmly welcomed with some refreshments which were highly needed on this summer day.

Once all the speakers managed to find their way to the BIST venue the interactive flash-talk session could begin. Four courageous speakers from each institute had volunteered and prepared one slide explaining their PhD research topic in a pictographic way. Just prior to the event, the organisers drew four speaker-pairs composed of one ICFO and one IRB BCN student.

These four ICFO-IRB BCN pairs faced the following challenge. First, the pictographic slide of the IRB BCN student was shown and the ICFO student had to come up on the fly with a description of the research project in one minute. In the subsequent three minutes, the IRB student revealed the actual research idea depicted on the slide. Then the roles were reversed. At the end after all the performance of all four brave pairs the audience had to online vote for their favourite one. The winning team was Valentina and Carlotta explaining their research on the genetic regulation of the circadian clock and on the energy transfer between a single emitter and a 2D material. Congratulations again and enjoy your awarded Amazon vouchers!
Overall, it was great to see how motivated all the participants tried to make some sense out of each other’s research as well as how attentively the audience followed. It must be said that even though we all stem from a scientific background, a supposedly very intuitive and easy to understand slide on research on biomedicine may easily appear as highly cryptic and magical to a student researching on photonics and the other way around.

While enjoying some more drinks and snacks the ICFO and IRB BCN students could clarify remaining questions and seize the networking opportunity to finish off the nice evening. Judging from the perceived feeling and the feedback to the organisers this first joint event was great fun and everyone clearly enjoyed this icebreaking event between two different BIST institutes. To be repeated!