Konrad Adenauer Foundation Scholars visit Edinburgh
The group of 24 students were in Edinburgh as part of a study tour to learn about "Science: Study, Research and Life. A comparison of the systems in Germany and Great Britain ".
The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) is a German political foundation, committed to fostering democracy and the rule of law, to implementing social and market-economic structures and to promoting human rights in Europe and worldwide.
As part its activities, the Foundation awards scholarships to undergraduate and postgraduate students to support study and research at universities in Germany. The scholars have the opportunity to participate international seminar visits, which are designed to give opportunities for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and information with other scholars and acknowledged experts.
For the seminar programme in Edinburgh the students came from a wide variety of backgrounds, including medicine, biology, chemistry, psychology, business and mathematics.
In particular, they were interested to find out how researchers in Edinburgh Infectious Diseases had chosen their fields study, why these research topics were relevant to them, and to learn about the types of career paths that they might follow.
Over two days at Kings Buildings they heard from PhD students Matteo Putra and Nila Johnson from the Hosts, Pathogens and Global Health, and Andrew Hanton, based at the Roslin Institute on the One Health Models of Disease PhD programme.
They also discussed career paths with Frank Venter a postdoc in the Institute of Immunology and Infection Research, and with Sarah Reece, the new co-Director of Edinburgh Infectious Diseases, in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution.
On the second day, they visited the Ashworth Natural History Collection in the Ashworth Labs, had the opportunity to tour the Edinburgh Genome Foundry with the facility manger Rennos Fragkoudis, and heard from learned more about some of the professional teams that are crucial to successful research with Dora Lola-Luz and Kirsten Paterson, research development specialists in the School of Biological Sciences.
The programme you came up with was great! We’re all going to remember it for a long time.
Related links
Hosts, Pathogens and Global Health PhD programme
One Health Models of Disease PhD programme