“Statistics under one Umbrella" in Bielefeld

From EESwiki

Andrea did her Master thesis under supervision of Prof Wolfgang Stephan and Prof Leonhard Held. She applied for a grant from the EES Global Learning Fund to be able to visit a meeting in Bielefeld. The EES Global Learning Fund paid for the hotel and the registration fee. Her train ticket was paid for by the International Biometric Society. Andrea gave two talks at the conference. One "normal" one and one because she won the Bernd-Streitberg-Preis prize for her Master thesis. Andrea has now started a PhD project in Zurich in the group of Leonhard Held.

The conference was visited by approximately 600 interested persons, mainly Germans,but also some people from Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain or the United States of America took part in. Some months before the conference started, abstracts for talks or posters could be submitted in either German or English and the program committee decided which talks were accepted. Besides the submitted talks there were also about eight invited talks.

I had the possibility to present the results of my Master’s thesis about the detection of DNA regions affected by natural selection using Bayesian methods in a session about bioinformatics. As this was my first conference talk I had been really nervous. Nevertheless the presentation went quite well and the audience was really interested in my subject. Even the days after my talk persons asked me about details of my work.

There were also some social events organized like a trip to the city hall of Bielefeld or a “junior meets senior” dinner, where students and young researchers had the possibility to meet and talk to more experienced researchers. The dinner was organized as a big buffet where the people ate at large tables so that there was the first possibility to get to know each other. After the dinner the participants were randomly divided into groups, whereby each group had at least one senior. All groups had to solve ten statistical questions, for example: “How many R-packages exist on CRAN?” The group with the highest number of correct answers won. I had really much fun during this evening and got to know many people.

To sum up I think that the conference “Statistics under on umbrella” was a very well organized and really interesting conference. The main thing I learned is that it is important to be open minded, to talk to the people and to take part in the social events of the conference, because there it is easy to meet and talk to researchers, which you do not know before.