13th Annual Graduate Meeting of the Section Evolutionary Biology of the German Zoological Society (Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft, DZG), Hamburg

From EESwiki

Report on my trip to the 13th Annual Graduate Meeting of the Section Evolutionary Biology of the German Zoological Society (Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft, DZG) in Hamburg, February 22nd to February 24th 2008.

The Meeting
The Graduate Meeting of Evolutionary Biology of the Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft is a meeting for diploma and graduate students working in the field of Evolutionary Biology. It takes place every year around spring time at another university located in Germany. This year, the conference took place in Hamburg from the 22nd – 24th of February. As next year the meeting will be here in Munich and I am part of the organizing committee, taking part in the meeting this year was a good opportunity to get to know more about the organisation of such an event as we could talk to the organizing team in an informal and uncomplicated manner. Approximately 50 people came to the meeting this year and half of them could present their work in a talk. Every morning the day started with a plenary talk followed by the student talks. The two invited talks were given by PD Dr. Gabriele Uhl from the University of Bonn and Dr. Klaus Reinhardt from the University of Sheffield. In between there were poster sessions where I could present and discuss my own work. On Saturday we visited the “Hamburg Dungeon” all together where we had a good possibility to get to know each other better. This was followed by a social event in a nearby cocktail bar where we had Mexican fingerfood and drinks.

My Contribution
I was able to contribute a poster titled “Sex-biased gene expression and adaptive evolution in Drosophila ananassae” about my current PhD work on the conference. As there were not so many participants there was a great chance to talk to everybody and so I got quite good feedback and suggestions. Everybody was very kind and so I also lost some of my nervousness I usually have on such meetings.

Atmosphere
As the meeting is organized mainly by and for PhD students the atmosphere was very informal. Nevertheless, the talks and posters had a very good quality and everybody was very well prepared. During the breaks and poster sessions it was easy to get into nice conversations. I really liked the meeting and thank the EES committee for funding me to go there.