Ph.D. Retreat 2023
The 2023 Ph.D. Retreat took place from July 2nd to July 5th, 2023 at the Schliersberg Alm in Schliersee. After the 2016 and 2017 retreats having been held there, it was wonderful to return to this marvelous location!
We started on Sunday afternoon with the first part of the Intercultural Communication Workshop. The Ph.D. students were divided in two groups: The new students were introduced to the topic by Ms Isabel Reible, whereas Dr. Mirjam Rossa offered a more in-depth version of last year's workshop to the other students.
Both have been coaches in this field for many years, working for academic institutions, the industry and the government. The workshop was finalized on Monday morning.
Prof. Dr. med. Verina Wild, holder of the professorship for Ethics of Medicine at the University of Augsburg since November 2020 and Director Institute for Ethics and History of Health in Society (IEHHS) since 2023 started our scientific program with a talk on Public Health Ethics. This inspiring presentation was followed by a lively discussion.
After the lunch break, we held a Career Development Session for which we were able to engage three alumni of our Ph.D. program - Prof. Dr. Michael Laxy, Dr. Catherine Mason and Dr. Halimu Haliduola, who, together with Prof. Jelena Spaniol, Head of the Institute for Innovation Management (IIM, LMU, Munich School of Management) discussed various aspects regarding academia vs. non-academia and could contribute a lot of experience from both sectors.
In 2020, Michael Laxy was appointed by TUM Technical University of Munich as professor for ‘Public Health and Prevention’, Catherine Mason holds the position ‘Associate Director Medical Writing/Study Design Consultant, Cerner Enviza, and Halimu Haliduola is Head of Biometrics, Alvotech Germany GmbH.
On Tuesday morning, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Mansmann, Head of the IBE, opened the session on Causal Statistics with an introduction on this highly significant subject. Subsequently, three doctoral students from our program, Ms Amani Al Tawil (Ph.D. start in summer 2021), Ms Dan Huang (Ph.D. start in summer 2022) and Ms Yujun Xu (Ph.D. start in summer 2020), presented talks on subtopics such as: causal graphs, estimands, inverse probability of censoring weights, bias in overall survival.
This intense workshop allowed all fellows to deepen their knowledge in this field and opened up new approaches during the discussion. The session was resumed on Wednesday with part two.
On Tuesday afternoon, we offered a Mental Health Hike guided by Ms Luna Roos, Mental Health Crowd GmbH. While planning this year’s retreat, we decided in unison that mental health has to be part of the retreat in any case. During a walk through the countryside we focused on different aspects related to mental health and how we can include a higher awareness in our daily routine.
At the very beginning of our last session on Open Science, our Ph.D. students received questions on this increasingly important topic in research. The results of this online live survey enabled Dr. rer. nat. Moritz Herrmann, Coordination Open Science, IBE, to span the arc from the state of knowledge among our Ph.D. students, to the most important terms in this regard, such as transparency, accessibility, data sharing, accountability, reproducibility, replication crisis, to name only a few. We will continue to focus on this issue in the future.
At this point we would like to cordially thank Professor Ulrich Mansmann and Professor Eva Rehfuess, who made this retreat possible in the first place.