Thursday, October 25 12:30 p.m. — 1:30 p.m.
Location: Natural Sciences 2 Room 1201
www.maxplanckschools.org/matter-to-life
Professor Michael Grunze, University of Heidelberg, is visiting our campus to inform students about an exciting new opportunity for graduate study at a new Max Planck school in Germany. This school aims to attract the best graduate students world-wide to study and perform research in an ascending and rapidly growing new area of science, the reverse engineering of living systems. The school offers a 2- year Master’s Degree followed by a 3-year Ph.D. program. It is a joint initiative of the Max Planck Society, represented by a number of Max Planck Institutes, several top German Research Universities, and the Leibnitz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen.
The curriculum and the science are centered around the basic question: What is life? We will work on a quantitative description from the perspective of physics, chemistry and biology. Scientists have learned a lot in the last thirty to forty years about how organisms work, how a cell works, and we are fascinated by nature’s achievements. The basic components and building blocks of cells are now known, making it possible to combine the ingredients needed to create a rudimentary cell that is able to mimic a living cell in its functionality. The goal of the school is to educate the next generation of highly interdisciplinary bioengineers by involving them in scientific discovery and reasoning at a very early stage. The curriculum and the organization of the school are aimed at teaching critical analysis of the literature and data, out-of-the-box interdisciplinary thinking, and achieving independence as a young investigator. Each student will be supervised by faculty mentors and advisors from different disciplines.