CIDBN’s festive opening on Sep 29: a retrospective glance
On Sep 29 more than 100 guests from science, politics and industry came to the convention center “Alte Mensa” at Wilhelmsplatz to celebrate CIDBN’s festive opening with us. We began the afternoon with an interactive session explaining CIDBN’s research topics and cooperations to the audience with various posters, hands-on demonstrations, and other visual material. When the Bernstein Duo (Jorge Jaramillo: piano; Theo Geisel: saxophone) played their first chords everyone took a seat for the official part.
After the welcome note by Fred Wolf (director of CIDBN), Metin Tolan (president of Georg-August University) gave the first greeting followed by the representatives from Göttingen Campus. Last but not least Sabine Johannsen (Sec. of State, Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony) gave her greeting.
The atmosphere was already lighter because of one or the other little joke in the greetings when Fred explained the purpose and specifics of CIDBN to the audience. Now that everyone was well informed about the circumstances of founding a new institute it was time to focus on science. We were happy that we could Marion Silies (former ENI Göttingen and CIDBN associated junior research group leader, now Mainz University) for a talk on “Form and Function of Neural Circuits”. Marion as co-speaker of the DFG SPP 2205 “Evolutionary Optimization of Neuronal Processing” also introduced the topic of complex system evolution that reverberated in several of the contributions and is a current common theme at CIDBN. The two PhD students Zoe Stawyskyj (Wolf group) and Anya Dietrich (Wibral group) gave insights into their doctoral projects and David Zwicker (MPRG at CIDBN and MPI-DS) explained “How Cells Build Droplets”. As the CIDBN is built to be a hub for junior research groups Marion and David gave impressive examples for the pathpaving research that young research groups can do in the field of biological networks.
Representing new international cooperations of the Göttingen Campus established by CIDBN we had two video messages. One from Amy Arnsten (Yale University) representing the NeuroNex Working Memory consortium in which CIDBN is the German theory hub, and a second from Kerstin Schmidt (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil), head of a new Institute in Brasil that collaborates with CIDBN on neurcal circuit evolution. The concluding scientific presentation “Understanding Neural Circuits by Interfacing and Interference” was given byour guest Agostina Palmigiano from Columbia University (NY, USA).
After closing remarks by Fred the music gave the signal for the end of the lecture part. The Bernstein Duo transformed into a Quartette being supported by bass and percussion. And, of course, everyone was invited to a glass of champagne and a small bite enjoying to chat with people in person almost like in former times.
