Dear colleagues,

I am a 2nd year PhD student in the Department of Biomaterials in Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Berlin, Germany. I am working with titania scaffolds for tissue regeneration. I am also involved in the Graduate School of Regenerative Therapies in the main hospital in Berlin.
I thought about trying to find an opportunity to take part in a 2-3-week summer school/research workshop abroad. However, all summer schools in biomaterials and biomedical science that I have found till now are actually for undergraduate students. Is there anything for PhD students and how can I find such programs? For all courses that I take part in during the Summer school, I will anyway get the necessary credits for my graduate school in Berlin, and simultaneously will experience smth new in another country.

In case you have any ideas concerning my question, I will be happy to know your opinion.

Best wishes
Yulia

Hi all! I am in the end of my first year and I have a small problem. I have recently started thinking about my first publication. Actually, the ongoing lab work is completely related to this publication and is of course the first quite big part of my future thesis. However, my mentor has just announced that she would write the paper by herself and I should concentrate myself on one technique I am using in my research (microscopy and staining) and write a "small" paper about how I managed to use this method in our case. In reality, yes, for some time I really played around with some conditions for this staining (concentration of the antibodies and fluorescent markers, etc.). However, this was just the normal routine work for me, with which one can face all the time when you apply some protocols from papers to your system. And for sure this microscopy it just one tool, which I use in order to calculate the adhesion of cells, in my case. Honestly speaking, I would probably with pleasure write smth about this staining method, however I do not think that I have enough data and if it is relevant at all for my work.
I must say in general about my observations that my advisor is quite obstinate person. She wants all presentations and posters to be made only how she thinks they should look like. It happened once when she was not in the institute, I had to prepare the presentation and I made it together with my other mentor (not less experiences than she is). I of course sent it to her for feedback. When she was back, she sent me totally different presentation (looking like all HER other presentations) and told that I should use it. I think this is not normal. And now again this story with the publication. I am afraid that since she wants to go back to her home country after some time here to get a professor position, she now needs some amount of publications that is why she wants to write it by herself. And by that putting me in this strange situation.
I will be really very thankful for advice.