CLS community gathers at the 2022 Fellows Retreat

The event was conceived and planned by the student representative team made up of Kamil Adamczewski, Cathrin Elich, Daniela Macari, Julian Nubert, with organisation by the CLS coordination office. Twenty-four CLS doctoral and postdoctoral fellows participated at the first in-person retreat since the start of the pandemic. The event team chose the motto “What am I doing and where am I going?” as a starting point around which to devise a program designed to help participants connect and exchange about current and future goals.
 
For the scientific program, talks and posters from the CLS doctoral and postdoctoral researchers were complemented by talks from invited faculty Justus Thies (Head of the Neural Capture and Synthesis Group), Samira Samadi (Head of the Human Aspects of Machine Learning Group, MPI-IS) and Robert Katzschmann (Head of the Soft Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich). The second half of the program saw a transition to forward-looking, career-related topics. CLS alumni Peter Gehler, Edgar Klenske and Katrin Lasinger joined Cyber Valley Managing Director Rebecca Reisch for a panel discussion. Rebecca stayed on to lead a thought-provoking coaching session, which threw up discussions about the path to a PhD, defining success, and the meaning of work-life balance.
 
Participants were able to connect further with an excursion to the nearby Atomkeller-Museum, home of atomic research by Werner Heisenberg in 1944, plus a fun quiz and a games night. Some participants also took to the water for data-gathering by kayak on the River Neckar. Overall, the location at the castle of Weitenburg overlooking the beautiful Neckar valley provided a great setting for the event and plenty of indoor and outdoor spots for discussion.
 
To round off the event, the winners of prizes for the best PhD/postdoc presentations as voted for by the participants were announced:
Best talk: Timothy Gebhardt (Neural networks that learn efficient parameterizations of PT profiles for atmospheric retrievals of exoplanets) and Xu Chen (Automatic creation of 3D human avatars).
Best poster: Artur Grigorev (Local method for modelling garment dynamics) and Zhiyu He (Model-free non-linear feedback optimization).
Many thanks to the student organising team and congratulations to the prizewinners!