Altmetrics just published the list of the top 100 scientific articles of 2017, which attracted the most online attention. None of the articles in the top 100 is dealing with materials research. Nevertheless, already the second most spread article is concerning us as well: It is a study on mental health of PhD students. The paper was spread more than 7000 times by twitter, posted 117 times on facebook and quoted in more than 20 online-articles. And it is giving food for thought: Every third PhD suffering seriously According to the study “Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students”, published in Research Policy,Read More →

At HZB we often have interesting guests from abroad – and with challenging topics. I met two of them, Vitaly Datsyuk and Svitlana Trotsenko, on a sunny autumn day. The first time Vitaly and Svitlana came to HZB in Wannsee, they were stopped at the gate. Both scientists work in the Physics Department of Freie Universität Berlin on a Ukrainian passport. But because the requisite application as required by the Foreign Trade and Payments Act hadn’t gone through, the two had to leave empty handed. And yet, this minor hiccup did not stop them from returning. In fact now, once a month, they are regularRead More →

As a doctoral researcher of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, I enjoy a lot of freedom to structure my research as I want to – especially, since we are usually not part of giving lectures or tutorials like the doctoral researchers at universities. By partaking in the summer student program, I learned though that teaching someone else can teach you a lot yourself. Taking the decision Only a few months after having started my doctoral research, we had a first summer student in our workgroup. At that time, I was very impressed by the sheer amount of work that this summer student could provide and thus sawRead More →