1st Joint Retreat of the PhD Students
in Experimental Plant Sciences
About the organisers
With research and education becoming ever more globally oriented, the International Advisory Board (IAB) of the Dutch graduate school Experimental Plant Sciences (EPS) has suggested an international collaboration the end product of which will be an International Graduate School in Plant Sciences.
As a first step towards setting up such an organisation, the EPS contacted the French doctoral school Sciences du Végétale (SDV) who's director, Michel Dron agreed that reaching across national borders is important to improve the research, training and education of the PhD students. Accompanying the EPSs proposal, the German International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) in Cologne (on Molecular Basis of Plant Development and Environmental Interaction) also drafted a similar suggestion. The output of these discussions was the initiative to organise an early-stage researchers retreat.

EPS, SDV and IMPRS are graduate schools that share common structures and responsibilities such as organising the training of PhD students and maintaining quality of research in Plant Sciences. Furthermore, the scientific fields that the schools cover are highly related and complementary. By joining forces, IMPRS, SDV and EPS aim, in the short term, at organising joint seminars, symposia and PhD courses and stimulating their PhD students to participate in the "PhD Students Days" of the partner graduate schools. In the longer term, the Schools will organise joint research-projects and exchange programmes based on the requirements for scientific and technical support less developed within an individual graduate school and that can be provided by another. The final goal will be the establishment of an International Graduate School of Plant Sciences, comprising a network of institutes go up and laboratories across Europe with well established scientific collaborations and information exchange.