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PhD Research Day 2010

The Central PhD Office and the 3 Doctoral Schools join forces to present the first VUB PhD Research Day on Friday the 28th of May 2010. In recent years we have seen similar successful initiatives from different individual faculties which inspired us to organise a first time great event in honor of all our PhD students of all disciplines. Currently, there are approximately 1200 researchers preparing a PhD at the VUB. By organising the PhD Research Day we would like to give them the opportunity to meet each other and to present their projects to the entire VUB community. The event is meant to be inspiring and we hope to bring our researchers closer together.

Program

The PhD Research Day VUB will include keynote presentations of internationally acknowledged speakers, presentations and panel discussions per faculty, a multidisciplinary poster session and a reception. The actual program will be updated as soon as more details are known.

Morning

After a quick coffee reception in the ‘Nelson Mandela’-room, which starts at 9a.m., our PhD Research day will be launched by the Vice Rector for Research, Mr. L. Wyns.
The keynote speakers will be briefly introduced by the directors of the Doctoral Schools.

“Three waves of Interaction between Science and Social Science” – Prof. Dr. H. Collins
Natural science was once seen as the supreme form of knowledge-making.  Detailed studies of scientific knowledge showed that when examined closely natural science looks more like other forms of cultural activity.  A huge amount was learned from these studies and analyses.  But science, and that includes social science, remains different to other kinds of knowledge-making.  Nowadays, the hard problem is to show how it is different.

“Piled Higher and Deeper” – Jorge Cham PhD
Jorge Cham is the creator of Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD), the comic strip about life (or the lack thereof) in Academia.
Often called the Dilbert of academia, PHD has appeared in the Stanford, MIT, Caltech and Carnegie Mellon newspapers among others, and is published online where it receives over 9 million page views a month from over 1000 universities and colleges worldwide.
Jorge Cham was born and raised in the Republic of Panama. He obtained his B.S. from Georgia Tech and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, specializing in Robotics. He was subsequently an Instructor and Research Associate at Caltech from 2003-2005, where his work focused on developing “Smart” Neural Implants. He travels and presents all over the world to thousands of graduate students, faculty and administrators on the graduate student experience.

Check out his comics at http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

Afternoon

The afternoon of our PhD Research day will offer our PhD’ers the chance to present their research projects to the VUB community through the use of scientific posters. Taking into account the great number of junior researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel the posters will be mainly presented per research department. It will also be possible for some individual researchers to present their work through a poster, more information about this can be downloaded here.
The poster sessions will take place at three different VUB locations since the posters are grouped per Doctoral School.

Also in the afternoon, there will be several decentralized presentations and panel discussions in building D. Each faculty will organize one of these lectures. A more detailed program of these lectures will be available at the beginning of April.

Night

The PhD Research Day will be concluded with a stylish reception and party. With smooth background tones provided by a live jazz ensemble, our researchers will get the chance to meet and greet, to wine and dine. After some inspiring closing words from Rector P. De Knop everyone will be able to shake the day off on the dance floor.

 

 

 

with a twist of Gaga