Upcoming events

On behalf of 4TU Design United, we invite all PhD candidates, their advisors, and design research enthusiasts across the four technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven, Twente and Wageningen, to meet our 4TU colleagues and discuss the latest themes in design research. The day kicks off with a keynote address by Johan Redström, Professor in Design at Umeå Institute of Design. In the afternoon, we’ll dive into a variety of topics through engaging break-out sessions. These may include themes such as artistic research practices in design, politics in co-design processes, new developments in bio-inspired design and AI, speculative design techniques, and application-driven topics such as inclusive mobility systems and planetary health. The event will be held in Utrecht, a few minutes’ walk from Utrecht Central Station.

We have the pleasure to invite you to attend March’s Wageningen Evolution and Ecology Seminar (WEES) and Workshop! The Seminar will take place on Thursday 27th of March, from 16:00-17:00 in Forum, C0221. For this seminar, we will welcome Dr. Grit Kunert from MPI for Chemical Ecology (Germany) who will present her work on plant-aphid interactions in a seminar titled “Host Specificity of the Pea-Aphid Complex: a consequence of chemical and ecological interactions”. This event will be followed by drinks at The Spot and an opportunity to meet and have dinner with the Speaker. The associated workshop, entitled “Aphids and their endosymbionts: An overview, with special focus on the obligate endosymbiont Buchnera aphidicola”, will take place in Forum B0326 from 14:00 to 15:30. During the workshop, Dr. Grit Kunert will explore the world of endosymbionts and discuss how they are transmitted to offspring, their roles in plant defence mechanisms, the challenges to study them and future outlook for the field. Please contact Maxence if you are interested in a scientific discussion with Dr. Grit Kunert and for further information about the workshop.

This virtual course will show how public bioimaging data resources, centred around the BioImage Archive, enable and enhance machine learning based image analysis. The content will explore a variety of data types including electron and light microscopy and miscellaneous or multi-modal imaging data at the cell and tissue scale. Participants will cover contemporary biological image analysis with an emphasis on machine learning methods, as well as how to access and use images from databases.

On Tuesday April 1st, the next B-Wise meeting will take place at 12:30h, in room C0222 in the Forum building. Lunch will be available from 12:00h onwards.

With an ever-growing community of professional and citizen scientists as well as practitioners in the field of Lepidoptera conservation, we feel that this symposium will offer a perfect occasion to meet again and offer new evidence-based perspectives on providing a future for butterflies and moths in Europe. The current debates on nature restoration in Europe indicate that these are urgently needed. We expect to cover a range of emerging topics to advance Lepidoptera conservation and restoration and we welcome your contribution! Please register before 15th of January for the early bird fee.

We invite you all for the LUNCH MEETING on “Managing stress when supervising students” organized by WIMEK. This will take place on Monday 7th of April in FORUM B0314, between 12:00 – 13.00 pm.

This course will provide a global overview of the different metagenomic approaches to study microbial communities, covering methods for the functional search of genes, sequencing of metagenomes using the most recent technologies and in silico methods for sequence analysis.

We are excited to invite you to join the NLSEB PhD & PostDoc day, organized by the junior board of the Netherlands Society for Evolutionary Biology (NLSEB), on April 7th! To register, please fill out this form before March 14th

We are excited to welcome you to the 2025 NLSEB meeting that will be held on Tuesday April 8th at the Reehorst hotel in Ede. We have two very exciting plenary talks by Inge Loes ten Kate (Utrecht University) and by Hassan Salem (Max Plank institute) and by the winner of the 2024 Netherlands Evolutionary Biology Prize.

The Polar Day is organised jointly by NWO, APECS Netherlands and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Polar Day is open to polar researchers, policymakers, NGOs and industry, Master students and other (up and coming) polar professionals. NWO is responsible for the overall programme and the event’s general registration. APECS Netherlands takes care of the poster session and Early Career pitch talks.

We proudly announce the third edition of the More Nature Deeper Education Conference on Tuesday April 8th at Wageningen University Campus. With new partners and an extended program with lots of opportunity to experience nature inclusive education, both inside and outdoors – and meet the growing network of educators and the like. This year, the theme is ‘it takes a whole school!’. Nature inclusive education is not an add-on or extra time investment for educators and curriculum developers. It takes a village to raise a child and a whole school to educate teenagers and young adults. So, bring in your colleague deans, remedial teachers, janitors, schedule writers, mentors, architects and gardenistas and network of active parents. We need a whole community to include a whole school!

We invite you to attend the inaugural African Plant Genomics Symposium on the 10th and 11th of April 2025 at the United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya. For this symposium, the term plant genomics will encompass gene discovery, genome sequencing, functional genomics, comparative genomics, bioinformatics, genomics-assisted breeding, and ELSI (ethical, legal and social issues). We look forward to welcoming you to the African Plant Genomics Symposium 2025.

Each year around 450 representatives of the Dutch plant scientist community meet each other for a two day meeting. This meeting welcomes junior and senior research from academics and industry and offers an excellent opportunity to hear the latest scientific developments and to network.

As a future scientist in the life sciences, it is important that PhD students have an insight into the debates around the relationship between human beings, animals, and nature, to understand their meaning and to learn to participate in these debates. This course will provide students with a systematic overview of the key topics of animal and environmental ethics. Specific attention is given to the ethical assessment of animal experiments and the tension between individualist animal ethics and collectivist environmental ethics. Attention is also given to the cultural background of normativity and the ethical aspects of the PhD students’ own research projects.

You are cordially invited to join our symposium on bio-inspired solutions for sustainable agriculture! It is the final symposium of the NWA project ‘Natural Plant Defense’, a multidisciplinary project focused on mimicking natural plant trichomes as biopesticide. The symposium will take place on the 22nd of April at WUR, Omnia building.

Every year, Wageningen Graduate Schools (WGS) organises a one-day event for PhD candidates consisting of a carousel of 4 sessions with 6 workshops per session. The 1.5 hour workshops deal with all sorts of elements important for PhDs and the PhD track. Workshops are either stand-alone workshops or teasers that give a taste of more elaborate courses and workshops organised by Wageningen Graduate Schools.

The Amsterdam Complexity School on Climate Change (ACSCC) is a one-week event where early-career researchers and non-academic stakeholders come together to work on interdisciplinary projects around climate change using complexity science as the backbone.

This course is targeted at biologists and biochemists who are (starting to be) involved in both next-generation sequencing and mass spectrometry-based proteomics, but who are not experts in these fields.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the broad ranges of approaches to the practice and policy of biodiversity conservation present in different chair groups across the university. While many of us are centrally concerned to research and support conservation, we do so from quite diverse perspectives, and currently there is very little dialogue or direct cooperation across the different silos.

This practical course will cover advanced light microscopy techniques and participants will learn how to derive qualitative and quantitative insights on molecular mechanisms in mechanisms in cells, tissues and developing organisms

Experienced scientists, entrepreneurs and (PhD) students/colleagues who are just starting their careers in bioinformatics or systems biology, we want to give all of you the opportunity to discuss the latest research developments in bioinformatics, systems and computational (systems biology) and their broad applications in life sciences & health, agriculture, food & nutrition. Early Bird Discount is until 9 April 2025.

This course will provide an introduction to metabolomics through lectures and hands-on sessions, using publicly available data, software, and tools. Participants will become familiar with standardised workflows as well as with the current state of experimental design, data acquisition (LC-MS, MS imaging), processing, and modelling. In addition, they will learn about community standards and sharing in metabolomics, particularly through the use of EMBL-EBI’s MetaboLights repository and Galaxy infrastructure.

Through this years’ theme, The Essentials of Life, we will explore multiple angles of Life’s essentials. On top of the inspiring keynote and invited speakers, your research, insights and knowledge will serve as glue for the scientific programme. The strength of NWO Life lies in its ability to gather researchers across various disciplines, who will present their work in a way that is meant to spark fresh and creative ideas for your own work. Registration for NWO Life opens on 21 January and will be open until the 1st of May 2025.

BCF Career Event is the largest career event for the Life Sciences. It is the meeting place for everyone who is or wants to be active in Bio/Life Sciences, Chemistry, Food or Pharma. BCF Career Event offers you the opportunity to get into direct contact with a broad range of employers in the sector, but also with other organisations that can help you further in your career.

This course will teach biological researchers how to analyse biological data sets using open-source software. Most of the analysis will be performed with docker4seq and rCASC packages, which were developed to facilitate the use of computing demanding applications in the field of NGS data analysis. Docker4seq and rCASC packages use docker containers that embed demanding computing tasks (e.g. short reads mapping) into isolated containers.

The aim of the course is to provide participants a comprehensive introduction to the various methods of spatial-omics and in particular those of multiplex immunofluorescence and spatial transcriptomics. We want to provide a general overview of the methods and assist researchers choose the right method for their needs.

Lectures and computer practical’s. The computer practical’s will be based on statistical approaches/question within the plant science research field.

The course focuses on interactions between plants, insects, and microbes, but also delves a little into the chemical communication of vertebrates and even humans and covers evolutionary processes, physiological and chemical methods, as well as new and upcoming applications

This course will give insights into, and practical experience in, data visualisation for exploring complex and multi-dimensional biological data.

This Summer school is organized by the Saclay Plant Sciences (SPS) network, one of the largest European plant sciences communities and will be hosted by the cytology and imaging platform of the Institut Jean Pierre Bourgin - Plant Sciences in Versailles.Microscopy is a fundamental tool for understanding the functioning of plants at the cellular to molecular scale. Recent technological advances now make it possible to address new scientific questions

We would like to cordially invite you to the 11th European Symposium on Plant Lipids (ESPL 2025) in Bonn, Germany, from 6-10 July 2025. The European Symposium on Plant Lipids (ESPL) is an international conference with a focus on lipid synthesis, function and biotechnology in plants and algae.The ESPL conferences are organized every two years and help to connect scientists within a global network. Expert scientists including postdocs and Ph.D. students from all over the world will gather to present their most recent results on lipid biochemistry and enzymology, function in cellular and physiological processes, and application of lipids in biotechnology.

The 12th international workshop on molecular biology and genetics of the lepidoptera will be held at the Orthodox Academy of Crete in Kolympari (also spelled Kolymbari), Crete, Greece, from 6 until 12 July 2025.

As a future scientist in the life sciences, it is important that PhD students have an insight into the debates around the relationship between human beings, animals, and nature, to understand their meaning and to learn to participate in these debates. This course will provide students with a systematic overview of the key topics of animal and environmental ethics. Specific attention is given to the ethical assessment of animal experiments and the tension between individualist animal ethics and collectivist environmental ethics. Attention is also given to the cultural background of normativity and the ethical aspects of the PhD students’ own research projects.

This conference welcomes scientists from all over the world working on and for the transformation of agricultural systems, with the aim to accelerate the development of healthy and sustainable agrifood systems. There is a need for radical shifts in the world’s agricultural systems so that they can face current and future challenges. Registration: from 1 April 2025 to 30 June 2025.

The 2025 iDiv summer school will provide participants with a hands-on experience in applying latest deep learning and computer vision techniques to ecological and biodiversity studies. The participants will be introduced to the theoretical foundations of deep learning and its applications in ecological research. In addition, hands-on sessions will allow participants to deepen their understanding by working with real-world examples. These practical exercises will focus on using deep learning libraries, as well as building, training, and evaluating deep learning models for ecological tasks. The summer school is aimed at MSc students and doctoral researchers. Participants from regions often underrepresented in science can apply for funding. Deadline for applications is 28 February 2025.

The EPS Summer school “Plant Development” is a three-days programme for enthusiastic PhD students and postdocs with a strong interest in Plant Development. Attendance is restricted to 45 participants. The programme includes presentations of keynote speakers, participants, poter presentations and team assignments. You will also have time to talk to the keynote speakers about career development and networking.