The First Online EMBL PhD Symposium took place on the web exclusively and the media file are now available for everybody interested.

The web has undergone some changes in the last years which includes a stronger involvement of users, more community interaction, mash-ups of web-resources, the availability of web application with similar power that which desktop applications offer and more. This new phenomenon was dubbed as Web 2.0 and examples like Wikipedia, blogs, del.icio.us, and Google Maps are only some of thousands. Science, living from communication of the community, will be heavily influenced by these changes. I am personally following these exciting developments and try to give my impression, ideas, and collected knowledge to others. With three other members of the EMBL Biocomputing Unit I gave a series of talks that took place in May/June 2006 about the influence of Web 2.0 on science to the broader audience at EMBL. You can download talk videos and presentation files.

I have a blog which has posts about society, hacking, open-source, open content, politics, science and more at least once a week (well, I try to).

Over the past few years volunteering EMBL PhD students have organized an annual international PhD symposium. I was part of the organizing team for the symposium that took place in Nov./Dec. 2005 called Biology At Work which was dealing which the application of biological research. During the course of a year we setup all that was needed for such a meeting and had, in the end, around 150 participant from all over the world, and very stimulating talks and discussions. It was quite some effort but we learned a lot about organizing such an event, others, and ourselves.

The main focus of my research is Metagenomics (also known as Environmental/Community Genomics). This is a new and very promising approach for getting new insights into microbial communities and their interaction with their habitats.

The title of my diploma thesis at the Department for Microbial Physiology and Molecular Biology was "Phylogenetic analysis of the general stress response in bacteria". Based on the general stress proteins of the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis I did a comparative analysis with about 30 bacteria. This project contained a lot of high throughput data analysis.

Protalizer is a small protein analysis tool that I programmed for the Department for Microbial Physiology and Molecular Biology of the EMAU. It has also become a small function of the Sub2D-Database and Protecs. To be perfectly honest: I don't really think this tool had big impact on the scientific community, but I had fun coding it at that time. :)

The methods may have changed but the aim is still the same as for many years...