At IMBA, most of our scientific success stories derive from work carried out by our graduate students who we recruit through the international VBC PhD program with the IMP, the GMI and the Max F. Perutz Laboratories. We select some of the most talented and ambitious students worldwide and provide them with a degree of freedom that is essentially unparalleled.

Students come from all over, whether Europe, America or Asia, and English is the language they exclusively use for scientific communication. They have completely free access to our scientific infrastructure. World class level mass-spectrometry, the latest microscopy technologies, second generation sequencing - all waiting to be used for exciting scientific projects. Drosophila and mouse facilities - free of charge, and a mouse and fly knockout service to take over some of the routine tasks during a PhD thesis and to speed up the progress of science.

Campus Wide PhD Program
Through the joint VBC PhD program the students benefit from a large campus at IMBA, so students can feel part of a community that interacts on a day to day basis.
Being part of the established VBC PhD program, the students profit from a high level of organization and three PhD representatives at IMBA advocate the interests of the students and take care of constant exchange with the program coordinators.

PhD Selection
We choose the graduate students in a one-week intense, but very efficient selection procedure. Those who are selected have up to four years to carry out an exciting scientific project. They become fully respected members of our scientific community and experience an atmosphere where curiosity and excitement for science and not the struggle for money and impact factors dominate day-to-day life.

Supervision and Presentation
Apart from their groupleader, they will be supervised by a PhD committee which meets annually to discuss progress, give advice on future directions and decide when the project is mature enough to be written up as a thesis. PhD students present their work once a year to the entire campus community in a seminar ('Friday-seminar') taking place every week. In addition to keeping everyone up-to-date with what everyone else is doing at the institute, the main purpose of this weekly seminar is to teach students how to present their work in an exciting, understandable, but concise way. They will receive feedback on their presentation by the entire faculty who will help them to improve their way of presenting. We also offer courses on presentation skills and on writing to help students meliorate. After the seminar, science is discussed in a less formal manner over food and drinks in the institute-sponsored social hour.

Scientific Meetings
Not only is it institute policy to encourage and pay the expenses of students taking part in international conferences, but once per year, students have the opportunity to organize their own scientific conference. Here they have the chance to learn how to put together a big meeting - from the invitations to the interaction with speakers. Those meetings are on interdisciplinary topics not represented on campus, like "Synthetic Biology", the Interface between Biology and Engineering or "The Origin of Life". In the past, those meetings have been unique events. They were successful not only for the campus but also for the respective community and some of the participants have called them the best meetings in their field during the past years.

Being a PhD student at IMBA is challenging and demanding but it is a fantastic experience for those who are ambitious and driven by true curiosity and excitement for science.

Yours, Jürgen Knoblich


Interested ? Get more information from the VBC program website or read how students describe their program.