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Published:25 de July de 2025
July news 2025

RETORNA activities – July 2025

After the last 2-3 intensive months, our DCs are back in their laboratories, each one continuing with their own individual research. It was quite hard to go back to the lab routine after so many activities and events they attended, but our students were also eager to restart the experiements they putted on waiting for sometime.

If you want to read more about the 2 weeks activities in Cork, have a look at our articles on the annual meeting and summer school.

 

 

🌟Second online session on transversal skills: objective setting, problem solving, time responsability

The first online session took place on the 6th of February 2025 focusing on the topic of stress response and how to deal with it.

Doctoral networks are a great training programme for the young researchers as they are planned in a way to offer not only scientific training but also focus on their own personal development, transversal skills and developing an entrepreneurial mindset.

In the long run, we are confident that these sessions will enhance the PhD experience for DCs and support them in their future career.

On the 10th of July our DCs attended the second online session on transversal skills, this time focusing on objective setting, problem solving and time responsability.

Objective setting started by identifying an objective that each PhD student had already reached, and identifying the strategy that they had used- what did they do to reach the objective and what did they stop doing to reach this objective- for later moving to a new objective creation with the S.M.A.R.T. goals method.

Problem solving: The trainer Kelsie Kerwin explained the 6 different strategies to solve problems and after each participant decided which one they wanted to use to go deeper into their own problem.

The strategies were:

  1. The academic IDEAL process
  2. The ethical model of 8 Key Questions
  3. Aristotle’s Model,
  4. Means-end analysis
  5. Seven layers deep question process
  6. Analogies method.

Each person went deeper into their problem and there was an interesting discussion from this! 

Time responsibility:  what strategy are we using to manage our time?Is it google calendar, planner, phone, our own memory….?
How is each person holding themselves responsable for what they have to do and keeping that promise to themselves without negotiating? Lots of questions that don’t always have a really easy answer.

There is a lot to work on and other sessions are planned for the future months, as it’s fundamental to talk about all these concepts and offer students the tools to become a better person.

🌟Ioannis and his PI in Portland for the Gordon Research Conference

This month, Ioannis DC5  traveled for the first time to USA,  to Portland, Maine more specifically, to attend the Gordon Research Conference on Computer-Aided Drug Design (GRC CADD 2025) . He flew there together with his PI Dr. Serdar Durdagi.
Ioannis attended the conference for the first time, joining researchers, academics, and industry experts from around the world to share ideas on recent advances in the field. He presented his latest work, “Simulating Evolution for De Novo RNA Aptamer Discovery in Retinal Degeneration,” and received valuable feedback from fellow participants.
Outside the scientific sessions, the conference also encouraged social interaction. Ioannis reconnected with familiar faces and made new connections.

 

As you see DCs are continuously trained, participate to conferences and dedicate precious time to their own personal research project!

Glad to have them all in the RETORNA team!

 

See you in September!

Wish you a great summer,

RETORNA team

 

 

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