This year´s COS-Symposium “Genetics 2019: Old Questions and New Frontiers” was held on June 6-7. The line-up of the speaker was fantastic and so was the COS-Summer Party on Friday evening to conclude this exciting event. And on top of that: plenty of the Argentinian BBQ delights! What could be better?
COS-Party 2019: MicroCOSmos
The decoration for this year´s COS-Party was stunning and so were many costumes. It´s hard to imagine that it could get any better. But let´s wait for 2020. In case its not obvious: we represent a fluorescent fungus…
Lab Outing: Sushi-Making at its Best
Organized by Ira & Liz, the Guse lab enjoyed some professional sushi-making tips and tricks from Ira´s neighbour Chika. The result was pretty impressive and super-tasty. Oishii!
Guse Lab Adventures – by Marie
Thanks to the CPS workshop in January, the Guse lab was inspired to continue improving communication and team building. We introduced “lab outings” as a way to connect and have fun outside of the lab. For our first lab outing, organized by Diana and Sebastian in April, we went bowling…
The winner of the evening was Sebastian, although we all played better than expected!
Philipp and Marie organized the second outing. In July, we went to a local Irish pub for trivia night. Our group has a diverse set of interests so we thought we would be good contenders for first place!
Because the lab has grown in the recent months, we had to split into two groups. One of these groups managed to get second place…a very close second. Five bonus points were awarded to the team with the best name; ironically, this team decided to name themselves “We don’t need the extra points,” when in fact, they did 😉 Either way, we all had a good time!
Looking forward to see what activity the next pair will choose!
Okinawa Field Work Trip 2018 – by Ira & Diana
On arrival this year the coral spawning had already happened and we could set-up experiments without delay. Thanks to our Japanese collaborators we had many bowls full of larvae to choose from. A big thank you to them for their help and support!
Acropora digitifera larvae were especially healthy this year and the abundance of material resulted in an abundance of cleaning and sampling, which often kept us busy until late in the evening.
But – of course – we made sure not to miss out on beautiful Okinawa snorkeling and delicious food.
Our outdoor activities were supported by the weather, which was a lot better than previously predicted.
A special pleasure was the meeting, greeting and discussions with old and new fellow researchers at the Sesoko Station.
CirCOS Party 2018
After the big success of COSmic and SpartaCOS, this year´s motto of the COS party was CirCOS. And as expected, the party was awesome: great decoration, music and of course lots of creative costumes!
A handcrafted Flea Circus consortium was the contribution of the Guse lab:
And here are some more official lab pics of my favourites:
The Wittbrodt Freakshow
The Lemke Circus Protesters
The Acebron Circus Victims
The Guse Flea Circus
Creative Problem Solving Workshop sponsored by EMBO YIP
As part of the benefits of being an EMBO YIP lab, the Guse lab did a 1.5 day Creative Problem Solving (CPS) workshop at Seissmo in Mannheim. The CPS technique aims to generate a bunch of new and unforeseen ideas and solutions to issues that may occur in teams. The specific goal of our workshop, however, was to create a scientific roadmap for the lab by visualizing and integrating all ongoing and some future projects. Along the way we learned a lot about working as a team and of the internal lab communication. Of course, we can now also apply the versatile CPS techniques to any other topic to come up with new and unique ideas. All in all the workshop was, thanks to our fantastic coach Natacha, a big success and a lot of fun.
GuseLab Cabbage Hike
Going to the Christmas Market as a lab outing to start the holiday season? Boring, isn’t it? Let’s do something much more serious: a Kohlwanderung. No clue what that is? In short: a Kohlwanderung (cabbage hike) is a traditional event done with a group of friends or colleagues in winter that includes a hike, some alcoholic beverages and a hefty meal made from green cabbage (kale) and a serious number of sausages cooked together with the cabbage in a meaty broth. The long description of that absolutely fabulous tradition can be found here.
I promise we did a hike – just forgot to take pics.
And the PhD title goes to….
Madeline! Congratulations! Well done, Dr. Bucher.
Killer hat, killer food. Please note Madeline´s speciality: “half-eaten cakes…”
So many things to celebrate!
Let´s celebrate:
(1) Philipp got married: CONGRATULATIONS to him and Sarah, his beloved wife. Pictures of the wedding are still to come. For now I only have the lab present for the happy couple: Champagner glasses with some nerdy and/or fun hand-made engravings.
(2) Liz´s birthday: CONGRATULATIONS! Again, only pics of the awesome American style sweets without anybody actually eating them. Please note the arts 3-D effect of the cinnamon roles. In fact Liz herself had to do some serious pipetting that particular day but we left her some of that deliciousness of course.
