The multidisciplinary academic event at Schloss Au, Wädenswil, was especially designed for postdoctoral researchers in Life Sciences to communicate their projects outside their institutes and increase their visibility. This is of special importance as there is no event at the University of Zurich that targets at postdocs. Moreover, the event launched the PostDoc Club Zurich that promotes collaboration and networking between postdoctoral researchers. 

The conference covered topics from Bioengineering & Synthetic Biology, Chemistry towards Biology, and Signaling & Epigenetics to Physics towards Biology. Plenary lectures were given by Dr. Med. Andrea Degen (EUrelations), Prof. Dario Neri (Biomacromolecules, ETHZ), Prof. Alex Hajnal (Molecular Life Sciences, UZH) and group leader Dr. Jonas Ries (Cellular Nanoscopy, EMBL Heidelberg).

Victoria Green received Best Talk Award
Postdocs of different fields presented their work in the format of short talks, flash posters and poster presentations. The best talk award was given to Dr. Victoria Green (Molecular Life Sciences, UZH) for her talk “Genome-wide screen on rotavirus replication reveals viroplasm recruitment of low complexity host factors". The best flash poster was awarded to Dr. Carsten Magus (Medical Virology, UZH) for his 2 min presentation about "Assessing the propensity of HIV-1 to evolve antibody escape variants during free virus and cell-cell transmission". And the best poster award was given to Dr. Rashel V. Grindberg (Microbiology, ETHZ) on the topic of "Single-cell genomics and transcriptomics: methods in subcellular gene expression analysis for biomedical applications". 

Dean considers PostDoc initiative as important
The Post-Doc-Day and PostDoc Club have full support from Prof. Bernhard Schmid, Dean of the Faculty of Science of the UZH and the "Vereinigung akademischer Mittelbau der Universität Zürich" (VAUZ) who emphasize the importance of this type of postdoc community.

The organizing committee composed by Dr. Ulrike Rieder (Chemistry), Dr. Richard Börner (Chemistry) and Dr. Juan M. Escobar-Restrepo (Molecular Life Sciences) was very pleased to experience an extraordinary response for the event which will ideally take place on a regular basis. The conference was financially supported by a grant from the Graduate Campus of the UZH, the VAUZ and IGZ Instruments. The supporting professors were Alex Hajnal (Molecular Life Sciences, UZH), Roland K. O Sigel (Chemistry, UZH) and Nathan W. Luedtke (Chemistry, UZH).

www.chem.uzh.ch/static/postdocday2015