Welcome to the 2nd Joint Retreat of
PhD Students in Plant Sciences
Latest News

Reception; Wednesday Evening in TACO LOCO

For those participants arriving on Wednesday, there will be a reception evening at the restaurant TACO LOCO III (www.taco-loco.de) near the hotel area. Here you can already register and come to know the other participants. The place offers Tex-mex food, so it is also possible to have dinner there (dinner and drinks are not included in the conference fee).

TACO LOCO III is located on Aachenerstr. 702 close to the Tram-Stop "Alter Militärring". You can easily reach it with Line 1 direction "Köln-Weiden West" from the city centre and Hotel Regent and direction "Bensberg" from Hotel Triton and Mercure Hotel. The other hotels are located in walking distance.

Reception and registration starts at 7 pm and is open until about 9 pm. With the registration you will receive your conference bag which includes the public transport ticket for the next days and the abstract book.

If you are arriving at Thursday, there is also the possibility to register on Thursday Morning from 8:00 - 9:00 in the foyer of the lecture hall at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plant Breeding Research.

Shuttle Bus Service; Information and Schedule

A bus service to the MPIZ has been organized, as the institute is not easily reachable by public transportation. This shuttle runs only twice per day, before and after the conference. The shuttle bus will be starting from and ending at the Hotel Triton, Aachener Strasse 1128, 50858 Köln.
Those of you that have reserved hotels apart from Aachener Strasse need to get to the Hotel Triton, which is easily accessible by public transportation:

The people staying at the Hostel "Am Rheinauhafen" walk to the Heumarkt and take the Line 1 direction Weiden-West, which runs every 10 minutes. Those of you staying in the Meininger Hotel also take Line 1, but from Rudolfplatz. Get off the tram at "Bahnstrasse", which is a 20 minute tram ride, the Hotel Triton is on the right side of the road. See also http://auskunft.kvb-koeln.de/ for detailed timetables.

The registration fee for the conference includes a 3 day public transportation ticket (Thursday to Saturday) in Cologne, which you can use for the trip.

The shuttle bus will leave at Hotel Triton on Thursday morning at 8:00, returning around 19:30.
On Friday morning the bus leaves at 8:15 and will bring you to the city center for the social evening at the end of the day.
On Saturday morning the shuttle takes off at 9:15, giving you some time for recovery. In the afternoon, the bus will take you back to Hotel Triton/Bahnstrasse at 14:30.

For remaining questions, please contact us at accommodation@plant-retreat-2010.de

Retreat Programme
The updated programme with all speakers can be found under the topic Programme

Keynote Speaker Information
We invited three excellent scientists for the Plant Retreat 2010.

Maarten Koornneef
Maarten Koornneef got his PhD 1982 at the Department of Genetics at Wageningen Agricultural University with the topic of his thesis "The Genetics of some Plant hormones and photoreceptors in Arabidopsis thaliana". 1987 he became associate Professor at the Department of Genetics in Wageningen, where he from 1992 is holding his own personal chair in plant genetics at the laboratory of genetics. Since 2004 he is also Director of the Max-Planck-Institute of Plant Breeding Research in Cologne as head of the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics. Maarten Koornneefs research interests are the physiological and molecular genetics of Arabidopsis, with the emphasis on the genetics of plant adaptation traits using natural variation.

Karin Dumstrei
In 2002 Karin Dumstrei finished her PhD project "Genetic and molecular analysis of Drosophila embryonic visual system development and brain morphogenesis in Drosophila" in the group of Volker Hartenstein at the University of California in Los Angeles. In 2002 she moved from US to Europe, to work at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, on the Investigation of the molecular mechanisms controlling primordial germ cell specification and migration in zebrafish. In 2005 Karin Dumstrei changed from research to editorial work by starting as an editor of the EMBO Journal at the European Molecular Biology Institute (EMBO) in Heidelberg, Germany.

Richard Morris
Richard Morris was first trained as a Mechanical Engineer before he started his studies on technical physics at Erzherzog Johann University in Graz. He did his PhD in Computational protein Crystallography at EMBL & Karl-Franzens University Graz. In 2000, he moved from Austria to UK to do a Postdoc with Dr. Gerard Bricogne at MRC-LMB in Cambridge about Bayesian Structure Solution. This was followed by a Postdoc with Prof. Janet Thornton at EMBL-EBI about Algorithm Development for Structural Bioinformatics. Since 2005, he is a Project Leader at the John Innes Centre in Computational & Systems Biology in Norwich. In 2008, he also became Honorary Senior Lecturer in Computing Sciences and Honorary Reader in Biological Sciences.


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