Women’s Career Day

GRK2162 – Women’s Career Day

The Career Day on July 24th 2019 started with a workshop aiming to encourage the doctoral researchers to reflect their personalities and thus learn more about their strenghtes, capabilities and potential, since especially women tend to underestimate their potential. The workshop entitled “My strengths, my drive, my life after the PhD” was given by Prof. Heather Hofmeister. She is an expert in the field and has a professorship for sociology with focus on sociology of work, gendered career development, and combination of work and family at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt.

 

After the lunch break, an Expert MeetUp took place. The speakers gave insight into career options in academia, pharmaceutical industry, journalism (Healthcare-Marketing-Agency), foundations, start-ups and scientific coordination. By inviting various female speakers from diverse professional fields, we wanted to encourage our female doctoral researchers to choose the career path they are fascinated by. Our male doctoral researchers were very welcome to join all parts of the career day to raise their awareness for equal opportunity issues.

 

Dr. Anne Gregor, a postdoctoral fellow who had received a Murie Curie Research Grant after her research stay in New York, as well as Prof. Leda Dimou, Professor for Molecular and Translational Neuroscience in Ulm, introduced their career paths in academic research end encouraged many of the female students that it is possible to successfully pursue this path. Dr. Christina Schempp (Roche Mannheim), Dr. Elena Braginskaja (Novartis Nürnberg) and Dr. Mia Pöhler (Celgene Munich) repesented diverse positions in the pharmaceutical industry such as “Medical Advisor” or “Regional Medical Liaison”. Dr. Selahattin Danisman (Program Director of the VolkswagenStiftung), who kindly subbed for his colleague, gave us interesting insight into the work in a foundation while Dr. Kathrin Brenker shared her exciting experience with us how to start your own company. She is CEO of optobiolabs in Freiburg. Dr. Michaela Schwestka, working as Medical Consultant & Editor at Spirit Link (Healthcare-Marketing-Agency) in Erlangen, and Dr. Anja Glanz, who is scientific coordinator at the FAU, completed the team of experts.

After the short talks, the experts were hit with questions in an exciting and interesting discussion round.

We thank all the speakers for coming from all over Germany to give our students insight into their career paths, share their personal experience and reveal challenges they were confronted with.