FdV Seminars

Mediator: Tsvi Tlutsy (Weizmann Institute, Princeton Institute For Advanced Studies)

Dates: 4*3h - Friday May 4th, Wednesday May 9th, Friday May 11th, Monday May 14th

The concept of information is omnipresent in biology: information is stored in DNA, transmitted in a signaling pathway or along a neuron, and translated by the ribosome. In this short course, we will formalize and quantify these intuitive notions of biological information. We will start from the basic definitions of Shannon's information theory, which will be linked to statistical mechanics. We will then apply this framework to examine a variety of living information systems, starting from molecular channels, through neural networks, to population dynamics and evolution. Coherent discussion in terms of information theory reveals common principles of noisy living information systems which we will discussed.

Details of the program :

Mediator: François Taddei (INSERM, Paris Descartes),

Duration: 10x 2h, first session 10/11, every two weeks

The success of gamers in games such as Fold-it are each year more impressive.
Last year in Nature they announced that players can make better predictions than the best software.
This year the gamers in 2 weeks solve a problem where scientists had failed for 15 years.
Gamers are even able to propose new heuristics for solving problems.

In this course we'll propose the study of such games and we'll work on how to design new scientific discovery games and will contribute to the creation of an international community of students and researchers that create such games. As it was announced in the first workshop on the subject organized last year in the CRI, we'll organize with the international leaders in this emerging field a student competition inspired by the impact that iGEM had on the field of synthetic biology.

Mediators: Richard Emmanuel Eastes, Matteo Merzagora (Traces)

Dates: 7, 8, 9 March 2012

The main focus will be on oral presentation to a scientific audience. Targeted to PhD students it is aimed at providing them with tools and techniques to deliver efficient presentations.

As in all TRACES courses, the seminar will have a very practical approach: more than 2/3 of the time will be spent in practical exercises.
A special attention will be given to horizontal communication, that is, organized exchanges among participants in order to share the individual knowledge and transform it in a shared knowledge.

Details of the program:

Mediator: Suzannah Rutherford, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle

Planning: 5 sessions of 2h - 31/10, 7/11, 28/11, 5/12 and 12/12/2011

Synopsis:
In this course we will review historical efforts to understand the difference between the living and the physical universes and how these ideas can be refined in light of current understanding. We will attempt as a class to build our own models of life, highlighting the ways in which the living systems in general and biology as a science in particular, are distinct from the physical universe and the science of physics.

Mediator: Ray Horn (ALM Formation)

Duration: 2 days - March 19th and 20th
Minimum 5 maximum 15 participants

« Time is what those who refuse to organize it lack most. » (Ed. Spaicer)
This training course will enable you to make a personal assessment and to consider how to optimize the management of your time (from a professional and also from a personal perspective).

Objectives
- Identifying usual habits,
- Applying organization principles,
- Making a personal assessment and setting objectives in terms of evolution,
- Classifying priorities,
- Anticipating and appointing clearly.utilisation

Principles
- Dealing with the notion of «time budget»,
- Controlling and planning workload.
- Setting organizational strategies.

Program
- Tools for functional organization (initial and final personal assessment),
- Managing professional obligations (assessing the situation),
- Analyzing and programming optimizations.
- Individual experimentation through concrete situations.
- Individual time and shared time.

Teacher: Jean-Luc Lebrun

Dates: 3 days: 7, 8, 9th February
(20 participants max)

This course is based on the book "Scientific Writing: A Reader and Writer's Guide". It helps identify and articulate the differences between efficient and deficient scientific writing. Through many in-class exercises, it promotes good scientific writing habits such as conciseness and clarity. The course material is mostly provided by the participants: they bring a published or unpublished paper (6 to 8 pages) to the course and learn how to evaluate and improve documents of the same type.

Career opportunities
Good scientific writing skills open up many opportunities to the researcher: publications, conference or seminar attendance. They also lead to better patents, better research partnerships and better funded research. Clarity and efficiency in scientific writing is a testimony to the quality of a researcher; It influences career promotion.

Target participants
Students, Graduates & postgraduates engaged in research and interested in publishing their findings. Researchers who wish to improve their scientific writing skills (seasoned researchers, have indicated how much they have benefited from this course, even after writing more than 20 papers).

The trainer
Jean-Luc Lebrun has managed research programs while working at Apple Computer in its Advanced Technology Research group for over ten years. He subsequently invested his energy in the commercialization of research. He teaches scientific writing at the following A-Star* research Institutes: BII, BTI, CMM, DSI, GIS, I2R, IBN, ICES, IHPC, IME, IMRE, SBIC, Simtech, and SSCC as well as medical research centres: SGH, NCCS.

Coordinator: Konrad Hinsen (CNRS, Synchrotron Soleil)

This interactive workgroup aims to offer the opportunity for students to share experience on the programming and computing issues they face and receive mutual support as well as input from senior researchers experienced with simulation computation. This collaborative workgroup on scientific computing and visualization proposes to operate:

- A forum page on a collaborative web platform (e.g. moodle) to gather the participants' problems, questions, successful as well as failed experiences, etc...related with computation and computer visualization. This aims to identify experience and difficulties faced by participants on these issues and be a platform to get help and mutual advice.

- Forum moderation, specific advice, reading suggestions and support is provided by the module coordinator and possibly other experienced researchers. Specific meetings, work sessions or practical sessions on give programming and computational techniques will be organized on topics called by sufficient interested people.

Mediator: Michel Morange (ENS, Centre Cavailles d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences)

Duration: 1h30, every 2 weeks, first session 26/10 at 9:00

The course is intended to evolve the students' ability to integrate information from science, in the context of philosophy and history through the examination of specific episodes in current science and the history of science.
The students will be guided in readings of classical articles to strengthen their critical thinking skills and scientific literacy in the various interfaces of Biology with Math, Physics, Chemistry and Medicine.

Mediators: Antoine Mazières and Cécile Galichet

Course duration: 3 X 2 Hours 8/11 15/11 10/01

Level: Beginners

This course aim at presenting a basic initiation to several tools available on the web for free that make the life of a researcher easier. Also, lot of this tools offer "network effects" that allow you to discover what people interested in the same things as you (a paper, a bookmark for example) are interested in.
Some elements of workflow optimization will be covered too (ie. tips and tricks that make your digital life easier)

- Bibliographical tools : Zotero, Mendeley, CiteUlike, Delicious
- Integration of biblio with Word Processing programs : Libre Office, LaTeX
- Groups frameworks : Google Groups, Google Docs, data sharing
- Quickly building a website, a wiki
- Good usage of bibliographic databases (search operators, histories)
- Advanced use of Pubmed

This is a basic initiation where tools we'll be presented with only a quick overview. The purpose is to help students to choose some tools so they can focus on specific features by themselves, through the extensive existing online documentation.

Coordinator: Pierre-Yves Bourguignon

In order for students to share mutual support -as well as to receive input from more senior statisticians- on the statistical issues they face, we propose to initiate a collaborative workgroup in statistics in the following way:

- A forum page on a collaborative web platform (e.g. moodle) to gather the participants' problems, questions, successful as well as failed experiences, etc...related with statistics. This would make the identification of the difficulties the participants face with the statistical aspects of their work easier. It is also an opportunity for knowledgeable students to identify when they could help their fellows.

- PY Bourguignon and possibly other experienced statisticians moderate and maintain those pages, keeping related topics together, suggesting readings and if necessary organizing specific working sessions on statistics topics of common interest.

- Students facing specific problems and needs can be individually advised and forwarded to adequate specialists.

Mediator: François Taddei (INSERM, Paris Descartes)

Duration: 10x 2h, first session 10/11, every two weeks

The digitalization of science affects the way it is done, the way it shared, the way we collaborate or are evaluated.
In this course we'll invite some of the world leaders in these new approaches and invite the students to discuss how these innovations change they way they learn, collaborate and do research.

Topics to be discussed include
- creative commons (under which license should you protect your creation in different domains)
- open access to scientific publications and data
- crowd sourcing project (for computing such as BOINC or data classification such as galaxy zoo)
- open source software
- open source hardware (eg arduino)
- open wetware.

Mediator: Evelyne Jardin (journalist, career adviser and blogger)
(Maximum 15 participants, minimum 10)

Content and dates:
1. Preparation of the post-thesis. (with Barbara Filler from http://cchconseil.fr/)
- January, Monday 30 from 17:00 to 19:00
- January, Tuesday 31 from 09:00 to 13:00

2. Networking. (with Evelyne Jardin and Marc Chevalier, entrepreneur and president of the network EntrezDok http://entrezdok.fr/)
- February, Monday 27 from 17:00 to 19:00
- February, Tuesday 28 from 09:00 to 13:15

3. How to find a good post-doc?
- March, Tuesday 13 from 17:00 to 19:00 with Evelyne Jardin
- March, Monday 26 starting at 19:00 till 22:00 "An evening on Post-doc".

4. Towards non academic careers for scientists.
- To be schedule April-May

Details of the program:

Mediator: Suzannah Rutherford, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle

Planning: 6 sessions of 2h - 27/10, 3/11, 10/11, 1/12, 8/12 and 15/12/2011

>> Mandatory for FDV 1st year students.

This course is intended to develop the student's ability to read and critically interpret interdisciplinary papers from impact journals. Through this exercise the students will be exposed to a large spectra of interdisciplinary research domains and methodologies.
This exercise is built of a series of seminars, each prepared by two students from different backgrounds, presenting in detail a research paper of their choice. The underlying hypothesis, background and the results is discussed in detail and the different techniques explained. In addition, the students are asked to suggest further experimental/modeling approaches with respect to their conclusions from the paper at stake.

Mediators: Samuel Bottani (Paris Diderot), François Taddei (Paris Descartes, INSERM), Ariel Lindner (Paris Descartes, INSERM)
Special guests: Stéphane Douday (CNRS/ University Paris Diderot), Suzannah Rutherford (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle), Miroslav Radman (Necker, Université Paris 5).

The workshop, set in Sèvres (near Paris), intends to assemble free spirited students and researchers from broad scientific backgrounds to conceive creative projects at the interface with Life Sciences.
This year will combine newcomer students of the FdV PhD program, 2nd year AIV master program and will host students of the new Licence FdV program on Friday.

The CIRP workshop attempts to provide the primary basis for collegiality and communication through dialogue and brainstorming on open questions in Life Sciences.

Aims of the CIRP workshop:
- To be able to focus on an important scientific question and to define the means to approach it from different disciplines
- To be able to zoom out (have a broader view) and zoom in (be precise and define the key experiments)
- To think and express your ideas more clearly.
- To gain confidence in your ideas.
- To be able to discuss, reject or accept ideas.
- To learn to take constructive scientific criticisms
- To learn how to write a research proposal.
- To discuss scientific questions thoroughly.
- To learn to interact with people from different backgrounds.

The workshop is mandatory for Master 2 AIV and first year FdV PhD students.

CIRP workshop program
CIEP center in Sèvres
CIEP Access / Practical info

All thematic workshops are during the week April 9th-13rd

The CRI/FdV thematic workshops provide the opportunity for FDV and AIV students to present their research to a specialized audience. The students' labs, their supervisors and other students will be invited to attend and to initiate exchanges topics of interests. PhD students from other doctoral schools may be invited to contribute. Organized by the different CRI/FdV thematic scientific clubs, each workshop will have the possibility to invite a specialist of the field to give a talk and interact with the students.
Presentation in a thematic workshop is mandatory for 2nd year students.

Mediators: Department EILA Paris Diderot University

Pre-requisite: Participants must have a level 5 or 6 on the Paris Diderot on-line level test to attend this seminar.

Preparation before the session: participants must select a real job/post-doc offer on the internet and prepare a CV and cover letter accordingly. The job offer, CV (.doc only) and cover letter (.doc only) must be sent electronically in advance.

Participants are also asked to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on a subject of their choice. The presentation should last SEVEN minutes and should contain no more than FOUR slides. Participants should bring their presentation to the session on a stick drive.

Details:

Mediators: François Taddei (INSERM, Paris Descartes), Samuel Bottani (University Paris Diderot), Ariel Lindner (Paris Descartes, INSERM)

Duration: Fridays at 17:30 - 4/11, 25/11, 2/12, 16/12, 13/1, 27/1, 3/2, 17/2, 9/3, 23/3

This seminar series aims to provide an overview on a wide scope of interdisciplinary research on issues in Life Sciences.

Each session by will group 2 short talks (15 minutes) by first year FDV students introducing their research area and subject.

The presentation, aimed at a general, but scientific audience, should present the domain's important issues and questions that motivate the students' and their labs' research.

These talks should not present research results but provide a "popular" understanding of the domain and the research goals of the speaker.

Mediator: Noah Hardy

FdV students preparing their presentation for an Interdisciplinary Fridays or a thematic workshop have the possibility to correct and prepare their talk and slides in advance with a specialist of Scientific English and receive personalized comments on their English. The same exercice will be proposed on the Students' presentation posters displayed at the CRI.

Formation externe dispensée en français
Candidatures au 3e trimestre 2011/2012 pour intégrer la session de septembre 2012

ESCP Option de spécialisation entrepreneuriat
Option de spécialisation Entrepreneuriat à ESCP Europe Trois mois pour apprendre à entreprendre.

Offre de formation ouverte à tous les profils BAC +5 : historien, ingénieur, designer, sociologue, pharmacien, biologiste, chimiste, mathématicien, artiste, cinéaste, publicitaire, géographe, physicien, traducteur, conservateur de musées, urbaniste, philosophe, archéologue, expert en développement durable, sportif....

Collège Paris Factory
Dédiée aux créateurs de tous horizons : universitaires, non-diplômés, autodidactes... quelque soit le secteur d'activité, l'implantation géographique, l'âge ou la nationalité du projet, la formation Collège Paris Factory accompagne les entrepreneurs pour accélérer leur croissance et connaître la création d'emplois.

Cours d'anglais par internet personnalisés / Personalized online English course
http://www.gymglish.fr

GymGlish propose des cours d'anglais innovants et ludiques, fondés sur un moteur d'intelligence artificielle qui délivre chaque jour un email d'activités linguistiques personnalisées en anglais, suivi de corrections.

GymGlish provides personalized English lessons through daily e-mails. In each lesson, you follow the adventures of the Delavigne Corporation in San Francisco: full of humor, business English, and with a wide variety of accents.

Each morning, you receive an e-mail in English with a variety of written and audio exercises. GymGlish lessons take 10 minutes to complete, and include a story from the Delavigne Corporation, dialogues to listen to, questions to answer, 'mini-lessons', and a personalized revision program.

Once you have sent your answers, you will receive a marked correction e-mail with your score for the day's lesson, personalized explanations, the English vocabulary you have requested to learn more about, the scripts for the audio files, etc.