The PhD Student Board was founded as an initiative of PhD students at the IPK. We are a team of volunteer PhD students, organised by the elected representatives of the PhD students. The current elected representatives are Gabriel Oliveira Ragazzo (chair), Alexa Sanchez Mejia (vice-chair), Abhishek Gogna, Yingrui Ma, Sai Thejas Babanna.

We bring up the needs of Bachelor, Master and PhD students in regular discussions with the head of departments and the head of administration. In addition to this work, we organise activities and events for PhD Students both at scientific and social levels.

Scientific events like the Plant Science Student Conference (PSSC) and the PhD seminars are opportunities for improving your presentational skills as a scientist as well as offering you the opportunity for discussions in a like-minded ambience. The Student Board also grants the Beagle Award for outstanding social and scientific engagement during the PhD-Phase. 

In addition to these initiatives, we want to offer some space for networking and socialising with students throughout IPK by planning social activities. Among other groups, we use the IPK Club, which is a good location for this. It is open for everyone and perfectly meets the needs for colorful and memorable activities like barbecue, parties, cooking, etc.

The PhD Student Board welcomes every student to join our team. Everyone can find some rewarding work for the student community, be it to find interesting external scientific speakers or have an idea for a workshop, organise a social event in the evening, improve the graduate programme or help newcomers to a good start at IPK. 

You will have fun and certainly, you will find good friends in our IPK student’s community. We meet every two weeks on Wednesday evening. If you never got an invitation to one of our events, please write us an email and we will add you to the mailing list. 

If you're new and need help or have questions, you're sure to find what you're looking for at our Help Desk or contact us by email. You can find more internal information here, we'll also keep you up to date on Twitter and look forward to seeing you!