Last Friday Konrad successfully held his Midterm Seminar. In Sweden, PhD students have to give a seminar halfway into their PhD, so roughly after two years. In this seminar, the PhD student presents the project, which progress has been made and what is left to do. Afterwards the young scientist will be questioned by a committee, experts from the field that must encompass senior scientists not working directly with the candidate but who have enough expertise on the topic of research. For Konrad, the committee consisted of Dr. Annasara Lenman (Department of Clinical Microbiology), Dr. Lars-Anders Carlson (Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics), and Dr. Richard Lundmark (Department of Integrative Medical Biology).
Thus, Konrad started off with a 30-minute presentation, giving a very concise and comprehensible overview of the 4 projects that form his PhD project entitled “Probing virus-membrane interactions using plasma membrane mimics”. Impressively, he showed that one of the projects is already complete, which resulted in a first author publication. Another project has been partially completed, resulting in a second author publication with Inga Rimkute and the Göran Larson Lab at Gothenburg University. Konrad has also already started all the other projects and could show preliminary data, give an overview of technical issues while at the same time discussing what will be done next. Overall, the committee agreed that he is on a very good track and will be able to finish his PhD in time.
During the scientific discussion, moderated by the examiner Niklas Arnberg, the committee asked a variety of questions, ranging from technical issues, further elaborations on the methods Konrad is using, to scientific literature references and background knowledge on membrane biology. Only the last part was considered in need of improvement. Else he impressed the whole committee; they were very satisfied with his progress and the scientific discussion. Chapeau Konrad!!!
