You have been working in Steven Dreißig’s new research group since January 2025 and were elected as the PhD Student Board's spokesperson. That sounds like a brilliant start!

I was already very familiar with the IPK. During my studies, I completed internships in the working groups of Andreas Houben and Kerstin Neumann, and I later wrote my Master’s thesis with Jochen Reif. So, when Steven Dreißig explained that the group was moving from Martin Luther University Halle to the IPK, I was happy to return. So, it wasn’t all that new to me.

And how did you get involved in the PhD Student Board?

It always bothered me that there was hardly any exchange between PhD students in plant sciences and biosciences at the university in Halle. There was no PhD student board there, and what’s more, the departments are located at different university sites. The situation is different at the IPK, so I want to get involved here and have a certain amount of experience in the last year of my doctoral thesis. It wasn’t the plan that I would be elected spokesperson straight away, but I’m looking forward to the task.

What has been the focus recently?

In recent weeks and months, it has clearly been on preparing for the Plant Science Student Conference (PSSC). We aime to bring 100-120 participants to Gatersleben, which we achieved. To achieve this, we approached partner institutions in other European countries for the first time. This approach was successful: more than 60 per cent of participants did not come from the IPK, including some from neighbouring European countries.

Could the PhD Student Board have managed all of this alone?

No - we also received great support from colleagues such as Lisa Schlehuber, Julie Himpe, Birgit Michael, Britt Leps and Katrin Menzel. I have never experienced such dedicated cooperation before. Thanks to our sponsors' generous support, we could also offer financial assistance to ten Master’s students from Germany and abroad, enabling them to attend the conference for the first time this year.

You only know the PSSC from the perspective of a participant. What did you gain from it?

On the one hand, it’s about networking and learning about new topics and organisations. But practical experience is important too. For example, anyone who has never given a presentation before can gain experience at the PSSC. This helped me a lot as a participant. There’s a big difference between just researching a topic and presenting the most important aspects, and telling my own research story based on my data.

How does the PhD Student Board work?

We meet every two weeks. We believe it is important that these meetings are open to all Bachelor's and Master’s students. We also liaise with the staff council and the graduate training contacts at the IPK: Britt Leps and Nicolaus von Wirén. We first met with him in April, when we said goodbye to the previous PhD Student Board. He asked us to improve our intranet presence and also offered us to meet regularly in future. We are pleased to accept this offer.

Are there any topics you would like to discuss with him?

The topic of mental health is very important to us. At the latest, we would like to organise a workshop on this topic with the Postdoc Board and Staff Council at the IPK next year. Many students find writing their doctoral thesis very stressful for various reasons. We want to raise awareness of this issue. Another issue is what comes after the doctorate. Many people do not know what the future holds for them after completing their doctorate. Understandably, this is also a source of concern.

Can these problems be solved at the IPK? Or are they structural issues within the academic system?

The pressure to succeed in academia is already very high. ‘Publish or perish’ is a well-known saying. There is certainly nothing that can be done about this alone at the IPK. However, we must also consider which groups are favoured and which are disadvantaged within the system. For example, I’m thinking of young female scientists who want to have children. Or foreign researchers whose stay in Germany is subject to certain conditions. Unfortunately, many people put such issues in a drawer and forget about them. But problems do not belong in a drawer. That's why we want to raise awareness.

What about the site itself?

We want to enhance the IPK’s location further. We have some concrete ideas for achieving this: For example, we could create a ‘coffee corner’ in the library or a small ‘indoor gym’. We work closely with the Postdoc Board on such projects.

What other ideas does the PhD Student Board have?

We aim to organise a joint activity every month. In March, for instance, we went hiking in Ilsenburg for the day. This was followed by a three-day trip to Dresden in April. While there, we visited the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) in Dresden-Pillnitz and met a strawberry grower. We also went on a hike through Saxon Switzerland. Such shared experiences are important to us as they foster trust, enabling us to recognise problems and areas requiring action at an early stage.

And what about your research?

For my doctoral thesis, I am working with a rye diversity panel that includes domesticated, wild, and weedy forms of rye. I am focusing on variation in reproductive traits, such as pollen size. Next, we will link these phenotypic differences with genetic data. We have already used this approach to identify candidate genes that could influence the flowering biology of rye. I aim to finish the dissertation within the following year.