Agenda

The Winter School is based on a “student’s needs approach”. The Doctorate in Chemistry encompasses different fields of research, this is reflected by a wide range of scientific interests 
of all the PhD students ranging from catalysis, to nanomaterials, heritage conservation, biochemistry, just to name the few. The PhDs’ research activities were classified into 5 subtopics, 
each one corresponding to a couple of ERC subfields. For each subtopic we identified 5 top scientists who will be the mentors of the WS. The subtopics, the ERC subfields and the scientists are listed below:
1. Chemistry in solution: structure and reactivity (PE5_22 Supramolecular chemistry & PE5_18 Homogeneous catalysis) - Prof. Cristoph Schalley;
2. Nanostructured Materials (PE4_2 Nanochemistry & PE5_10 Nanomaterials, nanoparticles and nanotubes) - Prof.Bruno Chaudret;
3. Chemistry of cells (PE5_16 Biological Chemistry & LS7_3 Pharmacology, pharmacogenomics, drugs discovery and design, drug therapy) - Prof. Gianluca Sbardella;
4. Heterogeneous catalysis and modeling (P4_15 Theoretical and computational chemistry & PE5_18 Heterogeneous catalysis) - Prof. Ilenia Rossetti;
5. Analytical Chemistry and heritage conservation (PE4_6 Analytical Chemistry & SH5_11 Cultural heritage and cultural memory) - Prof. Alexander Kuhn.
Since the close interaction between top scientists and motivated students is difficult to occur, we organize the WS with the aim to stimulate these interactions, as follows:
Day 1: A common session shared by all PhD students with five lectures, each one from the mentioned leading scientists. They will deliver state of the art seminars showing how it is 
possible from a scientific intuition to end up to a discovery.
Day 2: The students will split into 5 Working Groups each corresponding to one subtopic, leaded by the relevant top scientist acting as a mentor for the group. 
Each PhD student will give an oral communication about his/her research results and the mentor will stimulate a fruitful discussion between the participants. The aim of the WS is in fact to transfer the students the awareness that scientific excellence is built on a balanced combination of personal skills, knowledge, intuition and ability to relate with team members.
At the end of the morning team session all the working groups will gather together and each mentor will briefly summarize the activity of each working group to provide to the students 
some take home messages that will certainly help them in their growth as scientists.