The Technical University of Munich (TUM) invited 50 young scientists (from initial 362 applicants in 2018) from all over the world to the annual Research Opportunities Week (ROW) in Munich. During this week, the participants had the opportunity to visit different research facilities and research teams at TUM for developing their scientific network and to discuss potential research projects.
One of these selected international participants was Philipp Baumert. He is a PhD student at the Liverpool John Moores University where he is about to complete the PhD project titled ‘the effect of genetic variations on the individual response to exercise-induced muscle damage’ under the supervision of Dr Rob Erskine (Director of Studies), Prof Claire Stewart, Dr Mark Lake and Prof Barry Drust.
During the Research Opportunities Week in Munich and before that, Philipp had discussed a project with Prof Henning Wackerhage and Dr Martin Schönfelder as well as with Dr Karin Kleigrewe (Center Leader Metabolomics at Weihenstephan). Soon, we agreed on a project which utilises a fluxomics approach to study various phenomena in skeletal muscle, and we applied for the one-year TUM University Foundation fellowship (TUFF) which is exclusively offered to ROW participants.
An independent committee evaluated the quality of the proposed projects and of the postdoc candidates. We are delighted that Philipp has won the competitive TUFF and will start in Munich as a new postdoc of the Exercise Biology group. We are looking forward to this project and especially to the cooperation with Karin Kleigrewe in Weihenstephan.