News Detail

The Day Trip was an off-site excursion of our fellows and provided opportunities for identifying and exploring new and innovative research directions. The joint topic of the trip – Migration – aligns with the current theme of the global network UBIAS (University-based Institutes for Advanced Study), in which we are a member.
The participating Fellows and members of the Zukunftskolleg´s Central Office were impressed by their experiences:

• Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin (Research Fellow / Biology):

“My favorite part of the trip was seeing CERN - not just for the cool science, but also to learn about how this amazing international cooperation came about and continues to function. It was also great to get to know my fellow Zukunftskolleg fellows a bit better. Thanks for the great trip!”

• Cornelia Klocker (Postdoctoral Fellow / Law):

“What I found very interesting about the UN and CERN was the similarity in scale of cooperation and coordination necessary to facilitate projects none of their member states would be able to carry out alone.”

• Takayuki Kurihara (Research Fellow / Physics):

“I was especially impressed by the openness and brightness of the researchers in CERN. It gives me quite an awe to see how everyone who works in such a big institute is enthusiastically seeking for the same single goal of finding out the most fundamental question of the world. This is something we in the field of material science can learn a lot from their attitude, to share a true big problem.”

• Gianluca Rastelli (Research Fellow / Physics):

“This excursion has been a valuable and rewarding experience. I really appreciated it in particular the visit at the United Nations Offices.”

• Mihaela Mihaylova (Central Office Zukunftskolleg):

“It was great to spend some time with our Fellows and my colleagues out of the context of the university and gain some new impressions and impulses from our visits at the UNHCR, Palais de Nations and CERN.”

• Oleksandra Kukharenko (Postdoctoral Fellow / Chemistry):

“We had two intense, exiting days densely packed with scientific and cultural experiences thanks to efforts and enthusiasm of the back office (especially Daniela!). I personally was most fascinated by the CERN visit, where we heard about the dark energy, antimatter production, and amount of information produced there and stored still on tapes. It was a curious coincident that we saw and heard so much about the mysteries and unresolved questions of the universe at the same day, where the first image of the black hole was published. I had a feeling that those two days brought us much closer as a community than most “get together” events organized locally in Konstanz.”

• Jolle Jolles (Postdoctoral Fellow / Biology):

“I was not only struck by the size and complexity of CERN, but by the amazing coordinated, harmonised effort of the thousands of academics and technicians behind it, which actually therefore end up on papers together with sometimes exceed 2500 authors!”

• Nihan Toprakkiran (Postdoctoral Fellow / Politics and Public Administration) :

“I really enjoyed the opportunity to see how physicists from all around the world come together and coordinate their work at CERN. This is a completely different working environment from my discipline, and I have found the way in which this cooperation is combined with individual projects and experiments impressive.”