Bremen International Graduate School for Marine Sciences

This year me and my colleagues from the working group went together to the ICYMARE in Bremerhaven. We stayed there in a shared AirBnB for the time of the conference and had a great time experiencing the conference together. During the icebreaker event we got to see many familiar faces, but also meet new people, especially thanks to the game “Bingo” where we had to find people that already published three papers, who have a non-furry pet at home, who have the same favourite colour, and many more.

After this really nice socializing event the conference started the next morning with the opening ceremony and the first keynote speaker Julia Olsen talking about the Arctic Ocean, followed by a plenary discussion regarding early career researches in the ocean decade. It was an interesting discussion and after a short coffee break the program directly continued with a fun science speed meeting session, during which I got to know many PhD students, mainly from AWI. Then everybody headed off to the different sessions they were interested in. In the evening we visited the poster session together and had a blast with freshly provided pizza and soup talking about research projects.

The next day was also full with interesting talks and sessions, a very inspiring keynote talk from Caroline Ngorobi about “Art meets Science”, but mainly also filled with workshops. I visited a workshop talking about and collecting ideas for more sustainability in science. We discussed the different areas in which one can aim for more sustainability (travel, field work, lab work, conferences, …) and tried to think of possible solutions and approaches to tackle these issues.

On the last day of the conference finally the session “(Sub-)Tropical Coastal Ecosystems in a Changing Environment”, that I hosted together with a friend and colleague, took place and we had a really nice line-up of talks and an interested audience. After the closing and farewell we took the train back to Bremen again, leaving the conference with many interesting talks, new connections, and cool experiences.