Learning to do 16S DNA analysis at Manchester University  As good geochemists, Melanie and Karel know the chemical reactions in their lake sediments very well. But if life did not exist, the dynamics of iron and phosphorus in any natural system would be very different from what we see now as the microbial community plays…

Hi, I’m Rouven and in this blog I want to report about my secondment at Fertiberia – or better with Fertiberia, since the pandemic kept me away from visiting Fertiberia in Spain in person. Instead we tried our best, improvising a remote secondment here in Vienna. What is Fertiberia? Fertiberia is not only a non-academic…

This -in my understanding quite philosophical sentence- is a very nice symbol of what was offered in our training courses about “what comes next after a PhD”. Finalising this huge personal project is a challenge, it is exciting, but it can also be frightening when something familiar ends after several years. It is a kind…

– By Mingkai Ma – As an experimentalist, I must admit that my experience in dealing with natural samples is limited. For simplicity and practical reasons, we mimic the complicated soil/sediments environment with synthesized iron minerals, cultivated bacteria, and artificial water (99% from natural products) in the lab. However, the secondment collaborating with Aquaminerals has…

Hello everyone! I am Oleksandr Bolielyi, and I’m glad to greet you in the new blog post of P-TRAP. Today I will tell you the story of my secondment at Aquaminerals in May-July 2021 in the Netherlands, and how it was managed at this difficult time. I hope that you will enjoy it! From the start it was…

I am Ville, working at Eawag in Switzerland. My work revolves around the oxidation of iron in the presence of phosphate and numerous other solutes and how they all together affect the structure and phosphate binding capabilities of iron solids. In this blog, I would like to share some of my experiences during my P-TRAP…

Hi, I’m Victoria and on this blog I want to tell you about my secondment at Arcadis. First of all, what’s a secondment? One of the nice things about the P-TRAP project is that every early stage researcher has to do 2 secondments during the time of their contract. These are temporary activities at another…

1 ½ years! ago our P-TRAP ESRs met each other for the one and only time during the first skills course in Bayreuth! And not even all of them! The corona pandemic takes much longer than expected, and all project networking activities were -and are still- reduced to a minimum. We made the best out…

It has been more than a year since we started our project and we have all done a lot of experiments, taken a lot of samples and produced a lot of exciting new data. Now is the time to get in closer contact with the “outside” scientific community, to present our findings and also discuss…

Greetings everyone! In this blog post I would like to share my impressions from my first secondment, which took place at the University of Bayreuth. The task of this secondment was to test filter-stable materials by means of column experiment with the water from the field site in Weißenstadt (Voitsumra). Although this wasn’t my first…