ECOGLOBE PhD courses

May 2011

Design and evaluation of ecological studies - 5 ECTS
May 9, 08:30 to May 13, 18:00

The PhD students will be trained in planning and evaluating their own experimental, ecological investigations. An aim of the course is to enable the students to critically evaluate research papers from the international scientific literature.
Course programme

The course is open to Danish (including ECOGLOBE) as well as international PhD students. Minimum 15 and maximum 25 participants.
Registration to Ulrik Nørum uln@dmu.dk no later than April 1, 2011

August 2011

Determination of priority pollutants, transformation products and transformation processes in the environment - 5 ECTS
28th of August - 3rd of September

The registration is now open:

Course registration

Flyer:
Flyer

Course description:

Priority compounds (e.g. endocrine disrupting compounds, pharmaceuticals, biocides) may be found are in various environmental compartments such as water, soil, air. Many environmental processes are accompanied with environmental transformation reactions. This means that not only is it necessary to look for the parent compounds but their transformation products may be equally important to analyse.

Typical transformations include: biodegradation or biotransformation, photo-oxidation, chemical transformation, hydrolysis, formation of bound residues. All these process may occur or be used in technical processes such as soil cleaning, waste water treatment etc.

Analysis of the priority compounds is not trivial, nor is a prediction of the transformation products and transformation reactions.

This PhD course will address:

How to determine the respective compounds (extraction procedures, clean ups, detection methods with hands-on experience).

Which transformation reactions to be expected and how to determine transformation products (set op of experiments, determination, identification, verification)

How to determine transformation reactions (reaction kinetics, what to learn from them)

Instrumental techniques, demonstrated and used for exercises.

The course will be a mixture of lectures and seminars in combination with laboratory experiments and exercises.

Please contact: Kai Bester, kb@dmu.dk tel.: 4630 1243 or prioritypollutantsPhDcourse2011@dmu.dk

October2011 (9/10 - 14/10)

• The good, the bad and the ugly bacteria  

The registration is now open:
Course registration

• Flyer

Course description:
Research in microbiology has often focused on either the bad and the ugly or the good features of the microbes, i.e. their pathogenicity towards humans or their applicability by humans.

Many facultative pathogenic bacteria have complex life-cycles which might include a saprophytic and surviving stages in the environment and pathogenic stages in humans and other animals. Bacterial groups containing facultative pathogens often consist of species or even strains which differ remarkable in their pathogenic potential. Given these bacteria´s long history of occurrence in and interactions with the environment, including interactions with invertebrates, it is likely that the environment has played an important role in shaping their evolution.

The Bacillus cereus group, consisting of the species B. cereus, B. anthracis, B. weihenstephanensis, B. thuringiensis, B mycoides and B. pseudomycoides, is such a group of facultative pathogenic bacteria. The species range from the ugly very virulent B. anthracis, causing anthrax, via bad strains of B. cereus causing mild diarrhoea to good strains used as microbial pest control agents and probiotics. Further the group occurs numerously in the environment, where they also might have a role as saprophytes.

The scope of this summer school is to present and discus the mutual lifecycles of facultative pathogens, their potential virulence and probable good features, and how this might have influenced their evolution. These presentations and discussions will notably be based on examples from the Bacillus cereus group. Further the participants will in practice be presented for a number of methods useful for investigations on these topics.

Please contact: Niels Bohse Hendriksen, nbh@dmu.dk, tel.: 8715 8473 

October 2011

Fitting empirical data to ecological models - 5 ECTS
October 24, 08:30 to October 28, 18:00

The PhD students will be introduced to using advanced statistical methods, such as state-space models, structural equation models, and Bayesian networks, which are becoming increasingly popular for fi tting empirical data to ecological models.
Course programme

The course is open to Danish (including ECOGLOBE) as well as international PhD students. Maximum of 20 participants.
Registration to Christian Damgaard cfd@dmu.dk no later than September 23