Higrade Conference

Every year, the UFZ's Higrade graduate school organises a half-day internal conference where all third-year PhD students present their current work, and this year it was Julia's turn. The rest of the Polises group attended as guests and Gunnar took photos of the event. The event started with one-minute pitches of every PhD on their poster. As the Higrade conference is all about reaching an interdisciplinary audience with an entertaining yet informative presentation without strict format requirements, the PhD students were very creative about their pitches. We heard a poem about sensitivity analysis, animated clips about nutrition and witnessed the explosion of a mushroom on stage. This was followed by a poster session.

Julia presented her and Jonathan's work on a network model of hay markets. Using an optimisation model, the pair calculate the extent to which the trading radius and number of trading contacts affect the income, prices and transport routes of grassland farmers. Although Julia's AI-animated cartoon did not stand out enough to win the pitch award, she received a lot of positive feedback at her poster stand, both for the design and the content of the poster. However, there was also criticism of how such a hay market discriminates against smallholder structures and has negative consequences.

The programme ended with a musical interlude and the presentation of the awards, followed by a barbecue, which unfortunately was not so well attended. All in all, it was a varied and interesting day, during which we gained many impressions from outside our research field and which was not quite as serious as a traditional conference. Nevertheless, the preparation of the poster and the pitch required a comparatively large amount of effort for the limited target audience.