9th Leibniz PostDoc Network General Assembly

Ever wondered how diversity is pertinent to your work? What kind of skills are they and how are they important for a self-determined career path?

Having a career in academia requires a strong research portfolio whilst, at the same time, you have to show managerial and leadership competence in a highly competitive environment. Navigating your career means not only to check a list of achievements but to actively shape an environment in which you as well as others can strive.
Diversity skills comprise a set of key personal competences that help you built such an environment being able to identify and use your own strengths and the strengths of others. Having a strong set of diversity skills, thus, supports you in successfully planning your projects, managing teams as well as becoming a strong communicator.
This half-day workshop invites postdocs to explore and start developing their diversity skills with an outlook on their own career. The workshop will provide an overview of key diversity skills and facilitate participants to connect them with their own career goals as well as their values.

This workshop will cover the following topics:

• Overview: key diversity skills?
• Importance of diversity skills
• Career planning with goals and values
• Some “rules of the game”
• Tools and methods to create a trustful work environment

Have you always wondered whether there could be more to your research? Whether your scientific findings have the potential to be turned into a product that benefits society?

In this interactive workshop with Dr. Rebekka Müller, you will learn the essentials of technology transfer, with focus on the life sciences, and why it matters. Together, we will explore the key steps from research to application, illustrated by successful transfer examples. In practical sessions, you will actively work with real life science cases to identify the transfer and commercialization potential.

This four-hour online workshop builds on foundational knowledge of AI-assisted programming. Participants will work with current AI coding tools and examine their integration into research workflows.

The workshop covers recent developments in generative AI for code generation, with particular attention to model capabilities released in 2025. Participants will compare prompt engineering strategies across different model architectures and evaluate when automated code generation is appropriate for research applications.
The primary focus is Claude Code, currently the most capable AI coding agent available. Participants will explore its features for project-level code generation, refactoring, and debugging. The workshop also covers Cursor and GitHub Copilot, comparing their approaches to code completion, workspace awareness, and integration with development environments.

Participants will work with both standard AI interfaces (Claude, ChatGPT, and other platforms they have access to) and API playgrounds from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. This combination allows testing of different models’ code generation capabilities and comparison of their performance on identical programming tasks. The workshop also introduces LLM APIs and their potential applications in research.

The workshop concludes with a mini-hackathon where participants apply these techniques to their own research problems. This provides immediate practice with the tools covered and allows for troubleshooting specific use cases.

Prerequisites: Basic programming experience and access to Claude is recommended. Tasks, research questions etc. for the mini-hackathon are highly recommended.

We’ve invited four inspiring panelists to share valuable insights into the diverse career paths available for postdocs:

• Dr. Ulrike Hagemann: Head of the Landeskompetenzzentrum Forst Eberswalde (former: Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research – ZALF)
• Dr. Niklas Reinken: Junior Professor “Grammar for School“ at University of Leipzig (former: Leibniz Institute for the German Language – IDS)
• Dr. Lydia Repke: Acting head of the “Scale Development and Documentation” team and PI of the project “LoneCovid” (Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences – GESIS)
• Dr. Gabriel Sollberger: Science manager at Leibniz Association (former: Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology)