The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1459 Research Training Group held its
2nd Intelligent Matter Summer School (SIMSS)
from Wednesday, 3rd of July until Friday, 7th of July, 2024
at the Gemen Castle in Borken.
All member of the CRC1459 Research Training Group were invited and to experience three days packed with exciting lectures in Biology, Chemistry and Physics in addition to having the opportunity to choose one out of two offered 2-day soft skill workshops to become a well-rounded researcher. Furthermore, an evening's entertainment program further connected the fellow attendees after an intense day of lectures and workshops.
Michael Booth studied for an MChem degree at the University of Southampton, which included research projects in the groups of Professor Martin Grossel, Professor Ali Tavassoli, and Professor George Attard. As part of his undergraduate degree he also undertook a placement at the Université de Montréal, Canada, under the supervision of Professor Stephen Michnick. He carried out his PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian, developing sequencing techniques for modified cytosine bases. He then worked in the group of Professor Hagan Bayley at the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher and Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. At Oxford, he developed light-activated DNA technology to control cell-free protein expression within synthetic cells. He started his independent research career in 2018 with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. In 2022, he moved to the Department of Chemistry at University College London to begin a Lectureship in Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
For information about his group, visit boothlab.uk
Wooseok Choi obtained his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2017 from Korea University, Seoul, Korea. After completing his Ph.D. in Materials Science Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), he joined IBM Research Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher in 2023. His research interests are developing and studying resistive memory (ReRAM) for use in unconventional computing systems, i.e., neuromorphic computing and analog in-memory computing (AIMC). He is also interested in volatile memristors (e.g., VO2-based threshold switching devices) and their use in oscillatory neural networks and cryptography hardware applications.
In 2016, Dr. Stoev received his MChemPhys in Chemical Physics from University of Edinburgh after spending one year in industry at Syngenta and receiving the award for best Master's project that year. In 2020, he graduated with his PhD in soft matter physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. Until mid-2023 he was a postdoctoral researcher in biophysics at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden in the lab of Prof. Moritz Kreysing. Since the start of 2024, Dr. Stoev is a fully funded independent research fellow (YIG Prep Pro) at the Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems - Biological Information Processing, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he works on the design and characterisation of sequence-programmable DNA systems.
