Section Days 2010

Natural Sciences and Engineering
Nanotechnology

“Plenty of room at the bottom” - Richard Feynman’s (California Institute of Technology) famous speech in 1959 is considered as the foundation of Nanotechnology. With his demonstration how to write the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin, he showed impressively the possibilities present in this research field, “the small scale”, and provided a lot of new impulses for scientists.
Nanotechnology is defined as the understanding and control of matter at dimensions between approximately 1 and 100 nanometers (=1 E-9 meter) size range. It has recently become one of the most active research fields in the areas of solid state physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. This leads to the requirement to fabricate new materials on an even finer scale with the goal to continue decreasing the cost and increasing the speed of information transmission and storage. Nanomaterials display novel and often enhanced properties and functions that differ markedly from those seen from items made of identical materials and can open up possibilities for new technological applications. One far-reaching phenomenon, which appears when dealing with such small-dimension materials is the increasing influence of quantum mechanical effects. Some of these effects, like superposition and entanglement, which play an important role in the concept of Quantum Computers, will be introduced within this conference.

Humanities and Social Sciences
Borders – Conflicts - Innovations

This year's Section Day of the Humanities and Social Sciences deals with the topic "Borders - Conflicts - Innovations”. The Section Day addresses the question of what happens when research in one field reaches its limits and depends on the contribution of other disciplines. Which tensions can arise from this and how can possible, subsequent conflicts be resolved? 
Furthermore, we want to illuminate in which areas of (modern life) individuals and societies are confronted with borders and how conflicts might arise from the crossing and transgression of them. From the vantage point of interdisciplinarity the Section Day will inquire how and where the humanities and social sciences yield innovative potentials to overcome borders as well as resulting conflicts. 
The Section Day 2010 will be divided into two parts: in the morning three distinguished keynote speakers will open the conference by exploring the thematic field from their individual perspective. In the afternoon specific aspects will be extended and examined in closer detail in three distinct workshops. Each keynote speaker will chair and supervise one workshop in collaboration with the conference team. The workshops will intensify the academic exchange and provide doctoral students with the opportunity to present their own research projects in short talks of about 15 min. 

Contact persons
Véronique Sina (veronique.sina@rub.de)
Simone Heinemann (simone.heinemann@rub.de)

Download Abstracts of:

Keynote

Panel I

Panel II

Panel III

Section Day Natural Sciences and Engineering

• attendance of all lectures and poster sessions
• participation with a poster (see poster guidelines)
• submit an abstract until the end of the registration deadline by using the Form Sheet Abstract 
• please submit your abstract as word-file by mail to Alexander Meuer: Alexander.Meurer@rub.de until the end of the registration deadline

Section Day Life Sciences

• attendance of all lectures and poster sessions
• participation with a poster (see poster guidelines)
• submit an abstract until the end of the registration deadline by using the Form Sheet Abstract 
• please submit your abstract as word-file by mail to Michael Storcksdieck: michael.storcksdieckgenanntbonsmann@rub.de until the end of the registration deadline

Section Day Humanities and Social Sciences

• attendance of all lectures and poster sessions
• participation in one of the offered panel workshops (please indicate your first and second choice for the panel workshop in the online registration) 
• submission of a poster plus short abstract (max. 1 page) or submission of a longer abstract (ca. 1-2 pages) without poster:
• participation with poster: please submit a short abstract by using the Form Sheet Abstract and prepare a poster according to the poster guidelines 
• participation without poster: please submit a longer abstract of 1-2 pages by using the Form Sheet Abstract
  please submit your abstract as word file by mail to Bianca Häberlein: bianca.haeberlein@rub.de until the end of the registration deadline

The abstracts of your research projects and a list of participants will be published in an abstract book that we hand out to each participant. 

Guidelines for poster presentation
The poster should explain the basic idea of your research project also to the fellows and participating scientists from your section (but not always from your subject) as well as interested fellows from other sections. There are people from many other research areas, so it might be helpful to point out the basic ideas rather than go into the very detail.

Please remember:

• The posters should be written in English
• The poster should have a standard DIN A0 format 
• The poster should be printed out in portrait format
• The posters should have the Research School logo (see: download service for more formats)

So have fun (re-)designing your poster and see you on the Section Days.