Pre-Conference Workshops

The Early Career Researchers (ECRs) offer three virtual pre-conference workshops. Two of them will be two-day workshops.

To register for the workshops, please send an e-mail with the subject “Preconference Workshops PuG2021” to Maria Meier (University of Konstanz) maria.meier@uni-konstanz.de and indicate which workshop you would like to attend.

The participation fees are 20 Euros for members of the bioDGPs or the DGPA and 90 Euros for non-members. We are grateful for the financial support of the DGPA and the DGPs Division of Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology and of the companies NIRx Medizintechnik GmbH, Brain Products and MES Forschungssysteme GmbH.

We recommend that you register early, as the number of participants per workshop is limited to 20 in Workshop 1 and 3, and to 30 in Workshop 2. We will act on a first come first serve basis.

Workshop 1: An introduction to R

Lecturer: Juli Tkotz, ZI Mannheim

Juli Tkotz studied Psychology in Düsseldorf and is currently working on her PhD about sleep and memory at the Central Institute of Mental Health. During university, she got caught in an elective R seminar – and ever since, she has been preaching about her favorite programming language. Her hobby horse is data wrangling and visualization, simulations, and reproducible manuscripts in R Markdown.

Contents of the workshop

You would like to take your first steps towards learning the programming language R? Or you are confused after some initial attempts? In this introduction, we will take two days to cover the basics of R. Our approach will be application-oriented, so you will be able to test your new skills with real, “dirty” data. You will learn about the fundamental functionalities of R, prepare and visualize data, and run some statistical tests. Right from the beginning we will focus on a clean workflow that allows “future you” to understand the code “past you” has written. That means that we will get to know the basic elements of tools like GitHub and R Markdown.

However, the most important goal of the workshop is: Two days of fun with R. In the end, you will hopefully be excited about R and equipped with enough knowledge to continue your journey through the unive-R-se.

Workshop 2: Reproducible Research in R

Lecturer: Malcolm Barrett, California

Malcolm Barrett is a data scientist, an R developer, and an epidemiologist with a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Southern California. He is an RStudio Certified Instructor and served two years in AmeriCorps at federally qualified health centers in Michigan and New York City. Currently, he is highly involved in giving workshops and consultations surrounding data analysis, visualization, and packages in R. His courses are hands-on, use clear, engaging projects and are adaptable to all kinds of research topics.

Contents of the workshop

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use the R programming language to generate completely reproducible research using R Markdown, targets, and renv. We’ll focus on how these tools can support academic research and data science, allowing you to iterate between code and results quickly. Importantly, these tools will also improve your ability to return to projects months or years later and generate the same results and share projects with colleagues and stakeholders with confidence that they will be able to produce the same results as you. R Markdown is a publishing framework in R that allows us to weave code and text in the same document, generating reports, papers, websites, slides, books, and more directly from R. In the first half of the workshop, we’ll cover the basics of R Markdown, useful tricks for writing research documents, managing tables and figures, and more. In the second half of the workshop, we’ll use targets to manage our research code. Code pipelines are useful for managing research projects, as tools like targets manage our code output efficiently. Code pipelines also make writing in R Markdown lightweight and easier to iterate. We’ll also use renv to manage R package versions, improving our ability to make our code robust over time. Together, these tools support more effective research workflows in R–and, finally, let you come back to a project months on knowing that it will still work.

This workshop assumes a basic knowledge of the R programming language. Experience with the tidyverse will be helpful, as well, but is not required. This workshop will be held in English.

Workshop 3: Career Coaching

Lecturer: Ute Riedler, Graz

Ute Riedler has worked as a science consultant in Austria for over 20 years. She brings many years of experience in science journalism and television journalism, and as a university councilor at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, she also has direct experience within Austrian university supervision. Her broad knowledge of academic careers in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and beyond, she has published in the book “Black Box Berufung. Strategies on the Way to Professorship” together with Christine Färber. Her concern is to contribute to the professionalization of her clients through her work and to accompany them on their career path in a success-oriented way.

Contents of the workshop

This one-day workshop includes a “crash course” in strategic, academic career planning. The goals are to develop a focused view of one’s own career, to analyze one’s own skills and abilities, and to consistently implement defined goals. The workshop is interactive and combines content input with practical exercises and discussions as well as instructions for individual further work. Participants will also work on several topics strongly related to academic careers: Work-life balance, time management, and networking. The workshop takes place online via Zoom and covers a morning session (9.00 – 12.30) and an afternoon session (13.30 – 17.00), including short breaks and lunch.

The workshop will be held in German.