Feedback by MELINA KRAUTWURST, Thuenen Institute of forest genetics, Germany

The main object of the symposium was to encourage PhD students to share and discuss their work and build a network.

Every PhD student had the opportunity to present their work with a presentation. It did not matter if they had results already or were just at the beginning of their PhD. I had the chance to present my work “Identification and characterization of full-siblings from open-pollinated ash progenies based on microsatellites and whole-genome resequencing data.” In addition, four keynote speakers presented four topics in different fields of forest genetics and molecular ecology.

Due to the symposium, I was able to get into different topics of forest genetics. Within three days, I was able to discuss my research, get useful comments and made great contact with the other students. Scientific and networking wise I would always choose to attend F4-Symposium again.

Thanks to the organizers for their wonderful job, which were also PhD students, and for providing such space for PhDs and EVOLTREE who provided the financial support for the Symposium and me.