After almost a year, I finished my training as a certified data scientist at HarvardX. Sure, much of the material was repetitive, given that I have a PhD in computational chemistry, but I still valued very much looking at other types of data, learning about important visualization principles (that often neglected in my community), and diving into machine learning, of course.

Sadly, my time in California has come to an end; but I am excited to start my new postdoc position at FU Berlin in April. I will be joining joining forces with Bettina Keller whose expertise in Markov State Modeling will be invaluable to my research on skin permeation processes. Thew new position is being funded by a DFG Return Fellowship, for which I am deeply grateful.

How should scientists approach teaching? By treating it as a science! This is the central idea of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), which I studied in great detail, recently, as part of developing my teaching philosophy.

Yesterday, a new massively open online course (MOOC) started on the subject and I’m happy to be a part of this. The course is called An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching and is provided by the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) on edX.org.

So excited to perform some experimental work again by volunteering for StayAtHomeChem. Check it out on Twitter.

How does indoor air change now that >300 million Americans are urged to stay at home? ⁦First Basic Kits are arriving for #StayAtHomeChem @SloanFoundation @IndoorChem #indoorchem @NUChemistry @NorthwesternU @IINanoNU pic.twitter.com/l9zvaTHvrU

— Franz Geiger (@geiger_lab) April 17, 2020

Cheers! I received this year’s Edmund ter Meer Award, which is handed out annually by the sponsoring society of the University of Bonn for an outstanding dissertation submitted to the Department of Chemistry. If you’re curious, you can read the thesis online.

I am extremely happy to announce that the German Research Foundation (DFG) granted me a two-year research fellowship. Starting in October, I will be working with Doug Tobias at the University of California, Irvine, on modeling indoor air chemistry with molecular dynamics simulations.