Starting a PhD is an exciting step but it can also feel a bit overwhelming at times. Our First year Retreat is designed to help you get a better sense of what lies ahead and how to make the most of your PhD experience.

This retreat invites you to hit pause, look back, and explore how things are going  and how things can be improved!

Join us for an inspiring two-day retreat designed for PhD candidates in their final year!

The focus of this edition of the FSRLA course is on farm household systems in multifunctional landscapes, as affected by poverty, pressures of climate change, population growth, land-use change, and changes in markets. 

In this post graduate course, we will explore photosynthesis from the chloroplast to the whole-plant canopy level. 

The course Multivariate Analysis offers a thorough introduction to multivariate statistical methods, tailored for researchers working with complex datasets where multiple variables are measured simultaneously.

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to R and R Studio. It introduces the participants to R language syntax, to enable them to write their own R code. They will also learn about R data-types and data-structures, and they will be taught how to explore the data and produce plots. The course will be a combination of lectures and practicals.

This course focuses on concepts such as spatial self-organization, scale-free movement, and biophysical interactions at multiple scales. Furthermore, modern techniques to quantify plant and animal movement, analyse animal movement strategies, and model the implications of spatial self-organization in an ecosystem using a relatively simple modelling approach will be introduced.

In this workshop, participants will learn the principle of tidy data, how to transform and combine datasets using the tools from the tidyverse and how to generate advanced visualization with the ggplot2 package.

This is a refresher course aimed at PhD candidates. The level is that of a second course in Statistics. 

European forests have a central role to play in biodiversity conservation, as is recognized by recent publications and policy documents.

This is a brief introductory workshop especially aimed at those who have little or no experience working with LaTeX. There will be a theoretical and a hands-on practical part. The theoretical part covers the basics of what TeX and LaTeX are, how they compare with Office text processors, and how to get started with writing documents. The practical is a hands-on demonstration of some of the more useful features of LaTeX, such as making Gantt charts, bibliography management and automatic acronym expansion.

Machine learning plays an increasingly important role in many scientific areas, including geo-information science and remote sensing, ecology, biosystems engineering, and bioinformatics. 

In this module we discuss how to analyse data for which the assumption of independence is violated. In this course, you will learn all about it!

In this module we study how to analyse data that are not normally distributed. We look at fractions (logistic regression), counts (Poisson regression, log-linear models), ordinal data (threshold models), and overdispersion. We discuss (quasi-) maximum likelihood estimation and the deviance.

Classical statistics offers a powerful toolbox for data analysis. This toolbox, however, may not always be sufficiently flexible for modern data situations. 

Don’t miss out on the fantastic opportunity to meet fellow plant scientists in person and register before 7th June 2026! PE&RC PhD candidates can claim 50% of the fee (€200,-) by submitting an external course subsidy request. 

Extend participants' basic knowledge of R by teaching them more advanced programming concepts and the use of R for more complex problem solving, going beyond just statistics.

This course introduces analog serious games (e.g. board and card games, narrative games) as tools to explore and foster food system transformation and challenges the participants to design new and/or adapt existing games and test them in a final event where they can showcase their prototypes. 

In the postgraduate course Chemical Ecology throughout the tree of life, we will focus on how man-made changes to the environment can influence chemical communications within and between microorganisms, plants, herbivores and disease vectors. We will not only focus on how chemical information can be collected and analyzed, but also on the environmental factors that can affect chemical communications and zoom in on the underlying mechanisms of producing and perceiving chemical information. There will also be two hands-on workshops on how to analyze large datasets in the field of chemical ecology.  

This course will focus on the fundamental and applied aspects of the ecology and control of vector-borne diseases and their vectors.