IZN International Graduate Program Thesis Advisory Committee Meetings

The success of TAC meetings strongly depends on a thoughtful selection of TAC members and well-prepared TAC meetings. When choosing your TAC members please consider that outside expert views can often provide eye-opening critique and can offer particularly helpful technical and strategic advice. Sometimes, this may even result in the incorporation of new aspects and directions in your project at the expense of other project parts. It is therefore very important to carefully assess which combination of experts might help your research project most and could provide the best input. This could also mean that at a certain stage of your project you may want to include additional experts into your TAC if required.

TACs have at least three members: One TAC-member is your supervising IZN-PI and one TAC member must be a member of the Faculty with which you have registered your doctoral project. His/her/their roles are, apart from providing scientific expertise, to ensure IZN- and faculty-specific scientific standards. Often the IZN-PI and faculty member are the same researcher. All other TAC members are free for you to choose and should be selected primarily based on their scientific expertise and potential helpfulness for you and your project.   

1^st TAC: The first TAC meeting should be held in the early stages of your project within the first 6-8 months after starting the project. At this timepoint you should have generated first data, perhaps pilot experiments or proof of principle approaches, such that it is possible to estimate whether the project is on the right track. This meeting will therefore focus on the project proposal and your preliminary data that support the underlying hypotheses and the potential implications that might arise from the planned work. This TAC is perhaps the most influential and creative TAC-meeting for the rest of the project as it may involve discussions of additional high-risk pilot approaches or explore novel or cutting-edge strategies that may potentially be implemented into the work program.

2^nd TAC: The second and all following TAC meetings are typically arranged about one year after the previous TAC meeting unless urgent circumstances would suggest earlier meetings. The second TAC meeting typically evaluates the progress in the different project lines including, if applicable, the status of high-risk approaches. Based on the achieved data, discussions will center on potential outcomes and will try to direct the focus of the project towards the most inspiring and promising project lines. This meeting therefore sets first switches and directs focus.

3^rd TAC: The third TAC meeting is perhaps the most invasive TAC-meeting: it wraps up all insights of the project so far and discusses the possibilities for publication of project parts and potentially missing data. The meeting may therefore yield very discrete add-ons to the project, it may also result in the stopping of other aspects. Importantly, if required, the meeting may also suggest and support extending the doctoral work for another year (including a further TAC), but it may also suggest that it is time to finalize the experimental work and to prepare publications and the dissertation. Should your project go beyond three years please arrange for further yearly TAC meetings and document them similarly as the ones before. 

4^th TAC: see 3^rd TAC

You are in charge of organizing and arranging your TAC meetings, so please don’t wait until your supervisor asks for them! Again, TAC meetings provide you with a unique chance to discuss your project and its potential successes and problems with outside experts and to obtain their detailed feedback and assistance. Please, therefore, schedule your TAC meetings according to our suggestions. As soon as you have arranged a date for your TAC meeting, please inform the IZN-IGP office about it, including the names of your TAC members. You will then receive a personalized IZN-TAC-protocol that is to be completed by the IZN supervisor during your TAC meeting in which your progress is evaluated and the suggestions of the TAC committee are documented.  

Well in advance to your TAC meeting, you should prepare a concise TAC report (about 5 pages) with the project's starting date, its background, aims, results and their discussion as well as your continuing work schedule and future plans. Please send this report to your TAC members at least one week prior to the TAC meeting so that they have a chance to look into your data. Please also prepare a TAC presentation for a max. 20 minute talk that should summarize your projects, their results, and your future work plan in a meaningful manner.

Each TAC meeting follows a similar formal style starting with your concise 20 minute presentation followed by an in-depth question-answer-discussion session (typically 1 h). Towards the end, the direct supervisor may leave the room to allow the doctoral student to discuss concerns, conflicts or critical questions with the outside TAC members. Conversely, the student may leave the room to allow the supervisor to discuss potential issues with the outside TAC members. This procedure will result in a documented evaluation of the project's progress and its expected future development as well as discrete suggestions for future project directions or improvements including recommendations regarding publications or project extensions. The completed IZN-TAC-Protocol will then be signed by all participants and should be sent electronically together with the TAC report to the program administrator at IZN-GradSchool@nbio.uni-heidelberg.de.