The research training group (RTG) „multiscale clocks“ is funded by the DFG and started in April 2022 with Prof. Dr. Stengl as spokesperson.

The RTG “multiscale clocks” aims at reaching excellence, innovation, and internationality, with a broadly relevant and timely research question and an innovative scientific concept. This concept will be challenged with an interdisciplinary, diverse group of experts (PIs) that train international doctoral candidates and postdocs with a personally customized qualification program that bridges different disciplines. The RTG’s goal is to gain an understanding of the structure and organization of biological time. The RTG’s novel hypothesis predicts that biological time is orchestrated via adaptive endogenous “master clocks” in the plasma membrane and nucleus/cytoplasm, based upon mutually antagonistic mechanisms/elements. It is hypothesized that the interacting multiscale clocks generate superimposed oscillations on multiple time scales, from milliseconds to years over the respective organism’s lifetime.

The consortium consists of 12 principal investigators (PIs; among them two tandem) from different disciplines of natural sciences, mathematics, and electrical engineering/systems theory. Grouped into three main project areas, experimental and theoretical PIs collaborate to accomplish 12 research projects that study cellular clocks/oscillators and their interactions to orchestrate timing in various model organisms.

Each of the research groups (single PI or tandem PIs) has one PhD position open (the next cohort starts in April 2025), for the respective project number listed. A brief description of the projects is listed under “Research projects”.