Carolin Herbon

I conducted my ‘research residence abroad’ at the “Katolieke Universiteit” in Leuven, Belgium, about 20km east from Brussels. Leuven is a beautiful small old university city. The university was founded in 1425. It now holds approximately 37.000 students, of which about 5.000 are international students. More than 4.000 publications in international peer-reviewed academic and scientific journals were published in 2008 from this university. It is a member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU), a group of twenty European research-intensive universities committed to the values of high-quality education in an internationally competitive research environment. As I already took a lot of samples during my research stay in Indonesia in the frame of my PhD project, I decided to use the opportunity of the ‘research residence abroad’ to get advice and use the expertise of an expert in my field of study (benthic food web structures based on stable isotope analysis), Dr. Steven Bouillon, during my process of publication writing. He already conducted research on this topic for several years and published several very useful publications, helping to better understand the connections between trophic levels in benthic food web structures. Due to this expertise, he was able to give me a lot of input of his knowledge and experience he gained through his research, as well as a variety of papers, as he is intensively following publications on this and related topics since years.

An intensive review-correction process during these three weeks of my stay, and the possibility, to exclusively and concentrated work on my publications, made this a very successful stay for me, being able to complete my first publication. Due to many discussions and a large amount of papers on this topic, he gave me a whole lot of new thinking approaches for the discussions of my second and third publications.

Overall it were very productive three weeks, in which I achieved what I had planned completely. A different environment, an expert on your site and concentrated working can be very motivating. I can only recommend that to everybody who, like me, do not have to take samples any more.