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Workshop: Supporting Your Research Project Management with AI Assistants

 

Details

Date: spring 2027 (exact date tbd soon)
Location: online via Zoom
Target group: Postdocs from all research fields of the UA Ruhr Universities (max. 25 participants)
Trainer: PD Dr. Daniel Mertens
Registration deadline: tbd
Contact for organizational Questions: event@rs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de


Description

AI assistants can be a structured planning partner — helping you step back, see your project from the outside, and catch what's easy to miss from inside your own week-to-week work. This session focuses on turning that into concrete planning practice: assessing priorities with an additional more objective perspective, planning realistic and literature-based timelines, reading your stakeholder landscape, tracking how a project is actually going, and preparing for what could go wrong before it does. 

In this workshop:

  • Prioritizing and decision-making — using an AI assistant as a structured external opinion that sharpens your own judgment on what matters most
  • Realistic timing and duration planning for tasks and projects
  • Stakeholder analysis — mapping who needs to be informed and who has influence
  • Key performance indicators — tracking how a project is actually going (controlling)
  • Risk analysis and contingency planning — surfacing what could go wrong while there's still time to prepare

Participants leave with a concrete set of planning templates and a repeatable practice: routinely stepping outside their own view of a project and using the AI assistant as an objectifying, external sounding board. What changes afterward is how well-founded the planning behind the work becomes — priorities tested against a second perspective, risks named early, and unknown unknowns surfaced while there's still time to act on them.

Please note: Basics of working with AI assistants and will not be covered in this workshop. For this please participate in the workshop “AI Assistants Can Increase the Quality of Your Research: A Foundations Workshop”.
 

Trainer

PD Dr. Daniel Mertens is Biochemist, Lecturer and group leader at the German Cancer ResearchCenter (DKFZ) and at the University of Ulm. He shares his knowledge and experiences since several years as professional trainer as is an expert for responsible use of AI in research.

* In order to provide you with a comfortable registration process, we use registration forms of our service partner eveeno®. Please note the information on the allocation of places on the program overview page.