This week we had several visitors to the lab.
On Sunday we hosted a delegation from the Helmholtz Association. This delegation included the president of the association as well as directors from several research centers. They did a whirlwind tour of Israel. Their schedule at the Hebrew University was for half a day, and included a general introduction and then topic-oriented meeting. I was chosen to host the Biology meeting in the lab. The guests included the President of the association, the Director of Research of the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich and the Director and Vice-Director of Research of the Max Delbruck Center in Berlin.
As you can guess this was a very important crowd, and we assembled a team of scientists (established and new) to meet with them. The meeting ended up crowding 16 people in our small meeting/kitchen room, and as consequence was very informal. We also had a short tour of the robotics room.
This visit was a an excuse for us to do a thorough cleanup day on Thursday last week. I think that since it was open the lab never was so clean. The cleanup included also out of sight areas, such as the cold room, which was reorganized by Amit and Noa, who sorted through all the shelfs, removed old and outdated plates, and rearranged things in an accessible way.
On Monday, we were part of the country-wide "Scientists Night" events. The event at the Hebrew University included tours in labs, and our lab was one of the advertised tours. Each group was of 10 teenagers that didn't know much about labs and biology. Avital and Noa took charge of hosting the visit and explaining to the energetic youth why we have robotics.
One last, unexpected and less prestigious, visitor was a chameleon that started visiting my office window regularly.
The first sighting of this science-curious lizard was when we had a meeting with five people in the room, and suddenly I noticed that everyone was focused on the window behind me.
Since then it revisited almost every day, and finally I decided that it is calls for some pictures. The window is not 100% clean, but that ended up giving the images a bit of interesting blurs.
