Becoming professor at a university of applied sciences can be an appealing alternative career option. For three YIN alumni it has become a reality. At the YIN fireside chat in April, Prof. Romana Piat (Darmstadt), Prof. Stefanie Betz (Furtwangen), and Prof. Oliver Waldhorst (Karlsruhe) talked about getting appointed and about the differences and similarities between working at a university of applied sciences and a regular one. While industry experience is crucial for a career in applied sciences, for some it may be attained project-wise or at a research center. The teaching load can be reduced.

New developments like the Tenure Track Program and the first round of the Excellence Strategy directly impact the career of young investigators. As YIN, we participate, speak with a common voice and try help to shape a better future for science. In our annual magazine, we discuss the Tenure Track Program and review the KIT Associate Fellow. Moreover, new facts and figures show the amount of work and goals achieved by YIN, e.g. the amount of subsequent funding acquired and the number of course hours’ taught. We also report about YIN activities, new members and alumni.

Data availability, source code sharing and credit taxonomy for authors are essential in open access publishing. These requirements give rise to a whole set of new questionsthat vary for each discipline: What is the minimum data set and where to store it? How can specially programmed software tools be maintained sustainably over time? And which are the right criteria to weigh and describe each author’s input? Leonie Mück gave some answers that sprang a lively discussion with the YIN members. She worked as senior editor for NATURE until August 2017 when she joined the non-profit open access journal PLOS ONE.

Physicists at KIT have developed a crucial component for a quantum simulating. They represented the light-matter-interaction of photosynthesis using electromagnetic resonators for the photons and superconducting circuits as quantum bits for the atoms. “We succeeded in getting both the quantum bit and the resonator to assume two opposite states at the same time,” says Martin Weides, co-author and YIN member. Due to this effect, quantum simulators solve a problem much faster than conventional computers which store infor-mation either as zero or one.

YIN member Cornelia Lee-Thedieck develops models of the human bone marrow to study the regeneration of blood and bone by stem cells and how this regeneration is disturbed in diseases like leukemia or bone metastases. The  European Research Council now funds her research project “Blood and Bone – Conjoined Twins in Health and Disease: Bone Marrow Analogs for Hematological and Musculoskeletal Diseases” with EUR 1.5 million for five years. Understanding the mutual interactions of blood and bone might be the key to restore their regenerative potential.

For his outstanding contributions, Frank Schröder received the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Astroparticle Physics. In particular, he experimentally determined the sensitivity of the radio signal to air showers: When colliding with earth's atmosphere, cosmic rays set free cascades of smaller particles and, thereby, produce light as well as radio waves. While light observations are limited to clear, dark nights, radio emissions can always be measured. Representing 60 member states, IUPAP is one of the largest international physics organizations.