Romain Rouchet  Postdoctoral Research Fellow Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic  Institute of Botany -Pr？honice & Institute of Vertebrate Biology - Brno   Department of Fish Ecology  Institute of Vertebrate Biology  Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic  Kvetna 8  603 65 Brno  Czech Republic

I am a French postdoctoral assistant at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and spent three months at IHB for a project involving field and experimental work on the coevolution of bitterling fish and freshwater mussels in China. I worked there with colleagues from the Czech Republic from April to July 2014 and it has been a great experience, both professionally and personally.   

We received a warm welcome and we offered great research facility by our collaborator and host, Prof. Dr. Huanzhang Liu, as well as a great welcome and help by his research group and students. We had the chance to go sampling fish and mussels mostly at lakes Poyang and Bao’an, plus a few extra locations. That was a great opportunity to see beautiful landscape and to join local fishermen in their work. Although my time was very busy with work there, we were offer many opportunities to join our colleagues for dinner and visits of Wuhan. Wuhan is a very large (compared to the European scale) and great city with many historical sites and parks to visit. I hence had a great chance to experience a deep immersion in the Chinese culture, from the so rich variety of meals to historical heritage or the every day life of modern China.    

I would not hesitate to come back in Wuhan to continue my collaboration with the people from IHB and actually consider including this perspective for my next research position when the time will come for me to write my own research proposal.