Live from the MCAA Annual Conference (Friday, March 5th)

Every year, members of the Marie Curie Alumni Association gather to connect, share ideas, and enjoy some food and drink together. After a very successful pilot Virtual Conference held last November, 2021’s Annual Conference is completely virtual yet again!

You can follow along here on our live blog and on Twitter following the hashtag #MCAAConf2021, where we will continuously post updates from the different talks and sessions, all centered around Research in Times of Crisis.

*** This live blog was updated on March 5th during the Conference by the Communications Workgroup, you can find their bios and the end of this post. It has been edited on March 10 for clarity and consistency. Sessions appear in reverse chronological order***

Friday, March 5 Overview:

• Keynote lecture: Dr. Subip Parikh
• Parallel Sessions:
  How to be an entrepreneurial researcher
  Intercultural Competences
  Let’s be FAIR: Open research and Open science
• Parallel Sessions:
  Reshaping doctoral training with MCAA’s OSCAR and OEduverse
  Mental health and research careers: tips and tools
  Writing for the MCAA Newsletter and Blog
• Keynote lecture: Prof. Sunetra Gupta
• Introduction and Welcome

Keynote lecture: Dr. Subip Parikh

Dr. Mostafa Moonir Shawrav, chair of the MCAA introduced Dr. Sudip Parikh, the chief executive officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of the Science family of journals, who was the speaker for the keynote of the conference.

Dr. Parikh explained how difficult it is to live in the uncertainty but underlined how science will be the solution and the tool to fight against the pandemic, global warming, and many other crises we’re maybe not even aware of. He underlined the need to engage diverse cultures, and the need to collaborate and build trust within society. Scientists need to be able to influence policymakers, but also politicians. Science needs to be integrated and should be used by everyone, not only within a country but globally. It’s only through collaboration at a global level, that we would be able to tackle the major crisis of our world.

He then outlined how AAAS (https://www.aaas.org/) is working to “advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.” To do that, the association is working towards specific goals:

• Promote end defend the integrity of science;
• Increase public engagement with science and technology;
• Promote the responsible use of science in public policy;
• Provide a voice to scientists, put them on top, near politician and political leaders.

He concluded the talk by highlighting the need to connect researchers from all over the world as things happen, in terms of minutes, not hours or days. Our system of communication needs to be improved, and there is the necessity to permit scientists from all over the world to collaborate and work together toward the same objectives.

Parallel Session: How to be an entrepreneurial researcher

This session was moderated by Pavlo Bazilinskyy, Chair of Bridging science and business working group of the MCAA, and brought together four speakers from the cross-section of academia and industry. Each speaker was first invited to give opening remarks, and then the moderator led the panel in an interesting discussion.

Dr. Simon Brown, who is currently an owner @ P2T Consulting Ltd, shared that after a long career in academia and industry, he noticed in 2011 how our higher education grads are largely ignored and are actually in a very vulnerable position. Sharing the grim numbers from the academic job market, Dr. Brown stressed the importance of having a Plan B for PhDs, Post Docs, and ECRs. On the flip side, he also shared that one of the reasons for employer hesitancy in hiring PhDs is that they feel PhDs do not invest in skill development during their research. These realizations led him to his current work, where he develops training programmes to provide PhDs, postdocs, and ECRs with critical skills that are important for stepping outside academia.

Screenshot from Dr. Simon Brown’s talk

Next, Dr. Robert Merino-Martinez shared his interesting career trajectory, where he works part-time in the industry and part-time as a postdoc. For postdocs, the focus is typically on a specific, niche area of research and one can at times lose the bigger picture, but in his current role working side-by-side with industry on something that’s more tangible has been a great combination for him.

Dr. Jaconette Mirck, currently CEO at Insekten-Akademie, started her introduction by answering the question, ‘Why do we need entrepreneurial researchers and what impact do they have on society?’ In her view, entrepreneurial researchers create an impact with their research. She added that historically there has been a separation between industry and research institutes, which was important in order to not let industry influence the research. However, currently, there is an overlap between the two, which makes entrepreneurial researchers very important. She personally has learnt a lot of critical business skills while undertaking research projects that worked on real-world problems. Now, as a self-employed, new business owner, she aims to inspire women by exemplifying that they can have a career together with family, and also inspire parents to provide sustainable entertainment for their kids.

Screenshot from Dr. Jaconette Mirck’s talk

Next speaker, Dr. Marco Masia, who is currently Managing Director at MARMAS GmbH, also had a diverse career trajectory, where he started as a professor in academia and is currently working at the intersection of innovation, policy, and training. He agreed with Dr. Simon that researchers should become entrepreneurial and enterprising, but also pointed out that researchers don’t need to start skill development from scratch — they have already acquired valuable skills during their PhD which are needed in the entrepreneurial sector as well.

Starting off the discussion, in response to the question ‘Why do you need researchers to be entrepreneurial?’, Dr. Masia noted that there is a general top-down push for entrepreneurship from the European Commission. Adding to that, Dr. Brown highlighted that even though researchers already have enterprising and entrepreneurial skills, they need to figure out if their research actually solves a real-world problem — even if it is in the future. In his view, it is this realization that will help build relationships across industries, the commercial sector, and academia, which the researcher can then leverage later on.

In response to another question, Dr. Mirck highlighted that there is a difference in how people in the business sector view things versus how a researcher does. Researchers are taught to be perfectionists, but in the business sector perfectionism is not sought — hence there is a disparity there. Agreeing with this view, Dr. Merino-Martinez added that there is a need for compromise, and this is a gap that the entrepreneurial researchers can fill.

An important point, brought forth by Dr. Brown, was that the researchers are eager to engage in entrepreneurial activities; however, the challenge is to convince the PIs in letting their researchers participate in such training and to not view it as a loss. For this reason, the programmes being implemented by Dr. Brown always aim to measure and share impact with PIs so they see the added value the researchers will bring to their group.

The session was concluded with a nod to the COVID-19 pandemic, as it was apparent that the flexible work schedule and the possibility of remote work have allowed researchers to undertake hybrid roles in academia and industry. So there’s our silver lining, folks!

Parallel Session: Intercultural Competences

This session was organized by Theodota Lagouri, researcher at the Experimental Physics Department at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and Chair of MCAA Swiss Chapter since the fall of 2020. In this session, she aimed to develop a deeper understanding of interpersonal situations in intercultural communication, and develop a critical and skeptical mind.

The first panelist, Jane Elisabeth Wilhelm was a Translation Studies scholar and a translator. Her fields of research are the history of translation, gender in translation, literary translation, and intercultural communication. She highlighted how we negotiate understanding where those involved have quite different modes of communication, language, and world views, by turning into hermeneutics, the study of understanding. With language comes interpretations and misinterpretations, leading to misunderstandings which are a failure to understand what the other party means. To avoid this, self-understanding both at the personal and cultural level is key in intercultural communication. The starting point of any intercultural approach is self-knowledge; i.e. the importance of recognizing what is specific to one’s own culture, including its implicit criteria, to understand the mechanisms by which we belong to that culture.

Next we heard from Patchareerat Yanaprasart, a researcher at the University of Geneva and a teacher at the Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences. Her research interests include language learning, linguistic integration, and cross-cultural management in higher education. She highlighted how communication is goal-oriented and relationship-oriented. Misunderstandings are more frequent in multicultural teams, where there are differences in values (for example balancing work vs. family). As part of a team, it’s important to tell it like it is vs. tell what you want to hear. Teams must recognize, understand and respect cultural differences to be able to enhance communication. Working successfully in a multicultural team needs language awareness, verbal and non-verbal communication.

The final panelist was Pierre Wilhelm, who has coordinated online communication courses at Athabasca University, Canada’s Open and Online University for over 18 years. He innovated in his field by designing scenario- and video-based courses for self-paced learners. He spoke about the role of metaphors while communicating. A metaphor is a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things without using “like” or “as”. For example, “the mind is an ocean”. Organizational metaphors can help you define key aspects of a virtual university’s structure through figurative comparison.

Parallel Session: Let’s be FAIR: Open research and Open science

The session opened with Maje Miše, an archaeologist with has a strong research profile in both fieldwork excavations and laboratory analysis of material culture, specifically provenance and technology of ceramic materials. She underlined the importance of Open Science, and how much needs we have to make Science accessible to everyone. She then explained the concept of FAIR data. FAIR data must be:

• Findable, they need to be easily found
• Accessible, they need to be accessed by everyone
• Interoperable, they need to be integrated with other data
• Reusable, they need to be re-use

She then passed the screen to Mattias Björmalm, advisor for Research & Innovation at CESAER and an experienced scientist and policy professional, who explained the importance of giving the right to the author, and how the European Open Science Cloud is working in that direction.

He then quickly went through the following 6 points, that needs to be taken into consideration when it comes to Open Science:

1. Defend academic freedom and institution autonomy
2. Safeguard equality, diversity, and inclusion
3. Encourage cooperation amongst Members
4. Forster strategic partnerships
5. Balance “as open as possible and as closed as necessary”
6. Adopt a global perspective

The screen then moved to Marion Devouassoux, who works for the CERN and is a project analyst on several IT-related projects (co-)funded by the European Commission. She highlighted the need to develop a single European Market for research data and policies, and how the European Open Science Cloud is taking the challenge. There is the need to support Open science, and this means working on different aspects, ranging from policy, how to manage all the data, to the needs of having citation software, and other repositories where all the data can be stored accordingly.
She concluded her talk by underlining the efforts that the MCAA has made to support this platform.

Gareth O’Neil, principal consultant on Open Science at Technopolis group where he is currently working on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), concluded the session by explaining that Open Access data are not necessarily FAIR. There is the necessity to pay attention when it comes to data management, and it has to be taken seriously. FAIR data in fact is now mandatory, and data should be managed in this way. So, even universities and all the various institutions need to follow the requirements of FAIR data.
The problem with FAIR data is the amount of time that is needed to create them; time that researchers don’t have, as they want to publish as soon as possible.

Maja then opened a very interesting Q&A session, reading the questions coming up from the audience, which focussed mostly on how these data should be managed and how universities should train researchers to deal with their data.

Parallel Session: Reshaping doctoral training with MCAA’s OSCAR and OEduverse

This lecture was moderated by Dr. Christian Weber who’s a post-doc researcher with the Institute of Knowledge-Based Systems and Management (KBS & KM), University of Siegen, Germany. He is continuously researching the exploitation of evolving knowledge maps for industrial and educational digitization. The session focused on the importance of individually tailored doctoral training.

Dr. Weber opened the session and introduced OEduverse (summer school and in-person training) and OSCAR (online learning and mentoring). He discussed how OSCAR tries “to establish an open and personalized online training method of using goal setting and labour market information, to improve researchers’ mental wellbeing and career development. It provides an AI-based recommender system that recommends the right material for your current state of knowledge. It dynamically combines with online mentoring regarding mental health and career development and they are measuring its effectiveness.” The project is managed by Dr. Gábor.

• The purpose of these programs is to inform, discuss and seek feedback on training from doctoral students and for doctoral students.
• Feel free to submit your feedback by logging in to their Padlet page.
• He then advertised their upcoming summer school from June 21 — June 25, 2021.

The screen was then passed on to Dr. Mathias Schroijen who is a Co-coordinator for the mental health working group at Eurodoc and project leader for doctoral training and career development of early-career researchers (ECRs) at Université libre de Bruxelles. He focused on the importance of preparing young scientists for the role of teachers, leaders, and effective communicators using their training efforts. These efforts inculcate transferable skills which allow them to effectively bring their vision across the table and lead a team, in addition to technical skills they already possess. He talked about other neglected but very important skills such as mutual respect for people and, ability to inspire and encourage each other which comes from everyday practices, and how training centers and ECR community’s collaborative training networks mutually benefit from each other.

We then heard from Dr. Gábor Kismihók, who is the head of the Learning and Skills Analytics research Group at the Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover, Germany. He is the Chair of the Career Development Working Group at the Marie Curie Alumni Association. He also chairs the recently started COST Action on Researcher Mental Health. He raised key problems that the current academic skeleton faces with possible solutions:

• Sustainable career prospects
• Lack of career management services for ECRs
• Lack of emphasis on non-technical transferable skills.
• Nonavailability of networking options (particularly important for non-EU researchers)

Then to Dr. Sara Oroz who is a Counselling Psychologist & Postgraduate Liaison Student Counsellor at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She specializes in working with students supporting them to achieve mental wellbeing to reach their potential during their academic careers. She reiterated the importance of mental health in researchers. Then busted some myths related to the feeling of distress and imposter syndrome, stressed the importance of a support group, and discussed strategies to improve mental health using 6 steps:

• Avoid avoidance
• Recognize we are not alone
• Accept our feelings
• Do proactively things that can help
• Catch our self-critic
• Build supportive communities

She then passed the screen to Dr. Petra Ardai who is an artistic director at Amsterdam and Budapest-based art collective SPACE — Explorers of the Continuous Present. She talked about the importance of effective communication using fiction and storytelling, creating inclusive future scenarios and the importance of awareness that authentic narratives along with interactive and playful communication skills. She then shared keys to human-centered design in storytelling:

• Empathy
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test

The session was concluded with a final few minutes spent on the importance of transferable skills and the importance of a support group.

Parallel Session: Mental health and research careers: tips and tools

This session covered the topic of mental health in research careers providing tools and tips to achieve it. It was moderated by Stéphanie Gauttier, Assistant Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management and Chair of the Policy WG at the MCAA.

Hugh Kearns, Public Speaker at ThinkWell, started the session by sharing secrets on the care and maintenance of the supervisor. During his presentation, he strongly suggested having regularly and frequently scheduled meetings with their supervisor.

The next speaker was Scott Harrison, Chapter Chair at Germany MCAA, who talked about mobility, mental health, and integration. He mentioned his own experience and gave tips to the mobile researchers. He underlined the importance of getting informed about the new countries’ culture and policies and being flexible in our expectations.

As the next speaker, Darragh McCashin, Assistant Professor in Psychology at Dublin City University, agreed with previous talks and introduced the REFERENT program that was launched the last year by MCAA to provide early career researchers a mentor to be guided through their difficulties. He provided the key characteristics of mentor and mentee and answered the questions regarding how to join the program.

The session continued with a question from the moderator who asked if it is the researcher who is always responsible to face their own problems, why if they don’t have that mental energy to solve the issue? At this point, Lea Heckmann, Doctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Physics, answered: in the beginning, researchers need a lot of support, so the responsibility is more for a supervisor or any other part of the institute, not the researcher. Hugh Kearns agreed and added that at the beginning it is overwhelming for everybody especially if you change the country and culture.
Speakers then mentioned the adverse effect of stress and highlight the importance of connections and happiness.

The take-home message of the session was: Learn to know your supervisor, be flexible with new changes, try to take the time to connect to others and be aware that you can be successful and happy at the same time.

Parallel Session: Writing for the MCAA Newsletter and Blog

The workshop on writing for the MCAA newsletter and blog took a little bit of a different format, all participants joined in on zoom so they could workshop some ideas! Ruben Riosa (contributor extraordinaire to MCAA communication working group) hosted the session, joined by Gian-Maria Greco (Editor-in-Chief for the newsletter), Valerie Bentivegna (Chair of the communication working group and blog-person-in-charge), and Christina Makoundou (the inclusive language and images expert and member of the
Genders, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion workgroup).

Gian-Maria and Valerie took some moments to briefly introduce the newsletter and blog respectively, after which Christina took the floor and gave an overview on how to avoid discriminatory language. One key is to sometimes take some distance from the text, as to give yourself some space to spot issues!

The group then split into breakout rooms. In one room, Ruben led the participants through some editing exercises, while the other room had Christina zooming in on spotting discriminatory language. Halfway through, the rooms split to ensure that everyone got the full workshop experience.

After some final words back together in one room, they invited everyone to submit their work and contribute to the MCAA communication channels: news@mariecuriealumni.eu and blog@mariecuriealumni.eu.

The participants of the workshop

Keynote Lecture: Prof. Sunetra Gupta

Prof. Sunetra Gupta is a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford with an interest in infectious disease agents that are responsible for malaria, HIV, influenza, and bacterial meningitis. During her career, she has been awarded the Scientific Medal by the Zoological Society of London and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific research.

Apart from her highly successful scientific career, Prof. Gupta is also a successful novelist and a translator. Her novels in fact have been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and many other awards.

Valentina Ferro, the vice-chair of the MCAA, moderated the session. She opened the session by explaining how the MCAA tried to help researchers to cope with the effects of the pandemic. She underlined how the MCAA talked with policymakers, politicians, and many other organizations to try to support in the best way possible all the researchers.

Marina Rantanen Modéer, secretary of the MCAA, then introduced Prof. Gupta, who then started her talk on how to use mathematical models to understand epidemics.

During her talk, she underlined the importance of modelling and she explained that when it came to the Covid-19, we already had many models available that could have been adapted and be a good base layer to help us fighting the pandemic.

She also talked about how to use SIR model, which assigns the population into compartments with labels, for example, S, I, or R, (Susceptible, Infectious, or Recovered), and gave a brief overview of how different models were applied in the various countries all around the world, and how these models helped in supporting the decision of whether a lockdown was necessary or not.

Next, she focussed on one important aspect: What if immunity does not last forever? It is true that seasonal coronavirus protective immunity is short-lasting, but this doesn’t mean that herd immunity won’t be effective anymore; in fact, most of the time reinfection by a coronavirus won’t cause symptoms as severe as it could cause in the first infection. Around this topic, she presented various publications supporting this.

In the last part of her talk, she explained the importance of seasonality and she discussed whether these new variants could be dangerous and make the vaccine less efficient, and why is it so difficult to have a good vaccine for influenza compared to the measles: this is due to the fact that the influenza virus keeps changing year by year, and it’s not always easy to keep the same rhythm of the virus, whilst the measles virus remains pretty much the same.

While the session started with a little technical delay, it was a successful and inspiring talk.

Introduction and Welcome

Welcome to the 8th Marie Curie Alumni Association Annual Conference 2021, Research in the Time of Crisis.

Mostafa Moonir Shawrav, Chair of the Marie Curie Alumni Association since 2020, opened the session: How do we as a society have responded to current challenges?

Scientists have identified problems, created platforms for cooperative efforts, and developed vaccines thanks to joint processes with stakeholders. Nevertheless, scientists have faced numerous challenges. What are we doing to solve them? Is it enough? Each of us must work for our improvement and share general responsibility with all humanity.

In this sense, the MCAA is a unique platform that actively builds bridges, connects people and their expertise, and gives voice to the voiceless. Only then, we, as a community, can take a look at sustainability and openness as an integral part of the research. We must believe that we are gifted for something. So, believe in yourself, learn new skills, be the driving force, get involved in your community, and be aware.

We then heard from Mariya Gabriel, the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education, and Youth (2019–2024). She spoke about how hesearchers have proved how crucial collaborative work is to create and maintain a functional and healthy world. The MCAA has created real communities, supported open science, gave hope to many citizens, and created bridges across numerous disciplines.

The next speaker was Nicole Grobert, Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research focuses on the synthesis and development of new carbon-and non-carbon based nanomaterials. She spoke about how trust is the basis for society to properly function. Truthful relationships are based on trust. Moreover, research is based on trust, data sets, findings, and data that colleagues present. It is crucial to science advisors, policymakers, and society to develop trust among each other.

It is vital to communicate what we know and don´t know and be clear about what is uncertain. This will allow researchers and society to connect and collaborate. The pandemic has taught us how to communicate using virtual platforms and other technologies. But we need to find the balance between our research, our lives and focus on what is important, and thus build trust.

Last, we heard from Lidia BORRELL-DAMIÁN, the Secretary-General of Science Europe, an association that represents the interests of numerous public research organizations across Europe.

She spoke about cross-border collaboration, a key way to build capacity in less research-intensive regions, support researcher’s mobility, promote scientific excellence across Europe, and develop strategies and tools to support collaboration. Another strategy in the pandemic has been using open science to facilitate open access to research publications and sharing and re-using research data and ensure that research results and knowledge are freely accessible.

Finally, she focused on research culture, and how to develop a broader understanding of the research process, recognize and reward a wider range of contributors and skillsets and reinforce communication approaches between research and the general public. Society must understand that research processes naturally deal with uncertainty.

Meet the live-blog team:

• Valerie Bentivegna is a Science and Medical Writer, produces Geeky Comedy Shows in Seattle, and is Chair of the Communication Working Group of the Marie Curie Alumni Association.
  [personal blog, Twitter]
• Ruben Riosa is an animal nutritionist currently working as a PhD student at the University of Bonn/University of Glasgow, where he is part of the MSCA ITN project MANNA. His project focuses on dairy cow’s nutrition and physiology. In the MANNA network, he is also the Scientific copywriter. He is deeply interested in science communication.
  [LinkedIn, Twitter, personal website]
• Fatemeh Asgari completed her PhD in life sciences as part of ESR ITN project in 2020 at Humanitas Research Hospital, Italy. Currently she is doing a postdoc in San Raffaele Hospital. She is interested in science communication in the form of science writing and illustration.
  [LinkedIn, Twitter]
• Arturo Castro Nava is about to complete his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the DWI-Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen, Germany. He was part of the MSCA ITN “BIOGEL”, where he developed a light-modulated hydrogel to investigate how cells respond and behave in a dynamic microenvironment. He is passionate about science, volunteering work, and complementary/alternative medicine.
  [LinkedIn]
• Dr. Celia Arroyo-López has worked in the development of “green” strategies against gastrointestinal parasites in livestock. Later, she tested the biomedical applications of parasitic products as a therapy for autism.
  After years of labor abuses, she authored petition No 1132/2020 on the creation of a specific EU organ to prevent harassment in academia. Read about her work on stopbullyingresearch.wordpress.com.
  [LinkedIn, Twitter]
• Utkarsh Singh completed his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in 2018. He has worked as a Postdoc in the OPERA-Wireless Communications Group at Université libre de Bruxelles; and also in the AI Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Currently, he is working in Depsys SA (Switzerland) as a Marie-Curie Individual Fellow. His research interests include artificial intelligence, signal processing, and smart grid.
  [LinkedIn, Twitter]
• Ashish Avasthi is a Marie-Curie early-stage researcher (MSCA-COFUND) doing his PhD at Bionand in Malaga, Spain. His research is currently focused on molecular targeting of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) for early diagnosis and treatment using surface-functionalized nanoparticles. He likes to distribute his time between his varied interests of science, sports as well as writing.
  [LinkedIn, Twitter]