Live from the MCAA Annual Conference (Saturday, March 6th)

Welcome to day 2 of our Annual Conference! You can catch up on yesterday’s jam-packed schedule here, and follow along with today’s updates right here on our live blog and on Twitter following the hashtag #MCAAConf2021.

*** This live blog was updated on March 6th 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***

Saturday, March 6 Overview:

• Virtual social event: entertainment and comedy
• Day 2 wrap up
• Parallel Sessions:
  Accessible communication in time of crisis
  Green Deal Research Charter Assessment in Global Pandemic times
  How to prepare a competitive ERC Grant Application
• Parallel Sessions From our Partners:
  Materials available for researchers from the Net4mobility+ project
  Inclusiveness and diversity in the academic workplace culture
  EIT
  Research and Careers in Baden Wuerttemberg, the German Southwest
• Keynote lecture: Tim Harford

Virtual Social Event

There’s no MCAA conference without some entertainment, whether it’s in person or virtual! This year’s Social Event saw some Science Comedy by Naomi Fitter, Jon the Robot, and Dr. Matthew Murtha, along with our very own version of a stay-at-home quiz. How many questions did you get right?

Just some snapshots, to remember it all by!

Wrap up day 2

Marina Rantanen Modéer, the secretary of the MCAA, wrapped up the day, by starting with the amazing story of Florence Nightingale described by Tim, and the importance of data visualisation and how to do it correctly. She then moved into describing the highlights of the various parallel sessions and our partners’ sessions, which you can now read directly in this blogpost thanks to the MCAA communication team.

Marina Rantanen Modéer wraps up the second day of the conference

Parallel Session: Accessible communication in time of crisis

Gian Maria Greco, Editor in Chief of the MCAA Newsletter, opened the session by explaining what Accessible communication means, and what should be done to improve it. He then quoted:

“We may tend to perceive crisis situation as something that doesn’t concern us. In reality, the pandemic displayed that we are all at risk and we are all vulnerable.”

At the end of his introduction, he highlighted the discussion points of the talk.

He then passed the screen to co-moderator Agnieszka Szarkowska, who took the lead of the session and presented the speakers who will take part in the discussion. Agnieszka is a University Professor at AVT Lab, University of Warsaw, and a former MSCA Fellow at UCL. She is a researcher, academic teacher, ex-translator, and translator trainer.

The first panelist was Sharon O’Brien, Professor of Translation Studies in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland, where she teaches translation technology, localisation, and research methods, among other topics. In addition, she acts as Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science. She began her talk by the importance of translations to enable better access to communication, as we are living in a very multicultural and multilingual world. She then underlined how difficult is to use and adapt machine translations, especially in risk areas, or where the fund availability is limited. Then she moved on to discuss whether it would be ethical or not to have translators or to use machine translation during a crisis. To solve this problem, they tried to come up with policy recommendations, and they published as well chapters in books and articles, which could have had an impact on society.

The second speaker was Marcie Roth, Executive Director & CEO for the World Institute on Disability, one of the first global disability rights organizations founded & continually led by people with disabilities. She opened her talk by explaining what the World Institute on Disability does and which are the key principles the institute is based on. She continued explaining how, according to the United Nations, “children and adults with disabilities and older adults are 2–4 times more likely to be injured or die in a disaster.” And she underlined how this happens mostly due to the lack of plans and accessible communication.

Marcie then continued by giving out some key principles for accessible disaster communication:

• Accessible disaster facilities and services
• Accessible response communications and assistance
• Accessible and reliable relief and recovery communications
• Partnerships with the disability community
• Disaster preparation, education, and training
• Partnerships with the Media
• Universal design and implementation strategies

The third speaker, Łukasz Dutka is an expert in media accessibility, a member of the Management Board of Dostepni.EU (www.dostepni.eu), an accessibility services provider based in Poland, as well as the Board of Directors of the Global Alliance of Speech-to-text Captioning (www.speechtotextcaptioning.org), a US-based advocacy group. He gave multiple examples on how, most of the time, the tv broadcasters are not good enough when it comes to providing accessible messaging to the public. He underlined that subtitles are not always enough, but there is the need to display a sign-language interpreter as well in public messaging; this person must be well visible, not as big as a stamp, or, as he showed on a slide, as big as a piece of toilet paper.

On this picture, he then added that “pretended accessibility is shitty accessibility,” and there is the need to take this topic seriously, and that there is the need to raise awareness. All of us can contribute, by:

• pushing to increase and improve the research on accessibility;
• make sure we communicate our results in different forms, making them accessible to everyone;
• raise awareness within our institutions, colleagues, and so on.

The last speaker, Gion Linder, from the European Broadcasting Union, partly disagreed with Łukasz, and underlined that many television channels adapted and improved their accessibility, especially after the pandemic, and that more has been done; stating that nowadays there is more awareness about this topic.

A very vivid and interesting Q&A session continued and closed the session.

Parallel Session: Green Deal Research Charter Assessment in Global Pandemic times

This session was moderated by Lidia-Natalia Trusilewicz.

Susanne Schödel addressed Green deal calls “experiences from area 9.1 related to the European research infrastructures” capacities and services implementation to support the European leadership in clean energy, research infrastructures for gases observation, and the air quality. She noted the number of submitted applications for area 9.1, remarking ICOS (Integrated Carbon Oxidation SYSTEM) with Munich/Zurich and Paris as a case study.

Dariusz Szwed explained the green adjustment needed to cope with beings’ needs, from an ecological perspective. The Green Deal’s new paradigms were defined upon the Doughnut economic model: energy efficiency, more participation of citizens, energy democratization, “presuming” rather than consuming, more EU funds for decarbonizing and protecting the climate. He also mentioned some local green initiatives (e.g: European climate pact, Horizon, etc).

Pedro Pinto, the co-founder of start-up Fibersail, described technological initiatives to implement off-shore wind turbines and blades efficiency, and resistance using sensors. This technology has increased wind turbines’ resistance and life span.

Lastly, Lidia-Natalia Trusilewicz described her Ph.D. experience in the technology of concrete and methods to assess quality according to the quality control European criteria EN 450. Waste stream products were also mentioned for their technological applications for cement. About Coal mines, she enhanced the need for dialogue to bring a solution to the coal energy industry and market. She also commented on Science Policy for an EU Green Deal.

The take-home messages of the session were:

• The need for the reinvention of the infrastructures, reconstruction of the EU, and transnational democracy.
• Redefine our relation with nature, climate catastrophes associated with humans, redefine our critical situation and our bonds with nature.
• Finding people living also according to this model of life.
• More education is needed to understand the seriousness of the green challenges.

Parallel Session: How to prepare a competitive ERC Grant Application

Irene Castellano Pellicena was the organizer of this session. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the University Bradford in 2017, after having completed her European Industrial Doctoral (EID) Training program.

The first panelist was Per Magnus Kommandantvold, special adviser in the Open Researcher Arena department at The Research Council of Norway. He discussed the ERC Proposal Structure, giving an overview of all parts: 1-Stage Submission (Part A) and 2-Stage Evaluation (Part B1-B2).

Part A (Administrative forms & abstract) of an ERC proposal, should contain general information, information about the research participants, details on budget and resources, and a section on ethics and security. In part B1 (Proposal overview and PI track record), there are 4 parts: the cover page and abstract, an extended synopsis, the PIs CV, and the PIs track record. Part B2 covers the detailed research proposal, covering state of the art in the field, objectives, and the proposed methodology.

Next, he covered the evaluation criteria. The research project is evaluated on its ground-breaking nature, ambition, and feasibility; while the principal investigator is judged on their intellectual capacity and creativity.

The second speaker was Hansong Ma, group leader at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, who went over some key steps she took in preparing for an application:

Step 1: Writing the application — her main challenge in this step is that the application is a lengthy document, and the ERC submission system was quite complex.

Step 2: Interview preparation and delivery — candidates receive 3-month notice for the interview, during which time she read the reviewer’s comments and speculated a few questions from the panel members, whom she tried to guess beforehand. Her experience of the interview process was rather stressful. It’s important to keep on time for the presentation. During the question round, there were two main questioners with 6–10 questions.

She concluded her talk with some personal tips:

• During the application preparation, don’t be afraid to submit the application! Try to balance risks with feasibility and make sure your application is easy to follow for reviewers.
• During the interview, be sure to have what you want to say during the presentation (10 min) memorized. During the question round, keep short and concise answers. When you prepare your slides, keep both expert and non-experts in the field in mind. Finally, show your passion during the examination!
• After the interview, use the reviewer´s comments to improve your application for the next round

Next up was Peter Kennedy, Professor of Microelectronic Engineering and Head of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University College Dublin, who went into the players in the ERC game.

First, there is you, you need to sell yourself! Then there is the secretariat and Panel Chair, whose role is to make it easy for the committee to assign the proposal to the relevant panel members. The Panel Chair and Panel Members address important challenges, objectives beyond the state of the art, high risk/high gain, and feasibility.

These are some Key Points:

• Pick the appropriate panel and tease them with your idea
• Ability to propose ground-breaking research
• Evidence of creative independent thinking
• Make it easy for the panelist to pick appropriate experts to review your proposal
• Use a sans serif rather than a serif font (Arial than Times Roman)

Final panelist to speak was Ken Wolfe, Professor of Genomic Evolution at the Conway Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland. He discussed what ERC evaluators are looking for?

1. Your idea must be high risk/high gain, imaginative, and unconventional
2. The abstract is crucial
3. Use subtitles such as “Important Challenges,” “Going beyond the state of the art,” and “High risk/high gain”

One final useful tip: All ERC panel have the same success rate à Success rate = #Awards / #Proposals

From our Partners: Materials available for researchers from the Net4mobility+ project: how to use them and thoughts for the future.

This session was moderated by Cristina Gómez, who also participated in the session as a speaker together with: Anna Wiśniewska, Nora Jeney, and Juliane Sauer. The session covered the tools, activities, and services provided by the Net4mobility+ project.

Net4mobility+ project is a European transnational project to empower the National Contract Points (NCPs) networking for Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. It also provides support for researchers interested in MSCA applications from different perspectives, and also increases the participation of low research and innovation performing’ or ‘Widening’ countries to attract researchers.

MCAA partner Net4Mobility+, a network of National Contact Points (NCP) of MSCA shared their valuable experience on how to take advantage of services provided by them.

They strongly feel that there is a need to continue in the next project many of the activities, materials, like handbooks, call statistics, etc that were shown and have been made available in the framework of Net4mobility+ project. Those were appreciated by the research community and useful in many aspects.

For the new NCP project that would run in Horizon Europe, attendees commented that strategic approaches such as Green Deal and sustainability, in general, will need to be taken into account. Supporting Widening countries seems to be an action that would need to be kept, maybe the nature of the activities could be modified. Statistics and useful information on data participation are also welcome. Specific webinars on horizontal issues such as DMP and Communication would be good too.

The take-home messages of this session were that the Net4mobility+ project:

• provides guides for applicants, webinars, and HANDBOOKS to support researchers and institutions and researchers from the “widening countries” to elaborate high quality of the MSCA proposals;
• elaborates and share graphs and statistic of MSCA H2020, and launch surveys to implement NCPs effectiveness, and adjust their initiatives.
• collects and share stories of success written by MSCA fellows or successful organizations (ITN, IF, RISE, CONFUND);
• enhances the attractiveness of widening countries as potential MSCA host, with promotion kits, and guidelines to attract researchers;
• provides guidelines for implementing collaborations with researchers networks.

From our Partners: Inclusiveness and diversity in the academic workplace culture

The objective of this session was to highlight the problems (and how to deal with them) in academia related to gender bias, mental stress, inclusiveness, and diversity.

Matthias Girod, who is the Secretary-General of Euroscience as well as Project and Policy Officer for the Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium (CERIC) moderated the session and introduced us to some of the problems in Academia.

He then passed the screen to Dr. Brian Cahill, who works in the Learning and Skills Analytics Lab of Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology in Hannover as Grant Manager of the COST Action on Researchers’ mental health. He is a member of the Governing Board of EuroScience.

Dr. Cahill introduced us to the inclusivity programs available, backed by MCAA & MSCA such as BRiDGE II, science4refugees, Inspireurope, Scholarsatrisk network along with the program for the mental health of researchers — ReMO. He talked about the task force on refugee education and challenges faced by researchers in the long run and addressed the issue of mental health in researchers. He then highlighted the importance of career counselling for researchers interested in both academic and non-academic researchers and showed data related to how COVID-19 has impacted early career researchers. To conclude, he introduced Referent program funded by MCAA to improve mental health of researchers.

The screen was then passed to Dr. Magdalini Theodoridou, who is the Chair of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) Genders, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion-GEDI Working Group (2018-present) advocating for Equity Diversity and Inclusion and bringing GEDI closer to its goals of promoting a responsible and ethical research environment. She addressed issues related to and diversity issues while introducing GEDI which focusses on eliminating discrimination and homophobia, and showed work in progress includes receiving feedback from researchers. She ended her talk by sharing some upcoming events — Researchers at risk (March 25,2021), Families and mobility (April 15, 2021), Fairness in Artificial intelligence (May 2021). You can contact GEDI — GEDI@maricuriealumni.eu or @gedi_mcaa on Twitter

Dr. Jörg Müller then took the screen. He is a Senior Researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3 — UOC) in Barcelona, Spain where he forms part of the gender and ICT research program. He is currently coordinating the ACT project on Communities of Practice to accelerate institutional change on gender equality in the European Research Area. He talked about gender equality across different organizations and stressed its importance while telling us about his current projects. Having a good team is the key to research and, communication and diversity is the key to have a good working team. Psychological safety (to look vulnerable in a group)is the most important aspect of maintaining a functional team.

The moderator then opened the discussion with a question focusing on concrete actions to address inequality.

Key takeaways:

• The top tip to create an inclusive environment requires a clear commitment from top authorities in institutions and availability of proper training to people.
• If you can’t be yourself in a team, you need to talk to your peers or supervisors.
• If you feel or see something wrong being done to you or your colleagues, SPEAK UP!!

From our Partners: EIT

The moderator, Sara Ricardo, started the session with an introduction of the panel and how the session aims to merge the network of researchers & entrepreneurs. The focus was on how to turn your idea into a project and how to stay motivated during the process. She took up some initial questions from the audience to start with. Some were interested to enhance their skills and know-how to go through the transition from an academic career to an industrial one?

Sara then provided an introduction to the EIT (European Institute of Innovation and Technology) and how it forms dynamics between cross-border communities. She highlighted EITs association with MCAA because of its multicultural and innovative network.

The first panel speaker, Chaitanya Dhumasker, started with his idea about the depletion of fishes from fish farms. He emphasized the need to pay attention to fish farms and helping farmers in maintenance. He started his company with the basic idea of using AI in fish farms. They used sensors and cameras to monitor the quantity and condition of fishes. He emphasized believing in your idea, having a supportive team, being calm through the challenges, long-term vision, and being focused on learning rather than financial gains. Chaitanya emphasized taking the value out of collected data in the case of data-oriented startups.

Next, Dorine Duives spoke about how her role as assistant professor led her to focus on crowds and public events. She noticed we always have a hunch about crowd flows but there is a lack of systems that can actually monitor crowd dynamics. This idea led her to be the CTO at City Analytics which started monitoring music festivals and public events for crowd monitoring. She also shared her experience on how the project was about to go on the ‘Proverbial Shelf’, but she believed in her idea and found relevance through a global focus on crowd monitoring. Crowd Analytics became even more relevant during COVID times when monitoring crowd density became most important. Keeping the scalability and privacy aspects in mind is necessary according to her in such startups.

Sara concluded the session with a panel discussion where Chaitanya & Dorine shared some more insights. According to them, money should be the last point of focus. One should have a long-term vision and be aware of legal requirements. If you are working in a University, Technology Transfer Office is a good first point of contact where you can get guidance on product development.

Finally, both panelists shared their concluding remarks. Dorine told the attendees to always remain investigative, dare to dream (big), be proactive and persistent, and to find support a.s.a.p. Chaitanya said that it all starts from an idea, believe in yours; to be crazy, not afraid; and to learn from your experiences, don’t repeat your mistakes!

From our Partners: Research and Careers in Baden Württemberg, the German Southwest

Donata Iandolo, MCAA ordinary board member, briefly introduced Württemberg Research and Careers center. Next we heard from Hai Sun. He described the multiple Universities and research institutions that are present in the area and in which you can definitely think to have a career.

To conclude, he made an easy guide on how to find a career in 3 simple steps:

• Find out about the wide range of institutions and research possibility
• Choose your path to start your academic career
• Find out about funding to have financial security

The session ended with a brief Q&A session and for more information visit the website https://www.bw-i.de/impressum, and don’t forget to meet Han and his team in the dedicated Exhibitors area.

Keynote lecture: Tim Harford

Tim Harford is a world-renowned behavioural economist, an award-winning
Financial Times columnist, data detective, and BBC broadcaster. Described as ‘Britain’s Malcolm Gladwell’ (and as ‘a genius at telling stories that illuminate our world’ by Gladwell himself) and by the New Statesman as ‘perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world’, Tim brings storytelling, humour, and intelligence to the world of data and statistics.

His first two books, The Logic of Life and The Undercover Economist, have been translated into 30 languages, with the latter title selling almost two million copies. Moreover, he is a regular TED speaker and his accessible, easy style provides entertaining, thought-provoking insights relevant to every person and organisation.

The session started with a brief introduction by Valentina Ferro, vice-chair of the MCAA. Then Tim took the screen, starting his talk by talking in detail about one chapter of his last book, focussed on the story of Florence Nightingale, known as the Lady with a Lamp, who was an English social reformer, statistician, and the founder of modern nursing.

During his talk, he focussed on the importance role Florence Nightingale played when it came to communication. She was in fact the very first person who tried to communicate and represent the situation of the hospital during the war, by creating a graph showing the number of deaths during the war, and the causes of death.

He then underlined the importance of the data representation, and how persuasive a graph can be, compared to a written report, even today, when we are living in a world in which most of the data are reported graphically. However, this can be problematic. In fact, he underlined that, on average, the time a person takes to react to a figure is half a second, which is definitely not enough to properly interpret a graph in the correct way.

Another problem related to graphical representations of data, is that they are indeed persuasive, and he underlined how fast bad information can be intended as true, and thus, spread all over social media in a very quick time. He gave an example of a recent graph on Covid-19 which became very popular, even though it was misleading.

After his talk, Valentina opened the Q&A session, and she asked him an opinion on the making of the data accessible to the audience. She gave the example that Florence Nightingale was targeting the high members of society to spread her findings and that today, scientists also need to share the results with politicians and other powerful figures, but they also have the need to share their data with the general public. So, how can we make sure that we are passing the right message?

To answer this, Tim underlined the importance of the three Cs, both in reading, and creating a graph:

• Calm: when we analyse a graph we need to be calm; we can’t be angry at first sight, we need to properly analyse what we are looking at, in a sort of neutral way;
• Context: we need to look at a graph in its context. We can’t take it out, it would lose its meaning;
• Curiosity: we need to be curious, we want to understand that graph, and thus, we need to be curious to carefully look at it.

To conclude the session, Valentina asked him a couple of questions from the audience, and then she ended the session by thanking Tim for the inspirational talk.

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 the 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]