How Can Connectivity Build Research Communities?

[Music] Fellowship. Fellowship means coming together, interacting, exchanging, growing together, and benefiting each other. You come together, you meet, and then you are coming with different backgrounds. You are coming with different ideas or expertise, but then when you come together, there should be an exchange. The goal of fellowship is exchange, exchange forward growth, exchange for improvement, for impact. Because if you come together and there is no exchange, then what is the purpose of coming together? So for me that is simply what I will define, fellowship or what I have seen, fellowships to be, and I say that from personal experience. [Music] I'm invited board now. Please have your passport and boarding card. [Music] [Music] This is We Are Fellowship. It's a podcast marking 30 years of the Marie Skodowsky Cure reactions. I'm Shane Bergen, I'm a physicist, a science communicator, and I'm also an MSCA alum. And in my experience, my fellowship was transformative in my career. It gave me a start. I learned about how to do research, but I also learned how to be a researcher, so to work with others. And since then, I've had the great pleasure of supporting other people, start their research careers, and I've even had the opportunity to work with the commission to advocate for better conditions for early career researchers. And I know that my story is just one of thousands amongst the 150,000 plus MSCA researchers. MSCA, of course, everyone thinks about it as something about moving countries, and it is about mobility. It also has the potential to be about moving disciplines, getting different perspectives on your area of interest, about kind of your ideas believing in yourself, but also building your career, getting going, springboard, a start, making connections. Connections are an essential component of being a researcher, and often it's something that we don't really hear that much about explicitly. We're told about patron disease and things that are very individual, but rarely are we taught or explicitly told how to make connections with other researchers. And I think it really matters. Researchers are looking at massive global issues at the moment that require a collective approach. The problems of our world don't fit into traditional disciplines, so it requires us being able to work together and think together. It also requires us to present ourselves as a unit, as a collective, because of the political uncertainty surrounding research, and the changing public relationship with expertise, and of course AI disruption on top of that. So having a team or a community of individually excellent people is great, but on its own it's just not enough. We really do need to develop our collective capacity, and that means collaboration, mutual support, challenging the cultures that we have at the moment that might be healthy, and also explicitly building our trustworthiness. And that's what this podcast is about. It's about conversations with current and former NSCA fellows, asking them about their work, but also asking them about their working lives, about what motivates them, about the challenges that they face, and the communities that they work in. After 30 years of supporting 150,000 plus researchers, this podcast is asking what has MSCA built? And it really is trying to get at the big question of what becomes possible when our collective of researchers sees itself as a community, as a fellowship, as something together. So in this episode of We Are Fellowship, it's all about making connections. We're looking at how people make connections with one another, with different disciplines, and of course with the communities that they work with and within. The core idea here is that researchers who can connect, either knowledge or know how, that they're really important, they're like the blue within a research community. We'll hear more about that later in the episode. But let me tell you about the people that I spoke to. I spoke to Karen Delevega Hernandez and the University of Toulouse, and Karen works with pharmaceutical drugs, and she works to modify them, so to see can she improve their function and make them safer rather than starting from scratch with new drugs. So we are always looking to make better versions of a medicine, and the problem is the synthesis, because taking a complex molecule and making many new versions similar, but new of that medicine requires a very long process or different methodologies, and the idea was to make a general tool, just one tool that you could plug into that medicine, and that will give you an entry point for doing many modifications. I spoke to Dietim Garder-Brue at Uppsala University, Dietim studies robots, and how they cooperate with one another, and how they can coexist and collaborate with humans. So I mean one example can be the automated warehouses that are filled with different type of boxes for us, and these boxes needs to be carried from one place to another place, but these some of these boxes are small, some of them are big, some needs a robotic arm to carry and pick and load them, and to be carried maybe you don't need a robotic arm to be still there, so we use only mobile robots that carry them, so different embodiments we call it different type of robots, with different functionalities and abilities. This is complex, no one wants to deal with that, what we do is and what about same type of robots, and that's an option surely, but like I want to stay with that complexity. I spoke with Angela Belia from the University of Palermo, she does really cool work with archaeology and sound, she looks at researching soundscape, sonic heritage, ancient music and performance. For example, I reconstructed musical instruments, a window musical instruments, dated to the 60th century BCE, found in a tomb, I reconstructed it, thanks to computer-taxia tomography, because this instrument was in bone, artisans used deer bones for this instrument, I printed a copy of this instrument, and musicians used my printed copy to test the sounds of this instrument. To read a hard work studies astronomy and culture using methods from anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies, as well as collaborations from across these disciplines. Up until about 1992, there was this field called archaeostronomy. It was sort of the umbrella term for people who looked at ancient sites and artifacts, and people who actually looked at people and their connection to the night sky, what they did in relation to the night sky, how they did images of the night sky, but then it became so connected to archaeology. So, you know, archaeostronomy archaeology, that they decided in the 1990s that a new name was needed. So, it became cultural astronomy, is the umbrella term, and then underneath it, you have basically three branches. One is ethno astronomy, which is you're studying live people. archaeo astronomy you're studying people and then history of astronomy where you're studying dead people who are scientists. I spoke with Sebastian Shastan from Glasgow, Caledonian, and Genti University. Sebastian brings together physics, physiotherapy, and public health. What a combination. As a practitioner, I kept saying the same people come into our physio practice, with the same ailments, for the same reasons. So there was something that was not right before the people kept coming into the door. And that's where public health comes in. You know, and that was very much around the effect of physical activity. It has a preventative measure to many, many ailments and injuries to health. So that's how I got involved into physical activity. And strangely, physics comes in because the behavior of people in terms of physical activity is incredibly not easy to predict but predictable from a physics point of view. Eric Gaba is somebody who uses human-centered design and co-creation in his research. He works specifically with disabled people in Ghana where he's using pineapple leaf fibers to build and create prosthetics. So Eric is not just interested in the materials component of this project but also in terms of the social acceptability and implementation of prosthetics in the real world. So he set up something called Smiles of Hope. It's a social enterprise to support amputees in Ghana. And I was really interested in speaking to Eric about how he marries the material science aspects of his work with the more social science aspects of his work. And what that means for fellowship in general. What have you learned that you might like to share with the MSCA community so that we can be better together? What I would want to pinpoint in the regard has to do with the fact that we need to come together, create that ecosystem of a talents and talents that are bonded, well-bonded, well-integrated and can, you know, address societal problems together from these, you know, different backgrounds of expertise. When put together, we can solve problems together because the MSCA pool is made up of expects from different backgrounds. But then we see that when they come together, then they can achieve a goal. They can achieve something tangible. Yes, I must say in this journey, I've interacted with other MLCs and all that. And we've had good fellowship, I must say. Some of the things that I'm doing now that the way my projects has evolved is because I have fellowshiped with these colleague MSCA's. I've seen what they are doing. They've made contributions to my work. I've also done contributions to their work. And it's been so beautiful because just by an individual, there's something that you can achieve. But then together, you see a broader picture. You actually leverage on the experience of your colleagues, not just yourself. So you can see the MSCA coming together as a pool of expertise, talents and experiences that can be used to fight societies, you know, problems and build something good. Would you like to see research being more open in general? You know, the story you describe both better together. I think it's very compelling, but would you like to see research, maybe the Marie Skadowski-Kuri community become more open so that we can engage meaningfully with those societal challenges? Yes, I very much look forward to that community of openness. For instance, I'm glad for, you know, platforms like this. And thank you very much for organizing this. In that through this, someone who gets to know, okay, there's something going on on this side. And you never know who may also be interested in or who may see, okay, there's something to do. As far as this gentleman's work, it's consent. That is it. Now, but then if we don't give, let me say visibility or we don't give the platform to the fellows, then it seems whatever that they do is just still under the, you know, the la Kava is just like how you come secretaries, men and women. So what is the essence of, you know, the impact of the fellowship? Yes, but then this is a community or a global, you know, enterprise. So it must address global issues, it must address societal issues and how can that be possible? When the fellowship becomes more open, people expect these are brought outside for, you know, the better use of the community and the society, that would be a good thing. Yeah, absolutely. The things that or how I've seen the pineapple idea, let's say 10 years ago, has actually evolved. Now, it is not just a project to improve, you know, sockets, it is a project that can also contribute to water with water management, okay, through using an eco-friendly material, which is lightwitch and can be, you know, it's eco-friendly and it can be integrated into the environment. So that is one aspect. I, through the fellowship and through exchange with people, I've not seen that, okay, these material that I started with, the prosthetic industry is just one aspect. There are a couple more areas that these can be applied to. So that is what the fellowship has actually, you know, brought for me that helped me to see that there is more to what I started with and it is through the interactions. Eric makes the point that the goal of fellowship is exchange and that's a global thing. So we have to be really conscious of making it as straightforward and as easy for people right around the world to be part of us. So I spoke to Karen Delevega Hernandez about just this. Karen is originally from Cuba, now working in Toulouse and I was really interested in learning about how she made the transition, how she has moved from place to place and what connections she has made or not made along the way. So this is the conversation I had with Karen about her illustrating, can you believe it's the front cover of an academic journal, the Journal of Chemical Education. I loved one of your recent posts where you spoke about honoring your roots while pushing boundaries and through the context you may recall of journal cover art that you produced. After it was very moving to look at us, were you drawing yourself or were you drawing another Latina person on the cover but it was very moving to see it and it's something you might imagine is not normal for us as scientists to do to have these expressions. Tell me, why did you do this? What was your driver? I think visibility because it is important that people know that depending on where you come from, you have other struggles behind the classical one let's say that you might think your students may have. Scientists, we are people and we have families and we have different cultures and we have different experiences and it's important sometimes for people to remember that like you are coming from maybe a place that you had a really tough time to get a visa, when for other people that might seem like something that is not even in their minds and a different language and that you're also representation of those people for your roots in a new place and that also gives you some sense of that you can feel proud of that to bring something new. Do you connect with other Latina scientists like is there a network or do you find that there's opportunity to support others that are maybe having a similar journey to yours? In my career in Europe it has been difficult to find that network because I have basically been always the only Latina scientists in my groups or even sometimes institute depending on where I have been. So sometimes that is something that is more complicated to build but it's something I would love to do in my independent career to try to support not just Latina like in general to have that kind of cultural sensitivity behind the scientist's part to realize that people have different backgrounds and they deserve as well an opportunity. to do research because most of the people that are living their houses to do research in another country is also a matter of resources in their home countries and it's not an easy decision to take so when they take it support them because they are doing it because they really want to do what they are doing. Karen talks about the importance of having networks to support global involvement in a fellowship and that's really important because exchange is the point is Eric Abbott said but it's also important for us to have mechanisms to work between our traditional disciplines and so I spoke to Deedham Garder-Brew about this and Deedham is somebody who's work combines robotics computer science engineering psychology all connected to this idea of human machine interactions. How does that work for you that that interdisciplinary space? How do you make that productive? I learned that if you have a well-defined question anyone from any discipline will be happy to listen you and if it is something that they know they will be able to or they will be fine to give their time to you to answer your that specific question but if you have an idea which is not shaped and asking someone's time which is very valuable research time especially in academia they will meet you once but it doesn't turn to a you know like a functioning beneficial collaboration so it takes this building these links are so much work in so many sense one like one should be very much enthusiastic about the problem love it take the risk of doing something interdisciplinary because we all know that it is not the most funded way of doing research either and then be able to understand both disciplines in some way to come up with that well-defined question so people can give their time with you and then funding surely how we are going to then fund this more people puts their time to work on that yeah it always strikes me that interdisciplinarity is something that everyone says we need but there are rarely structures in place that facilitated properly not least academic positions they all have to fit in a department and it can be very tricky to find an interdisciplinary role I wonder you've done a lot of interdisciplinary work do you feel that being open to changing personally is an important component to that in other words your perception of what it is to be an engineer that has to be open to change I agree with that for to some extent in a sense that I think a person should be able to see it first so and you can dedicate your time so there is a lot of personal dynamics and parameters that is in place I must admit I don't know how to do interdisciplinary research and that's the reality you know I mean sometimes for some times for some specific project and some specific task I have no and I find it interesting also and I have no problem to dive in and deal with mathematical complexity and algorithmic complexity of things and come up with ideas in that very you know domain specific boundaries and when I do it I love it also but the next day I want to go back to the big complex messy interdisciplinary problems because I want to make the world a better place that's the main thing that's the first thing that drives me and I don't see how I can do that without I can absolutely resonate with what Dean is saying about wanting to make the world a better place I think when researchers can find that gear it transforms the relationship that we can have with the societies we serve so thinking about how to do that is of crucial importance I spoke to Angela Belia about this and many other things she's somebody that works on music research and I as part of a long conversation about the universality of music as a language I asked her what she felt was important when it comes to really supporting fellowship so that it can continue to have amazing people that want to make the world a better place as a we celebrate 30 years of the Marie Skodowska reactions my effort hope is that the European Commission will commit to significantly increase the investment in this program and in the research programs in Europe we need more resources to ensure that new ideas a new way to and emerging researchers can refine their research paths not only to build a competitive Europe but also to build one that is deeply grounded in peace and solidarity I envision a scientific community that does not leave anyone behind we must create the conditions to improve the lives through sustainable energy a profound respect for nature and the protection of the health that hosts us and also the sounds of our common house Lucially science must work to bridge the gap with the global south offering everyone an opportunity for dignified life and the future filled with hope that to me is the true legacy of research and how researchers can improve the the future for our our life and also for Europe Angela's message of dignity and hope is wonderfully optimistic it's something that gives me the energy to do the work that I do from time to time but I think we should also be aware of coming to those making connections that are humble be it with other researchers who have been excluded from research or indeed other communities in any connection research and researchers need to be humble because we don't have a monopoly on ways of knowing and our existing research cultures are not fully set and that we have an awful lot to learn from communities of researchers who have been traditionally excluded from research so I spoke with a researcher Jorita Harbrooke who works in an area where there's absolutely tons of indigenous knowledge i.e. astronomy this is what we had to talk about and tell me about that African tradition that exists how how do communities and peoples in in Africa relate to the night sky and how does it differ maybe from other parts of the world? there's there's always two levels right they do the same things everybody else does and then there's things that are very specific to specific cultures and specific to certain regions right so it's like two levels of specificity but then there's the things that they do that everybody does so for example everybody will use the sky to determine agricultural activities so that's just like generally like okay we're going to we're going to look at the moon and determine when it's going to rain we're going to look at you know rainbows we're going to look at halos around the moon we're going to look at certain stars being in the sky certain stars not being in the sky so like stars enter like oh first time i see it on the eastern horizon after sunset or before sunrise and then when it leaves the night sky like okay now we don't see it at all of the night sky and until the next season comes around right so that's the thing that a lot of different cultures do around the world but the specific parts have to do with what observations are they making? so they're embedded in their own environment for example the Pleiades everyone thinks that Pleiades is sort of the calendar marker for so many cultures because it's beautiful it's easy to spot so some some cultures will wait until the Pleiades shows up And that will be like the beginning of their planting seasons. Sometimes the Pleiades have to be overhead at midnight, and that would be the beginning of their rainy or planting season. And sometimes it has to be visible just after sunset on the west horizon. And they'll say that's planting harvester or whatever. So they actually tailor, they may all be looking at the Pleiades, right? But the timing of what they're looking for has been correlated with what happens in their environment. So that is the general and the specific. - It strikes me that the night sky and the senses, given its universality, should belong to us all. But your experience as a student as an astrophysicist was that it was quite exclusionary. - Oh yeah. - Yeah, so like, is that historic? Is it cultural? Like what comes the basis of that exclusion? - There's many, many rude things that I could say about it. And yet, you know, I'm American. I'm African American. I am descended from slaves. My ancestors were denied access intentionally for a long, long time, right? But for me, I never felt like that was true, because I come from a wealthy family by my grandparents were professors. You know, like so academic to certain extent. You know, like I was on college campuses before I could walk. You know, I never saw myself as being outside of the mainstream, first mainstream American culture and mainstream academic culture. But in fact, I was perceived as something different. And so there was a mismatch between my image of myself and everybody else around me, image of what I should be, right? And so it definitely has historical roots, definitely. How do you feel about programs and initiatives that champion minoritized groups in areas like astrophysics? And I'm mindful of, I know the experience of many women in physics might be that they end up being on all the committees, or they're always on the poster that shows their institution to perhaps be more diverse than it may otherwise be. How do you feel? Are you comfortable with those? You think they're important? You think they maybe pushed the wrong way? What do you tell it's? Absolutely supportive. Absolutely. So I actually wrote two ERC advanced grants since my Mary Curie to make these programs more effective in astrophysics. So for both of those, sadly, I got to the interview stage, did the interview, and then they didn't give me the money, right? So I was like, no, twice, twice this happened. So I probably got it in me to do it one more time, one more time. And the thing about in astrophysics is I think, well, I'll just lay out how I think this is going, why I think I can do this better and get departments to do it better. So first of all, people are not on board on who their target are, right? Astrophysics is migrate all over the world. When they're thinking of underrepresented minorities, they may not match underrepresented minorities where they are located. So for example, when I'm here in Scotland, and whenever I'm talking to astrophysicists about their students, I always ask, are they Scottish, right? Because Edinburgh draws from all over the world. And so I would not say that Scottish students are underrepresented, but they're not the majority, right? I would have to actually go in and count and get the proportions to tell you if they're really underrepresented, but by far not the majority. So we have like here in the context of the United Kingdom, there's gypsy travelers as well, right? Which is a minority group that I had had no nothing about until I moved to the United Kingdom, right? So you have to be on board. Like you have to educate your faculty as to who are the minoritized individuals. And then you know what you're going for, right? So that's one thing. Another thing is that they need to know the history, right? They need to have an understanding of the history. And what is never considered is the resistance of the faculty to diversification. So clearly we have, as a community, as a fellowship, a long way to go when it comes to making our fellowship truly inclusive. Perhaps it's something we will have to do continuously. So fellowship is a global enterprise. It's one that has to bring and should bring together cultures from right around the world. We need clear questions that we can be passionate about and love indeed. We need to resonate and connect with our innate passions to make the world a better place. And in doing that, we need to ensure that we value existing and other ways of knowing and that we don't dominate conversations and shoulder out other perspectives. And all that's great. But of course, when we sit around the table, when we're at conferences, when we're at meetings, the big question is, how do we talk to each other? And perhaps a little bit more than that. How do we listen to one another? I spoke with Sebastian Shastan about this. I love the idea of being a polymath, right? It seems so optimistic and so much driven by your curiosity. But I wonder how you observe the various networks be it the physicists, the public health experts, the physiotherapists, how they will view this sort of interaction together. How do they compare as networks of people working together? That's the crux of the problem. It's actually getting them around the table, listening to each other. And that's why over the year we developed methodologies and ways of facilitating this. It's a lot of patience. It's a lot of really making the dialogue and the debate possible, breaking barriers, breaking jargon, I'll never add a center. We're always on a periphery of this, trying to facilitate this perverse. It takes time. We also takes the good methodologies. So tell me about that. What kind of things do you do to encourage people to find each other, reach consensus, listen, et cetera? It's not always about consensus. So the first thing is that is the clarity of purpose. That's the most important thing. The second thing is immersion. You have to put people in a room and get them sweating around the clarity of purpose. And then there's a whole host of methodology. I think we have around 716 methodologies in a metal picker. Somewhere that allows us to enable our collective intelligence. So in people kind of discover what they have in common, but also what they have as differences. So it's conflate and debate. It's about dissent and consent. And it's just constantly moving into about this. And knowing that people have very precisely different things to contribute to a co-creation of things. So this is the idea of critical reality. And it's knowing where your own expertise starts and where it stops. And when you need somebody, it's as bringing that humility in people, which is often quite difficult. And your topic fellowship is interesting because we spend a lot of time building the individual. Well, the work we do is trying to build a collective. Because science is made as a collective. It's a network. With this famous thing that's attributed to Newton, I think, standing in Los Angeles or giant. Actually, you stand in Los Angeles or a lot of people. We teach our fellows to actually say he's thank you to the cleaners and the porters in the university because they're just as important as, you know, they might have said something. They do something. You know, that will trigger something in science. And if we don't have that co-creation, without that collective intelligence, I think we're missing something. For a long time being a physicist was the most important thing I could do in academia. And whilst I loved it and still loved being a physicist, doing that on its own is really rather limited. Because I'm just looking at my own community and indeed just looking at myself. I found over the years that being part of a university is far more exciting because you get this rich tapestry of perspectives. And if your university is diverse and inclusive, then it's even better on that front. Connections are what make that possible for me. And I hope, and I look forward to doing. a lot more connecting in my career in the future. We are Fellowship is hosted by me Shane Bergen and produced by Shonen Mars. The podcast series is an initiative of the European Commission and is brought to you by Mary Skodoski Curie Actions, Europe's flagship funding program for excellent space research training.