How the Around the World Webinar Series made the leap on diversity and inclusion within the Marie Curie Alumni Association
by Nicoleta Spînu
Joining the Communication Working Group of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) as a Vice-chair in 2021, I found out of many interesting projects that I could not have imagined prior. One of them planned to take off for quite some time was the Around the World Webinar Series. What was once an idea by Gledson Emidio, Ruben Riosa, and Gian Maria Greco, became a two-season series of webinars. I’m happy to share some insights and behind-the-scenes that will highlight the strong community the MCAA represents, and that I was lucky to experience for the past mandate of almost two years.
The aspiration behind this series is to bring researchers across the world together willing to share their experiences in order to learn from each. This aligns perfectly with MCAA’s values of encouraging networking and cooperation and providing support for career development opportunities to its members. On the other hand, the MCAA has lots of active members that volunteer their time to make projects like this one happen. We, at the Communication Working Group, noticed this effort and wanted to show appreciation by providing free monthly webinars on various topics to help advance the scientific career of its active members. The series was opened to the general public as well, with the recordings now being available on the MCAA YouTube channel. That is to be inclusive and share learnings and practices with any scientists independently of their career stage, background, or affiliations to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research programmes.
Meet the co-organisers
It was the COVID-19 pandemic, and we, at the Communication Working Group, aimed to turn it into an opportunity and make the most of such an unusual and painful period of time for scientists as well. It couldn’t have been a better way to make the MCAA members stay connected and spend time qualitatively even if online but that continued afterwards too.
By encouraging each Chapter or Working Group of the MCAA to take the lead in organising a webinar and/or choosing a topic and proposing invited speakers, we supported the organisation of the series with all the other logistics. The only requirement was that a webinar had to be informative and not self-promote the Chapter or Working Group.
This resulted in 19 episodes being co-organised by eight country-specific Chapters and three Working Groups during December 2021 — July 2023 as shown in the figure below. It covered five main themes such as research funding, career development, science communication, science policy, and entrepreneurship.
Some statistics about the series
At the time of writing, the MCAA Around the World Webinar Series was watched by over 17 thousand people on YouTube with an average participation of 50 members during the live sessions. The series was opened by the Brazil Chapter bringing experts to learn about CVs for non-academic jobs.
In order to show the variety of topics covered, the main themes were grouped into five categories, which allowed identifying science communication and career development being the most covered ones as part of the series.
The experience of the Spain-Portugal Chapter
This is what Joaquín Capablo, Chair of the Spain-Portugal Chapter shares with us:
For the webinar about science policy, we had some reflections in mind. How can we as scientists have an impact on the policy arena? How is the information transferred from the scientific community to policymakers? How do policymakers produce evidence-informed policies? And we knew the previous work of our guest speaker Chloe Hill. Chloe works at the interface of science and policy. Her experience working with both research and policy sectors allows her to effectively translate and disseminate scientific evidence to policymakers and facilitate activities that enable scientists and policymakers to exchange information. And she kindly accepted our proposal to be the speaker for the webinar.
About the SDGs of Agenda 2030, why bring the SDGs to this episode? We had the impression that these days you can find SDGs everywhere, for example, in press notes or in the evaluation of the impact of the research activities. “To which SDGs is this activity contributing?” is a recurrent question when disseminating the activities of any EU-funded project. Our objective from the Spain-Portugal Chapter with this webinar was therefore to offer the opportunity to learn a bit more about the SDGs, how, why, and where they were set, and how their actual implementation from international to local scale is being developed, with special focus on the citizen engagement on science and policy as a tool to achieve them. For that, we contacted Fermín Serrano, the current Commissioner for the Agenda 2030 of the Government of Aragon (since 2018) in Spain, who courteously agreed with us to be the speaker at this webinar in order to help us better understand them and to discover how he is coordinating all regional policies towards the SDGs. Furthermore, from his previous roles at the confluence of science, policy, society, innovation, and arts (with an extensive career in music, you can check it at https://ferminserrano.bandcamp.com/), he was in the position to shed also some light on the domain of social engagement (citizen science). And taking advantage of his artistic side, Fermín could also explain his perspective of bringing Art and Science together (a topic of high interest for the Spain-Portugal MCAA Chapter, in view of the Art & Science challenges organized by the Chapter in the last years — e.g. photography, short poetry, master-cooking, and anecdotes contests).
Personally, the experience of taking part in the organization of these webinars was great, with a very fluid and efficient collaboration with the Communication WG. Furthermore, I like a lot the complementary approach of writing the summary of the webinar at the MCAA post, so that the impact of the webinar can be higher (people could read it in less than 10 minutes and, if interested, view the webinar on the Youtube channel).
The experience of the Swiss Chapter
Theodota Lagouri, Chair of the Swiss Chapter, shares her thoughts with us:
The single criterion for the selection of the topics for both seminars was based on what would mostly interest and be relevant to young researchers concerning the development and sustainability of their careers.
In the first webinar, three talks were presented and discussed with the audience related to the topics of “Career Development and Research Funding”. Isabelle Spühler (EURESEARCH Office in Switzerland) in her talk gave us useful information on Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), European Research Council (ERC) grants and outlined the main points of Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) grants. Béla Z. Schmidt, author of the book ‘Career Advice for Young Scientists in Biomedical Research’ presented part of his book and shared his personal experience on how young Principal Investigators can choose and build their own research team. Finally, Christian Weber (Chair MCAA Research Funding WG) in his presentation gave us an overview of the actions and support that MCAA is providing, especially on the way the WG is helping researchers with grants applications and then enlightened us with new ideas on how young researchers can develop quality careers.
The second webinar focused on the topics of “Open access science policies and new research assessment practices for sustainable researchers’ careers”. Firstly, Giulia Malaguarnera (MCAA Secretary) introduced us to the importance of “Open Science Policies” for better quality of research. Then, Karen Stroobants (CoARA Vice-Chair) discussed “How research assessment reform can support more sustainable researchers’ careers” and explained to us the significant role of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. The following questions were addressed during the panel discussion: Which research assessment practices are appropriate for high-quality science and sustainable research careers? Which are the major reform changes in the existing research assessment scheme? Which are the issues in the reform implementation? What is the role of open science in science quality and research careers?
I’m very happy with my collaboration with the MCAA Communication WG not only in the organizational and promotional part prior to the webinars but also afterwards in the dissemination of the webinars’ outcomes.
The experience of the Middle East Chapter
The Middle East Chapter has co-organized, with the MCAA CommWG, the March episode of the MCAA Around the World webinar series — with the title: “Storytelling in Science”. Members of the chapter shared their thoughts with us:
The topic was chosen in two stages. First, we had a brainstorming to gather topics that could be interesting for researchers based on discussions with MCAA members and attended events. Then, the board members voted for the topic in particular. During the organizing of the webinar, the chapter’s board members shared the tasks and the communication was effective.
Organizing the webinar was a great and enjoyable experience. As researchers ourselves, it was very interesting and educating to learn about the different aspects related to the topic of “storytelling in science”. First, we started to create a list of potential speakers, they were chosen by searching online, based on previous “attended workshops”, as well as recommended by the MCAA CommWG.
We started to contact groups of speakers based on the characteristics of their expertise and interests. All potential speakers showed interest and enthusiasm to participate in the event. Some of them did not have the time for the defined time slot, and others were more interested in a different format or a longer event (e.g. full-day workshop) as they were professional trainers and had very structured materials. Some of them recommended us to contact other speakers. While talking to different potential speakers, we learned various aspects of the topic, so it was great to have two speakers (at the end); one talked about the “HOW to..” and highlighted practical tips to help scientists to communicate their research and results, while the other one talked about the importance and the significant impact of storytelling along with policy-making aspects. It is worth it to mention, that one of the main challenges in finding speakers, besides the time [most speakers have their calendars booked for three months in advance or so] and besides finding speakers with interests matching the topic, was that some of them required fees which can be considered “high” relatively to the budget of the Webinar. [P.S. Those fees are typical and ordinary, especially for a full training session, but not for the format of the Webinar].
It was super interesting during the Webinar, to see the wide spectrum of researchers who were/are interested in the topic, they come from different scientific backgrounds, they are in various stages of their research careers, they are in various locations, etc. On one hand, the feedback and the active interaction at the end of each session showed that the talks were really of high interest and beneficial to the attendees. On the other hand, we got great feedback from the speakers as well showing that they are more interested in participating in similar events and beyond with the MCAA.
Organizing the event was enjoyable and a great opportunity for growth and skills development. The experience was great, especially with the help of the CommWG, and the communication with various speakers who were professional on the topic and who offered future collaboration was productive. Thanks for the help and chance!
What the future holds
With the newly elected team taking over the CommWG during the next months, we hope for the Around the World Webinar Series to continue. Attention should be given to improving its quality by covering (other) topics of interest to the MCAA members, rigorously screening invited speakers and trainers, and promoting existing recorded webinars across the MCAA community on social media platforms and events. This series represents a unique opportunity to increase diversity within the MCAA by encouraging other Chapters and Working Groups to co-organize webinars.
We thank everyone who took the leap together with Ruben and me in making this series happen to bring (young) researchers together, learn from each other and from the best, and become a valuable community.
Nicoleta Spînu
Outgoing vice-chair, MCAA Communication Working Group
