Category: European collaboration

Celebrating RIMO

It was a pleasure last month to join the Research Impact Management Office (RIMO) for their anniversary celebrations. RIMO has been going strong for ten years, more actually, and it certainly is a most interesting niche in the Imperial ecosystem. It was a happy occasion, then, as colleagues and friends gathered in the entrance foyer, over nibbles and fizz, to reflect on a decade of achievement.

If a really big grant starts to come your way, perhaps from the EU, all are agreed its best to get in touch with RIMO right away. That’s what I would do. At the party I met a few of RIMO’s scientist-partners.  Their message was: hook up with RIMO, they work away in the background, now you’ve got the time to do the science. Or, as RIMO’s website puts things, ‘[we are] a specialist team with project and communications expertise who support major international research collaborations. From financial and consortium management to communication plans and engagement events, the team provide a robust service to ensure academics can focus on the research.’

I’ve known RIMO’s energetic director, Dr Marta Archanco, for quite some time. And I’m familiar with her team, seven strong now. So I know that ‘research management’, noble though that term is, does not quite capture what Marta and her team have achieved. Of course RIMO will keep you on track as regards time strategy, comms facilitation, financial systems and more. And these are long-lasting commitments: Professor Mike Levin, of the Faculty of Medicine, has been collaborating with RIMO for ten years, with three successive projects. His DIAMOND project for example, funded to the tune of 22.5m euros, is developing techniques for rapid testing of infectious disease. Workflows like this are complex, filled with change of pace and deadlines, and fraught with responsibility. You need RIMO by your side.

Don’t imagine with RIMO that what you’re getting is simple efficiency, although you will get that precious commodity by the bucket. No, there is something else going on here, and this I know from many conversations with Marta. The ‘something more’, the added element of spirit, looks very like the topics that regularly come up in Good Science Project meetings. I’m talking about collegiality, security, conversation, pleasure in your work, and imagination. Don’t take my word for it: this description, written by Siobhan Markus, about the background to the anniversary celebration, and about the artwork we saw at that splendid party, gives the full story. Note the great phrase RIMO have adopted to describe their work: ‘Making Science Glow’.

Just yesterday I presented the briefest of descriptions of the Good Science Project – 5 minutes – to a Research England panel. How to capture three years’ work in 5 minutes? I would describe some of the Friday Forums, the Day of Doubt conference, our art projects, the Prism of Research conference. But could I find some concept, some element of science, that forms the background to all the work we have been doing, and continues to give it life? The element I chose was ‘ordinary daily scientific practice’: lab life, the time with colleagues and students, quietude in front of your screen, the routine. I admit the phrase ‘daily scientific practice’ hardly ignites the fireworks. But I pressed on, and to the RE panel I described the ordinary aspect of the life scientific as the gold dust, the hum, the place where the happiness resides. Naturally it is this background buzz of science, so constant as to be hardly noticeable, where you need to look, if you want to understand research culture. Don’t worry: if you keep humming the tune will emerge.

RIMO knows this well. Those myriad small matters of the research life, and the powerful forces of the big grant, allow no sloppy thinking. But nor are these ‘small matters’ the cogs of some tedious mechanism, controlling each day and forcing time to flow unnoticed. With the RIMO team, ‘making science glow’ springs from a passionate attention to detail, and a deep interest in the humanity of science. So, well done Marta, Siobhan, Maria, Ivana, Benjamin,  Mike, Ally and Harry. And here’s to the next, certainly wonderful, ten years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summer travels

 

Good science and the European dimension

British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has been travelling this week, aiming, as the media put it, to ‘re-set’ relations with Europe. The self-destructive act of Brexit, while not likely to be undone anytime soon, must plainly be mitigated if our new government is to see the economic growth that forms the basis of its plans.

 

A big headline this week, coming from Starmer, is that perhaps a European youth mobility scheme is back on the agenda. We all know it is important for young Europeans to experience life in another country. This is not migration. Let’s call it growing up, or simply growing a better world. In an interesting accident of timing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, that great poem to human unity, has just had its annual performance up the road from Imperial College, at the BBC Proms.

 

For the Good Science Project, the link between travel and science, between research and new perspectives, is endlessly interesting. Our first Friday Forum last year, titled Nauka Emigrantka, looked at the joys and the perils of migrating for your science. Chaired by science journalist Urszula Kaczorowska, a staffer at the Polish Press Agency, this was a fascinating panel discussion about the challenges a scientist faces, when they move their research to another country.

 

As the Good Science Project moves into its third year, I hope we can grow links with other European countries, and travel more,  both physically and intellectually. Certainly the desire to enhance research culture is not simply a British preoccupation. The distortions scientists sometimes suffer, from the competitive hunt for grants or from the insecurities of employment and publication, are found across the continent.

 

The Good Science Project in Krakow

Can we learn from our European colleagues, as we try to understand better the social, economic and political forces that impact on scientists? Last summer I co-directed, with Urszula Kaczorowska, a summer school in Krakow, at the invitation of the Jagiellonian University. We worked with social science doctoral students, nurturing the communication skills young academics need if they are to flourish. Because they were social science students, their research areas often touched on the fractured nature of European politics.

 

Each morning of the Summer School, Urszula probed the students’ research. What was their project? How does it work? Why does it matter? Listening to Urszula’s interviews I felt I was experiencing in real time the basic tenets of the Good Science Project: that when it comes to research we always will find that the character of the scientist – their persistence, their care, their ingenuity – has powerful relevance. So often, in laboratory life, the gaze turns exclusively to publications, grants won, and the frailties of collaboration. It was a great discovery too, to see how much the students enjoyed and benefited from those conversations with Urszula, feeling – rightly – that such supportive but critical scrutiny itself is a boon to their research. At the same time they were learning the best ways for academics and journalists to interact.

 

Thinking of that wonderful Summer School in Krakow, it is clear why Poland is a good country for a science communication partnership with Imperial College. Like the United Kingdom, a change of government in Poland has brought a sea-change in official attitudes to Europe and the EU. Today, from opposite ends of the continent we in the UK and colleagues in Poland look across at each other, and perceive in the land between us not zones of national fervour, but routes to a shared wealth. No doubt an element of that wealth will be the common benefit that good science brings.

 

In 2021 Imperial College signed an agreement – a Letter of Understanding – with four Polish Universities. Together we would explore ways of spurring on progress in science communication. The agreement was a success, with meetings in Poznan, Krakow and Warsaw. Back at Imperial, Gareth Mitchell, Urszula Kaczorowska and myself, looking for ways to capture good practice in science communication training, made the Minding Science podcasts. Meanwhile feelers are out also with the Medical University of Gdansk, the Pomeranian University of Słupsk and the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Let’s see what happens.

 

A philosophical epilogue

There are philosophical reasons too why those interested in innovation in science communication might be drawn to Poland and other Central European countries. For in this area of Europe, over the last 100 years, two vital philosophical developments gave us new ways to look at science. Interestingly, the two developments seem at odds with each other. On the one hand, partly in response to the programmes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, scientists, mathematicians and philosophers, many of them fleeing west, looked for ways of detaching science from society and from culture, so that research could never again be abused and shaped by dictators. Yet, on the other hand, our contemporary belief that science is inseparable from society also has origins in Poland and its neighbouring countries. Think of the Polish physician and microbiologist Ludwick Fleck (1896-1961), a survivor of Auschwitz, who argued that scientific facts take shape through the collective processes of belief and social interaction. For Fleck, scientific knowledge is as much social construction as it is the mechanical collection of data and the blunt comparison of theory. If Fleck is an obscure name to us today, his vast influence is obvious once we remember that his work was known to Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). Kuhn’s 1962 text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is today recognised as the epochal moment when science was pushed back into the embrace of society – sometimes an unwilling embrace, but an embrace nonetheless.

Another Central European philosopher-scientist, Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi (1861-1976), was also a forerunner of  Kuhn. In his 1958 book Personal Knowledge Polanyi wrote that scientific thought and practice are guided and even fixed by tacit understanding and by personal styles of thought and expression. These social and personal aspects of the scientific project, argued Polanyi, are central to scientific advance, but are not easily reduced to objective foundations of data gathering and theory testing.

These rich intellectual traditions of Poland and its neighbours, both pulling science into society, and also separating it from society, remain pressing and central tensions for science communicators. For it is science communicators who we rely upon to navigate a safe path through social issues as well as through scientific issues. Science journalists, in other words, are not simply transmitters of information, or informal educationalists. When they work properly, these communicators are agents of science-society enrichment, and are very much needed. Science communicators must continue to look across Europe, learning from each other, and developing their philosophical, social and technical understanding of the scientific world-view.