All language subtitles for [SubtitleTools.com] 15. Enago_presentation_ Prof. Richard de Grijs and Darrel .srt (1)

Welcome back to #SeeTheFuture 2021.

I'm Darrel Gunter
and it's my pleasure to

introduce you to our
next keynote speaker.

Earlier, our keynote speaker, Randy
Schekman[ph], described the importance

of collaboration and openness in
basic science and research publication.

Our next session is going to delve
further by addressing the topic of the

future for international research
collaboration in the post-COVID era.

The speaker for this session is
Richard de Grijs, professor in the

Department of Physics and Astronomy
at Macquarie University, Australia.

Richard is an acclaimed
academic and journal editor with

more than 25 years' experience
in the physical sciences.

In March 2018, he joined
Macquarie University as

Associate Dean of global
engagement between 2006 and 2008.

Richard served as a scientific
editor at the Astrophysical Journal,

and later as deputy editor of
the Astrophysical Journal letters.

He has received numerous
awards from such prestigious

organ izations as the
Australian Academy of Science,

and from the University of
Canterbury in New Zealand.

Richard was the
founding director of the

East Asian office of
astronomy for development.

His current senior appointment
include roles as a senior adviser

to the Australian Government on
the Australia Awards in Indonesia.

As a member of the
advisory board of the Australia

China Consortium for
astrophysical research,

and as president of a division of
the International Astronomical Union.

Please use the chat
box to reach out to other

delegates and to the
conference organizers.

Don't forget that if you
have any questions for

Richard, please post them
in the Q&A box on this page.

All responses will be
published and see the

future conference report
after the conference.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further
ado, here is Professor Richard de Grijs.

Professor!

Good day, everyone.

I would like to
thank Enago for their

invitation to speak at
this conference today.

It is customary that speakers
from Australia acknowledged the

traditional custodians of the
lands from which they are speaking.

Prior to the arrival of the
first British settlers in 1788,

this continent was
covered by some 500

nations of Aboriginals
and Torres Strait Islanders.

I therefore pay my respects to
the elders, past and presence,

of the Bongo clan of the Eora
nation on whose land I am based.

I also welcome
indigenous attendees from

anywhere in the world
to this presentation.

International research collaboration
in a post-pandemic worlds

will become even more important
than it was prior to the pandemic.

If you look at the graph
on the left of the screen,

we see that over the past two
decades, international research

collaboration has increased
by almost a factor of two,

that is shown by the red line
at the top where we see the

proportion of papers co-authored
by international co-authors.

The blue line at the bottom
shows up collaborations with three

or more countries more than
doubles during the same time periods.

And so, in the words of
Magdalena Skipper, Editor in Chief of

Nature, science lies at the heart
of solutions to important problems.

And at the moment of course, there
is no problem more important than

solving the coronavirus pandemic so
that we can go back to our normal life.

International collaboration
during the pandemic was curtailed

to some extent by travel
restrictions and border closures.

But our newly digitized worlds
has given rise to an increase

of an acceleration of
international research collaboration.

Because we needed
to combine the efforts

of scientists working in
a wide variety of fields,

from basic virus biology to
help us understand the problem,

to rapid epidemiological
data sharing so that

we understood how fast
the virus was transmitted.

And the transmissibility of the

Coronavirus, particularly
the early viruses,

is anywhere between
influenza, the flu and measles,

the Delta variant might
actually transmit more quickly.

Once we understood that,
other teams of scientists worked

on genome sequencing at
scale and at very rapid pace,

results of which they
make public almost

immediately to the rest
of the scientific community,

so that we understood that we were
actually dealing with the Coronavirus.

And once that was understood,
lots of teams of scientists

all over the world worked
on vaccine development.

And so now we have a number of
viable vaccines that were developed in

rapid time, an order of magnitude
faster than prior to the pandemic.

So, international
collaboration has been

very important in
tackling the current crisis.

In the words of Gabriel Leung, Dean
of Medicine of Hong Kong University,

everyone who has
some expertise has

dropped everything to
work on solving the problem,

and everybody here means
molecular biologists, epidemiologists,

clinicians, social scientists,
engineers, material scientists,

and a whole slew of other professions.

So, in essence, we
needed interdisciplinarity.

And really what we needed was a step
change in interdisciplinary approaches.

From pathogen identification
which requires expertise

in epidemiology and
virology to virus screening,

which requires imaging and genetic
expertise to vaccine development,

where biomedicine
and molecular biology

played important roles to
diagnosis and therapeutics,

of course, led by clinical
medicine and pharmacology.

But if you look forward to the
next, let's say decade or so,

Coronavirus is not the only
global risk that we are dealing with.

From the World Economic
Forum's global risks report 2021,

you can see here at the top of
the screen what the most likely

global risks are going forward
from 2021, also in the last few years.

And at the bottom of the
screen, they're ranked by

impact and you can see
there is a lot of green here.

And all of that green relates to
environmental factors to some extent,

extreme weather, climate
action, failure, human

environmental damage,
biodiversity loss, etc.

And of course, in the
last few years, infectious

diseases, the Coronavirus
have also come to the fore.

All of these future crisis require
mitigation, and for that mitigation

to be successful, interdisciplinary
approaches are essential,

pressing global challenges
from the climate emergency to

biodiversity loss from food
security to future global health,

from education to justice and
poverty alleviation will all require

cross discipline and cross sector
approaches on a global scale.

The world needs solutions
to pressing global challenges

if we are to prosper in
a post-pandemic future.

And this was very well voiced by the UK
science minister Amanda Solloway recently,

who said this pandemic
is demonstrated the urgent

need to work together to
tackle common challenges.

From genomic sequencing to vaccines,

our scientists and researchers
have achieved far more working

across borders than they would
have been able to do alone.

Now of course, there are a lot
of challenges associated with

international collaboration, but
there are many opportunities as well.

So, let us consider some of
the challenges and opportunities.

First, of course, practical
impediments imply that scientists have

not been able to travel as much as
they used to prior to the pandemic.

Border closures
prevent early career

researchers from building
up face to face networks,

and that might be
devastating to some extent

later on in their career,
so they need to catch up.

Border closures and travel restrictions
have interrupted fieldwork, which

might have led to gaps in long
term data sets, longitudinal data sets,

or even the loss of entire
experiments or research programs.

Again, early career researchers
have lacked opportunities,

to gain the skills and
experience they need to

become the future experts
the world will depend on.

And then of course, from a policy
perspective, a long time before the

pandemic hit, we already saw trends
and tendencies towards isolationism.

In the past few years, the
worsening geopolitical tensions

between, for instance, the
United States and China,

have only contributed to further
isolationism in some sectors.

Numerous countries have passed
foreign interference legislation, the

United States being one of them,
but the UK and Australia as well.

And again, that might stifle
international collaborations.

Brexit hasn't helped the UK.

Many British scientists have been
excluded from European collaborations,

simply because of Brexit and the

uncertainty surrounding
funding of their projects.

And similarly, Swiss nationals
or Swiss scientists based at Swiss

institutions have been excluded from
horizon 2020 European Union programs,

because the Swiss government
and the European Union are at

loggerheads in terms of negotiating
a new Association agreements.

So, these are major challenges, but we
can overcome them if we work together.

There are many
opportunities as well, perhaps

opportunities you may
not have considered.

Given that everything these days
is online, we use zoom, we use

Google Meet, we use a whole variety
of digital means of communication,

rebalancing of the north-south
imbalance to lateral virtual,

collaboration is possible now at
any stage of a research project.

Gone are hopefully the days of
helicopter science, when northern or

Western scientists would parachute
into southern research environments,

do their research and
disappear again, without

hardly any collaboration
with Southern scientists.

There are numerous
opportunities now for the

global south, including
south-south collaborations.

Digital means of collaboration
provide us with additional transparency,

visibility and representation
of everyone involved

at any stage of a project,
a major opportunity.

Remote participation
and also opportunities

for education are now
coming within reach,

to those for whom it would
otherwise have been prohibitively

expensive in terms of travel
expenses, accommodation and the like.

And some countries even have seen
positive brain gains of diaspora scientists

returning from western and northern
countries home to the global south.

And so there are some unexpected
advantages of the current situation.

If we now look at international
collaboration over the last year or so,

this graph on the left shows
you the number of international

collaborators on COVID-19-related
papers during the year of 2020,

from January through to December.

And you can see that if you
look at the orange line, initially,

international collaboration on
COVID-19 papers was a lot higher,

in terms of the
fractional contribution of

international teams
than for standard science.

But that, of course,
tapered off after a while.

Interestingly, if we look at the smaller
graph on the right, during the pandemic,

scientists from China
were involved almost

twice as frequently
on Coronavirus papers,

particularly in the early days than
they were prior to the pandemic.

And this is of course, due
to the fact that the COVID-19

Coronavirus was first
reported in China in late 2019.

Now, this is all good
and well, and I am a huge

proponent of international
research collaboration,

but international research
collaboration, for that to be effective and

efficient, we need to provide global
data access to everyone involved.

And that is a challenge.

We already talked about
the threat of isolationism,

so the long term retreat
for multilateralism.

In a number of cases,
the free exchange of

information is curtailed
or has been threatened.

Just as a case in point, in the last
week, the Singapore government passed

foreign interference law that some
scientists are very worried about,

because it might restrain
them from openly discussing

genuine academic research
with their overseas collaborators.

One has to be very careful
about the ethics of responsible

data sharing, not just among
academics, but also with industry,

and how does industry
then handle sensitive data.

Issues of data privacy, data
security, and of course, national

security may be of concern and they
have to be very carefully managed.

In this day and age that we
have to share a lot of our data in

order to allow contact traces to
know where we are and what we do,

prevention of data exploitation
by either government or private

enterprises is a significant
issue that many of us worry about.

But it is key that international
collaboration and global education

building must be based on
transparent and trustful relations.

And that is what we have to work on.

Work between people
established up trust so we can take

the next step and collaborate
efficiently and effectively.

Threats to that approach
come from threats to academic

freedom, self-censorship,
and threats to integrity.

Again, in addition to the challenges,
there are numerous opportunities as well.

Sharing global data access
offers significant benefits to publicly

and privately funded research,
particularly if it's free or low cost.

Open lines of research and
relationships facilitate world class

research outcomes, we see
that in my field of astrophysics.

Digitizing societies, leading in
turn to wealth generation based on

public-private trust relationships
is perhaps the next step forward,

we really have to go beyond
the academic ivory tower

and involve our private
enterprises in our work,

and providing global data
access allows citizen science and

citizen based digital research to
take off at unprecedented scales.

So, there are lots of
opportunities here as well.

And this is voiced
very well by some of the

global research and
private enterprise leaders.

And I have two quotes
here, one from Jean-Pierre

Bourguignon, President of
the European Research Council,

who states that science needs an
open world to thrive and the senior

Vice President of the Novo Nordisk
Foundation, Lene Oddershede,

says we need a global code
of conduct for data sharing.

So, businesses as well as research
funders are on the same page.

The next thing we need to do is really
take that next step and work together.

But in order to work together,
some funding is required, and

particularly the sustainability
of our finances is required.

At present, many governments
have poured in lots of

money into their economies
to keep their economies going.

Government spending packages
have been quite generous in some cases.

But what makes, at some
points once the pandemic

tapers off, those spending
packages will decline.

And if we look at the graph on the
right, this is research and development

expenditure from 1996 to 2018, as a
percentage of gross domestic products,

you can see that the
high-income countries,

mostly the global
north, in red and dark,

the bold red line shows you
that the average of those countries

only spends about 1% of GDP on
research and development expenditure.

And low and middle income
countries spent even less.

Now, in this world facing multiple
global challenges, is that sufficient?

Or do we need to lobby the
governments for more research

funding and work more closely
with our business partners?

Some new funding has been
made available for science.

And during the current pandemic, but
most of these were targeted investments,

specifically aimed at achieving certain
goals to help defeat the Coronavirus.

We need to be very careful to
not just go only for mission-driven

tendencies but curiosity-based
research is just as important.

And COVID-19 needed both
approaches actually, because

otherwise, you get an
imbalanced science portfolio.

And that is not good
for your economy either.

Collaborative innovation
needs infrastructure and capacity

building across disciplinary,
academic and national boundaries.

We really need to reduce
barriers to international

scientific collaboration,
and not go for isolations.

Now, in terms of speaking
from the academic world,

if we look at the bar graph
at the bottom right here,

it turns out that if you publish papers
with authors from multiple countries,

you have an advantage compared to those
people who come from a single institution.

This graph shows you the
normalized citation impact.

One is the world
average for papers with

only authors from a
single institution at the top,

and with authors from more
than four countries at the bottom,

and you can see a market
increase here of citations for papers

that were co-authored by
people from multiple countries.

Scientific publishing is currently in
an accelerated states, peer review

can be done in near real time, thanks
to preprint servers and social media.

Researchers need to develop
new skills, they need to become

effective communicators
beyond their primary discipline.

And in turn, that might be good in
working with governments and businesses,

who are often focused on
broader subject areas than

just a niche area on which
the researcher focuses.

Science communication skills must
therefore be nurtured, valued and

encouraged at any given stage of
someone's education or research career.

There is a real need
for an ongoing dialogue

among scientists, global
leaders and policymakers.

And we really need to
look beyond academia,

we need to go for a
whole of society approach.

Effective scientific
collaboration

transcends traditional
discipline boundaries.

And this here, I refer back to our
earlier discussion of interdisciplinarity,

where we have to work with
scientist and practitioners from many,

many different fields in order to
make that step change progress.

The education system
needs to actively

encourage collaboration
between disciplines,

as well as between
science and industry,

business, media, citizens
and governance bodies.

At this point, we work too
much in our silos, academics with

academics, industry with industry,
very little cross collaboration.

But there is that opportunity.

At my own institution
of Macquarie

University, I moved
here about four years ago.

And I found out even though
we have departments and

schools that are focused
on discipline boundaries,

those boundaries
are very low, it's very

easy to talk to colleagues
from other disciplines.

And to my surprise, that has
led to quite a wide variety of

interdisciplinary projects
within the university ecosystem.

So, that's all very, very positive.

And so I'm actually very pleased

that this is a possibility
at my institution.

Academia, the private sector,
policymakers and civil society,

must therefore collaborate
in an equitable and inclusive

way to co-design future
solutions and interventions.

We should go beyond the
academic ivory tower once again.

In turn, this would offer
a unique opportunity

for the business
and financial sectors,

to support and consider
collaboration as a

guiding principle when
considering investments.

Business or financial sectors
don't have to collaborate,

but they should consider it as
an important assessment criteria

in order to decide whether
or not to lend their support.

Finally, I would like to close
with the views of some of the

industry leaders on global
international research collaboration.

The Vice President of
Johnson and Johnson,

the pharmaceutical
company, Seema Kumar said,

"Science needs to capitalize on a moment
of great opportunity and momentum."

Of course, she is referring here
to the high respect in which experts

and Coronavirus researchers are
being held today across the world.

But recent paper in
Nature, the authors wrote,

"The most important ingredient in
making collaborations work is commitment,

commitment to producing
research that is relevant

and to understanding many
angles and perspectives."

So, to close, I would like to
leave you with my conclusion.

International collaboration
in science, technology and

innovation offers significant
and increasing potential,

to yield important
advantages in terms of

scientific, economic,
health, national security,

educational, societal, and
diplomacy benefits and developments.

Thank you very much for your attention.

And for those of you who
would like to know more,

I've got a slide here that shows
you the literature that you could

consult to get some more ideas about
international research collaboration.

Thanks for your attention.

On behalf of the Enago,
#SeeTheFuture team, we want to thank

Professor Richard de Grijs
for that excellent presentation.

Please be sure to come back for
the next session of #SeeTheFuture.

Please be sure to post your
questions in the Q&A box and note that

the responses will be published
in the official conference report.

Also take some time to visit our
sponsors and exhibitors at their booth.

I'm Darell Gunter, your host, and look
forward to seeing you at the next session.