EFDS Programme Announces Second Round Results: Supporting Displaced Scientists in Ukraine and Europe

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The European Fund for Displaced Scientists (EFDS) Programme, launched in partnership with the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, has announced the results of its second round of funding.

The first round of calls, launched in May and June 2022, received overwhelming interest. All applications were evaluated and selected by an independent selection committee composed of senior officials from international and pan-European science institutions representing universities, funding organisations, and researchers, including ERC, EUA, Global Young Academy, and Science Europe. While 35 applications from European host institutions (Funding Line 1) and 6 applications from Ukrainian institutions (Funding Line 2) were selected for funding, a reserve list of applications under both Funding Lines was created.

Due to the ongoing situation in Ukraine, most scholars won’t be able to return to Ukraine in the near future. On the other hand, the vast majority of Ukrainian scholars remain in Ukraine (Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science, October 2022) and continue research and academic activities under increasingly hard conditions created by the war. Considering the urgent need to support those scholars, it has been decided that the second round would support applicants under both funding lines, distributing the remaining EFDS funds in support of 6 more applications under Funding Line 1 and two applications under Funding Line 2.

In this second round, the EFDS funds will help support 56 Ukrainian scholars who are still in Ukraine, including early-career researchers, as well as 6 scholars in European countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, and Austria).

The EFDS Programme continues to be an important source of support for displaced scientists in Ukraine and Europe and will pursue its goal to provide assistance, networking opportunities, and other forms of support to help the Ukrainian science community.

“We Need Professional Scientific Journalism Back”

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In the age of social media, scientific mis- and disinformation spreads far and fast – with deadly consequences. During the early days and peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, the torrents of false and misleading information led to highly risky behaviours, impacted mitigation efforts, vaccine uptake, and even resulted in (preventable) deaths. Besides the pandemic, science disinformation is also particularly rampant and harmful when it comes to the climate crisis, which presents an existential threat to the world. Therefore, fighting science mis- and disinformation with evidence-based tools and resources is of paramount importance, not just for the scientific community, but for policymakers, the media, and the public.  

Dr Carlo Martini, who leads PERITIA’s work on Behavioural Tools for Building Trust, speaks to ALLEA Digital Salon on how scientific disinformation is becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect, and the resulting need for equally vigorous counter-measures by professional science journalists.

 

“Scientific disinformation is different, because it is often rather complex to debunk, and it tends to stand on pseudo-evidence, that is, something that looks like scientific evidence but is not obtained through rigorous scientific methodology.”

 

Question: In a recent interview you emphasise that expertise is the substantial possession of two traits: experience and competence. Could you elaborate on the importance of these two in the make-up of an expert?

Carlo Martini: I view experience and competence as the backward-looking and forward-looking components of expertise. What that means is that experts need experience, typically in a very narrow field of human knowledge, to gain the capacity and proficiency to deal with new problems and tasks, which is usually called competence. Experience alone, however, is not always enough to acquire competence, and sometimes competence can be acquired through other means (for example, instruction manuals). The relationship between experience and competence is thus a complex one. For example, lots of experience will yield little competence if said experience is acquired by mere repetition of the same task.

 

Q: The ease of access to communication technology makes it easier for pseudo-science to spread to ever-larger audiences. What tools or resources do laypeople have to recognise the “bogus” experts and their pseudo-scientific claims?

CM: Without a filter at the source, laypeople can only rely on critical thinking to vet the information they receive. Scholars disagree on how “gullible” people are, but unfortunately, it is a fact that there are many bogus “professional” experts, often very well-funded, who are very keen on and skilled at constructing and spreading disinformation. This type of professional-looking disinformation is rather hard to spot without specific skills that are acquired through the study and application of critical thinking and digital literacy.

 

Q: What about legitimate disagreements between experts? How can laypeople make important decisions on topics where experts who are on equal epistemic standing express conflicting views or recommendations?

CM: Legitimate disagreement among experts is a thorny issue for laypeople’s decision-making. First, though, the fact that there is a genuine disagreement should be established. Unfortunately, much of what appears to be “disagreement among experts” is bogus. Once we have done that, however, and we are still faced with disagreeing parties, a few options remain. Sometimes the disagreement may mask different assumptions about, for instance, risk attitudes and values.

For instance, there was a lot of bogus disagreement during the COVID pandemic; but some disagreements were legitimate, and it was sometimes the result of different stances about how much value to assign to human life, as opposed to, for example, economic and psychological suffering deriving from restrictions. If nonetheless, experts’ views about ethics and risks are aligned but they still disagree, it probably makes sense to sit on the fence, as it were, and wait until new evidence is available.  Unfortunately, there are situations when sitting on the fence is not an option.

 

“Experts may not realise that their incompatible conclusions may each be supported by good evidence if they start from different stances about the evaluation of some basic moral facts.”

 

Q: The work of the EU-funded research project PERITIA, in which you are one of the lead researchers, deals with the topic of disinformation. What is the difference between scientific misinformation and disinformation, and why is it important to make this distinction?

CM: We can be disinformed about many diverse topics, from politics to pop culture. Let us imagine we hear that an actor we particularly love has broken up with their partner. Is it true? Is it false? A tabloid or a social media account may spread disinformation to gather readership or clicks. But often this kind of disinformation is a lie with no legs to stand on, like the infamous “Pizzagate” affair during the 2016 US presidential election. Scientific disinformation is different;  it is often rather complex to debunk, and it tends to stand on pseudo-evidence, that is, something that looks like scientific evidence but is not obtained through rigorous scientific methodology. One shouldn’t generalise but it is safe to say that most scientific disinformation is supported by pseudoscience.

 

Q: Your research focus within PERITIA deals with the emotional and cognitive components of trusting behaviour. What are the key facts that your research has found on this front?

CM: One of the foci of our research is the idea that often people do not trust information based on the contents of what they read or hear, but rather, they tend to trust familiar sources, irrespective of the objective quality of their contents.

For example, in one of our studies, we tried to improve people’s ability to spot disinformation by giving them critical thinking prompts. In the first round of experiments, we ran into the problem that familiarity of sources was masking the effect of our intervention because people tended to judge as accurate those sources that they perceive as trustworthy and familiar. In order to try to detect the effect of our prompts, we had to refine our search and we ran a second round of experiments using only unfamiliar sources, to test whether our prompts were helping people become more accurate in their search for reliable information.

 

“We need professional scientific journalism back, and the competition coming from scientific disinformation and click-bait style journalism is unfortunately not helping.”

 

Q: Part of your work also focuses on the role of expertise in knowledge transfer from science to policy. How has the role of experts in policy advice changed in recent years? What do you see as positive developments, and what must still be improved?

CM: I think it’s fair to say that in recent years we have witnessed opposing trends. On the one hand, crises like Brexit have been fuelled by and, in turn, magnified a wave of negative feelings towards expert advice and evidence-based policy-making. Experts have been accused of protecting a worldview, rather than holding superior knowledge. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic was an eye-opener on how much science (and experts) can accomplish when they coordinate with each other and with policymakers. Some experts even attained celebrity status during the pandemic.

My research team and I ran in-depth interviews with several major COVID-19 experts who were prominent public communicators during the first wave of the pandemic and one of the key takeaway points they tended to agree on was that communication should be improved. We need professional scientific journalism back, and the competition coming from scientific disinformation and click-bait style journalism is unfortunately not helping.

 

About Carlo Martini

Dr Carlo Martini is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science in the Faculty of Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (UNISR). His primary research interests are in philosophy of the social sciences and social epistemology. He works on the role of expertise in knowledge transfer from science to policy, on expert disagreement and on public trust in scientific experts. He is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science, University of Helsinki. Before taking up his post at UNISR (Milan) he was a senior researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, after completing his Ph.D. at the Tilburg Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science in 2011.

Dr Martini also leads PERITIA’s work package on Behavioural Tools for Building Trust. PERITIA is an EU-funded research project investigating public trust in expertise. ALLEA is one of the partners of the consortium, which is composed by 11 organisations from across Europe.

More by Carlo Martini

Knowledge Brokers in Crisis: Public Communication of Science During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Climate Change and Culpable Ignorance: The Case of Pseudoscience

Lateral reading and monetary incentives to spot disinformation about science

Breakthrough Prize Opens Public Nominations for 2024 Prizes

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ALLEA is proud to continue its partnership with the Breakthrough Prize for the upcoming 2024 awards in fundamental physics, life sciences, and mathematics. The Breakthrough Prize is a highly prestigious international award, recognising groundbreaking research and advancements in these fields. We encourage members of the European scientific community to nominate deserving individuals and teams for these awards, and to showcase the outstanding contributions of European scientists to the global research community.

 

Press release, The Breakthrough Prize, 19 January 2023

The public nomination period for the 2024 Breakthrough Prizes in Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences and Mathematics is now open. Nominations can be submitted online today through 1 April 2023. While self-nominations are prohibited, anyone may nominate another person. The nomination forms and rules are available at breakthroughprize.org.

For the 12th year, the Breakthrough Prize, recognized as the world’s largest science prize, will honor top scientists, handing out three prizes in Life Sciences, one in Fundamental Physics and one in Mathematics. Each prize comes with a $3 million award. In addition, six New Horizons Prizes, each for $100,000, will be available to promising early-career researchers in the fields of Physics and Mathematics. Nominations will also be taken for the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize, an annual $50,000 award presented to early-career women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the previous two years.

The Breakthrough Prize, dubbed ‘The Oscars of Science,’ hosts an annual globally broadcast gala awards ceremony to celebrate the laureates’ achievements and to foster broad popular support for scientific endeavors and inspire the next generation of scientists. The cohort of 2023 laureates was announced in September 2022.

For the seventh year, the Breakthrough Prize will partner with two prestigious institutions – the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) and ResearchGate – to directly engage with researchers and the science community.

ALLEA brings together more than 50 academies from over 40 countries, with members leading scholarly enquiry across all fields of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

ResearchGate is the professional network for researchers. Over 20 million researchers use researchgate.net to share and discover research, build their networks, and advance their careers. Based in Berlin, ResearchGate was founded in 2008. Its mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all. ResearchGate members are encouraged to nominate their peers for the 2024 prizes in Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics.

Selection Committees are composed of previous Breakthrough Prize laureates, who select the winners from the list of candidates generated during the nomination period.

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

One 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics ($3 million) will recognize an individual or individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge. It is open to theoretical and experimental physicists. The prize can be shared among any number of scientists. Nominations are also open for the New Horizons in Physics Prize, which will include up to three $100,000 awards for early-career researchers who have already produced important work in their fields.

The Selection Committee for the 2024 physics prizes includes: Eric Adelberger, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Charles H. Bennett, Charles L. Bennett, Sheperd Doeleman, Michael Green, Jens Gundlach, Alan Guth, Blayne Heckel, Joseph Incandela, Charles Kane, Hidetoshi Katori, Alexei Kitaev, Andrei Linde, Arthur McDonald, Juan Maldacena, Eugene Mele, Lyman Page, Saul Perlmutter, Alexander Polyakov, Adam Riess, John Schwarz, Nathan Seiberg, Ashoke Sen, Eva Silverstein, David Spergel, Andrew Strominger, Cumrun Vafa, Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Yifang Wang, Rainer Weiss, Edward Witten, and Jun Ye.

Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Three 2024 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences ($3 million each) will be awarded to individuals who have made transformative advances in comprehending living systems and extending human life. One of the prizes is designated for progress in understanding of Parkinson’s disease or other neurodegenerative disorders.

The Selection Committee for the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences includes: David Allis, James Allison, Victor Ambros, David Baker, Shankar Balasubramanian, Cornelia Bargmann, Alim Louis Benabid, Frank Bennett, David Botstein, Edward Boyden, Clifford P. Brangwynne, Lewis Cantley, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Zhijian “James” Chen, Joanne Chory, Don Cleveland, Hans Clevers, Karl Deisseroth, Titia de Lange, Mahlon DeLong, Jennifer Doudna, Catherine Dulac, Stephen Elledge, Napoleone Ferrara, Jeffrey Friedman, Michael Hall, John Hardy, Ulrich Hartl, Demis Hassabis, Helen Hobbs, Arthur Horwich, Anthony A. Hyman, John Jumper, David Julius, Katalin Karikó, Jeffery W. Kelly, David Klenerman, Adrian Krainer, Eric Lander, Robert Langer, Virginia Lee, Richard Lifton, Dennis Lo, Pascal Mayer, Emmanuel Mignot, Kazutoshi Mori, Kim Nasmyth, Harry Noller, Roeland Nusse, Yoshinori Ohsumi, Svante Pääbo, Gary Ruvkun, Charles Sawyers, Alexander Varshavsky, Bert Vogelstein, Peter Walter, Robert Weinberg, Drew Weissman, Shinya Yamanaka, Masashi Yanagisawa, Richard Youle, Xiaowei Zhuang, and Huda Zoghbi.

Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics

One 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics ($3 million) will be awarded to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of mathematics. Nominations are also open for the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, which will include up to three $100,000 awards for early-career researchers who have already produced important work in their fields. In addition, up to three $50,000 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes will be presented to early-career women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the previous two years (2019, 2020).

The Selection Committee for the 2024 mathematics prizes includes: Ian Agol, Alex Eskin, Simon Donaldson, Martin Hairer, Maxim Kontsevich, Christopher Hacon, Vincent Lafforgue, Jacob Lurie, James McKernan, Takuro Mochizuki, Daniel Spielman, Terence Tao, and Richard Taylor.

Information on the Breakthrough Prizes is available at breakthroughprize.org.

About ALLEA

ALLEA is the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, representing more than 50 academies from over 40 countries in Europe. Since its foundation in 1994, ALLEA speaks out on behalf of its members on the European and international stages, promotes science as a global public good, and facilitates scientific collaboration across borders and disciplines. Jointly with its Member Academies, ALLEA works towards improving the conditions for research, providing the best independent and interdisciplinary science advice, and strengthening the role of science in society. In doing so, it channels the intellectual excellence and experience of European academies for the benefit of the research community, decision-makers, and the public.

About ResearchGate

ResearchGate is making research more efficient. Over 20 million researchers use researchgate.net to connect with peers, share and discover the latest research, and advance their careers. Based in Berlin, ResearchGate was founded in 2008. Its mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all.

Event Report on the ALLEA-RIA Symposium on “International Reflections on STEM Education”

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Today, ALLEA published an event report summarising the key take-aways from the recent symposium “International Reflections on STEM Education”. The symposium, which was organised jointly with the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, brought together local and European experts in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education to discuss current challenges and opportunities in the field. Read the event report here.

This report highlights the need for a holistic approach to (STEM) education to provide future generations with the requisite knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values to enable them to address complex real-world problems. Other emerging themes relate to the need for a breadth of thoroughly validated teaching materials, the key roles of Initial Teacher Education and Teachers’ Professional Learning, as well as the importance of continuous interactions between educators, researchers, and policymakers to improve STEM teaching and learning.

The symposium was a valuable opportunity for experts in the field of STEM education to come together and share their knowledge and experiences. The report is a testament to the importance of international collaboration in addressing the challenges facing STEM education today.

The full event report is available here for those interested in learning more about the symposium and its findings. The programme for the symposium and detailed information on the speakers can be found here.