The organizers
Maxime Toussaint, Yoran Bornot, Alexandre Fruleux, Henri Cuny, Estelle Noyer, Emiline Hily, Aurélie Deroy
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This two-day seminar was organized by a team of PhD candidates and postdoctoral students supported by LabEx ARBRE. It was a first, and it was very clearly a success thanks to the professionalism of this young team. The program was organized around three highlights: presentations of ongoing research open to all, workshops for PhD and postdoctoral students, and a hosted seminar.
Eighteen doctoral and postdoctoral students presented their research in short presentations divided into three sessions. While the presentations themselves were brief, everyone agreed that it was hands down interesting to see what others are working on; their objectives, challenges they faced, their results. Discussions that followed went further than just methodological approaches and experimental techniques, and led to an interesting exchange of views and perspectives.
Three workshops were used to address three key themes proposed by the organizing team (Workshop I: Climate change and wood quality – what are the impacts? what are the management solutions?, Workshop II: Understanding tree-microbe interactions with a view to improved production and valorization, Workshop III: Climatic changes and the phenomenon of species migration). These workshops prompted particularly rich discussions between the PhD and postdoctoral students who prepared three overviews of these exchanges which were presented to everyone at the end of the seminar. To read the workshop overviews in French, follow this link – Restitution des ateliers
Special guest Jean-Marc Galan gave an engaging presentation on scientific mediation. A researcher with the CNRS and a biologist by training, Mr. Galan has successfully refocused his career on scientific mediation, on communicating scientific issues to broader audiences – even non-scientific audiences – and addressed the notion of conceptualizing science in a broader context, on the point of contact between ‘those who know and those who don’t know’. Ultimately, how to creatively and intelligently capture the interest of others when presenting scientific information. Using his personal experiences as examples, he presented the main issues involved in scientific mediation, for the public but also for researchers.
