Posted on by ncubekn

One more thing COVID-19 and lockdowns have changed drastically: Scientific conferences

Attendees at the 18th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology in Kyoto, Japan.

Conducting research can be one of the most laborious things for a person to do. It involves identifying gaps in the current body of knowledge and providing clues to various unanswered questions within a specific field. The approach differs slightly between various research specialties. In my field, Pharmacology, it involves reading a lot of scientific papers, planning and conducting of experiments, and ultimately publishing the obtained results in the form of journal articles and a Doctoral thesis. In all of this, there is one specifically exciting and rewarding part… sharing your findings with peers at scientific conferences.

Academic conferences are a platform where researchers meet to share research ideas and discoveries. This is usually done via oral presentations by senior researchers and presentations of posters by students. Conferences are a valuable platform that allow for collaboration and establishment of relations among academics. Typically, conferences run over a period of 4-5 days, and are a worthwhile experience, especially for young researchers.

Personally, attending conferences offered me an opportunity to travel out of the African continent for the first time. I got to travel to Lindau Germany to meet Nobel Prize winners. For any young scientist, being selected to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting is a huge privilege. Not only did I get to meet and have discussions with Nobel Laureates for the first time in my life, I also met and interacted and shared research experiences with PhD students from the most prestigious universities in the world. As a result of being selected for this meeting, I was featured in an article from the largest newspaper publishing in my city. As such, this meeting will remain a major highlight of my academic career.

From Germany, I immediately travelled to Japan to present my research findings at the 18th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology. We had booked the return tickets to both countries during different times, and I had to first travel back to South Africa the whole day, and immediately connect to Hong Kong for a 14-hour flight, before taking another 4-hour flight to Japan. As you can imagine, I was fatigued when I got to Japan, but experiencing the difference in the landscape and way of life in Japan compared to Africa rendered the fatigue was worth it! I found one thing bizarre though, some individuals wore facial masks in public, are rare sighting in the South Africa at the time. It turns out, Japan has a long history of disease outbreaks, and with the current advent of COVID-19, I now understand why they wore masks in public. The conference was abuzz with researchers from across the globe, who shared ground-breaking findings from their individual labs.

In addition to these international conferences, local conferences have afforded me the opportunity to meet peers form various Universities in South Africa, with whom I have exchanged research findings and ideas. Conferences have also offered me an opportunity to display my presentation skills. As a consequence I was given the Young Scientist Award in Basic Pharmacology for the 2nd best podium presentation at the First Conference of Biomedical and Natural Sciences and Therapeutics in 2018, while my late colleague lab mate got the 1st prize.

Left: Myself, presenting a  poster in Kyoto Japan at a world Pharmacology conference. Right: colleagues and myself carrying awards at a National Science conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Unfortunately, the global wave of lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered conducting science conferences in person a challenging task. As a result, there has been an increase in online research conferences, as a way to sustain the level of academic exchange during these difficult times. Virtual meetings have many advantages, including a decrease in the financial burden and ease of access. A screen with multiple faces (figure below), and phrases like “please mute your mic” have been a familiar feature over the past year. Although the online environment allows for easy organization of meetings, I personally feel like the social connection that usually happens during person to person interactions is lost. For example, when I am presenting I love making eye contact with people in the audience as a way of evaluating their level of concentration. This falls away when your audience is behind muted mics and cameras and all one has to stare at is a computer screen.

The 2021 South Young African Academy of Science blogging team, meeting for the first time, in a virtual meeting earlier this year.

Person to person interaction during conferences fosters the establishment of relations and collaboration amongst researchers, and this is not particularly easy to do in a virtual setting. With vaccination strategies being rolled out in various countries being rolled out, I am hopeful that COVID-19 and lockdowns will soon be a thing of the past and we can safely resume physical conferences.

Posted on by leahjunck · 1 Comment

The ongoing tale of finishing up my PhD

I am not quite sure where to start this post, this tale of mine I want to tell you about. Thinking about it still tightens my stomach and produces mixed feelings. Especially now that I have finally re-submitted my thesis.

Backing up: in May 2020 I was getting ready to submit my thesis the first time around. I had been spending the strict level 5 lockdown finalising it and was pretty proud of myself. Now that it had been proofread (in exchange for a fortune and a half), and my supervisor had given his okay, I uploaded the thesis and its trail of paperwork. With a feeling of great relief, I popped the bubbly. Then, the waiting game started. I kept busy with some online jobs and started applying for work in my field (see my last post).

Three months had come and gone. Like a fast-growing fungus, concern started growing, covering over the feeling of lightness that had first accompanied the upload of my thesis. Did something go wrong in the examination process? Was my work being torn apart? Was it, perhaps, much worse than I remembered it? Thus far, I had locked all disquieting questions into the back of my head – safe from any excruciating self-doubts (I assume most of us are familiar with those…).

Some more months passed. I had moved flats in the meantime and sent out more applications. Other than that, I remained in a waiting position. Come the 5th month, I was convinced something was not right. Enquiring about it at the university, I was informed that one examiner had asked for an extension. A touch of relaxation started shining through the, by now thicker, layer of worries. This meant the delay was not necessarily linked to my dissertation – or my skills as a researcher. Without any PhD coursework as commonly the case in South Africa, everything was hinging on the 244-page-document I had submitted. Whether it was good or even sufficient became an increasingly nauseating question, despite the confidence I had initially feigned and convinced myself to be solid.

In month 6, I got mail! Seeing the response from the university’s doctoral board in my inbox, my heart started beating wildly in my chest. The content was sobering: one examiner wanted me to re-submit. I was given three documents, one from each examiner with a length of 2-3 pages. These were full of comments on my work. After addressing them, I was meant to have my work examined again by the same person who had not been fully convinced by it the first time around.

It took me a conversation with all the support-people in my life to start digesting and another few days to dare open my original thesis.

Some of the examiners’ comments were immediately understandable to me and only required making relatively small changes. Others, I did not agree with. For instance, it was put to question whether I overdid it integrating my own experiences into the thesis. I added a section on the importance of ‘autoethnography’ (which is essentially just that, considering yourself part of the research process). Everything I changed was documented in excel sheet format: comment — response. Then there were those comments that made a lot of sense to me, but that were more difficult to approach. Among them was a criticism of how I had integrated literature into my qualitative findings, collected in 2 years of fieldwork. Looking at my thesis with a more distant view after all those months, I could very clearly see the examiner had a point. There were just too many references to too many things while the main theory was reduced to background noise!

After the first small edits, I came into a rhythm and stoically went through each of the three examiners’ suggestions with increasing motivation to improve my work. I stopped thinking about the weight of my disappointment. Indeed, with each point crossed off my list, I started feeling a little lighter again. At least I could do something now. I made a proper start by looking up and reading through a whole lot of literature that I thought could be useful in addressing the comments. With every change, I slowly gained a better idea of what an improved thesis will look like.

And then, last week, I pressed the ‘upload’ button once again. This time, I am not feeling light. I am also not riddled with worry. It simply feels like an unfinished story, but one that I think has been enriched in the revision process. Its concluding remarks shall remain unwritten for the time being.