The 3rd Cohort of EUTOPIA SIF Kick-started at UPF, Barcelona

The bright and sunny city of Barcelona welcomed the fellows of the EUTOPIA SIF Programme for a symposium from 25–27, 2023. The SIF program is one of the most important initiatives of the Alliance to promote the research of high-level young researchers.  The Ciutadella Campus hosted this week the symposium on the scholarship program in science and innovation, EUTOPIA-SIF. About fifty young researchers from six of the universities of the Alliance have gathered to share their research and attend workshops and round tables from Wednesday until this Friday.

The event was mainly the kickoff of the 3rd cohort of the MSCA-co-funded SIF PostDoc program. The meeting also served to share the experiences of the researchers who participated in the first and second rounds of the program, selected during 2021 and 2022. Researchers participated from the CY Cergy University of Paris (France), the Vrije Universiteit de Brussels (Belgium), the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), the University of Warwick (United Kingdom) and Pompeu Fabra University, (Barcelona).

Of the twenty-five fellows in the third cohort, nineteen attended in person and six virtually. The third cohort of fellows gave a brief presentation of their projects on the first day of the event.  The researchers of the program received training on ethics and moral integrity in research, by Marianna Nadeu, Promoter of R+D+Ethics projects at the UPF. From studies on the legal risks of Artificial Intelligence, on the phytoplankton of the oceans, on equal access to higher education in developed countries or on 3D printing; the program accommodates all kinds of disciplines and fields of study.

The second day of the symposium was a day of training and talks. During the morning, Thijs Devriendt, responsible for Scientific Policy at the VUB, offered a training session on open science and data management, and Sergi Jordà, Director of the UPF Musical and Multimodal Interaction Laboratory, and Gonzalo Ortiz, a participant in the first edition of the SIF program at the UPF, presented their research on AI and the music of the future. In the afternoon, Reimund Fickert, project director of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, offered the workshop Get What You Want in a Minute, and the Exhibition Hall hosted a poster session by the researchers selected last year. The active participation of the crowd made these talks interactive and interesting. After the immersive training sessions that followed, the day was concluded with a cocktail and research poster exhibition by the cohort 2 fellows. The intensive event concluded on the third day with an art-track tour and library visit.