Young researchers learn the art of asking scientific questions
NEWS
Science requires creativity and the ability to ask good questions. That’s the starting-point for IceLab Camp. During an autumn week young scientists from various scientific backgrounds gathered at Kronlund Kursgård by the Vindel river to develop their communicative and creative skills together.
– As a student you learn how to answer questions and solve problems. Those are the skills you practise from your first year at school to your last year at university. Science is totally different; it is very much about asking the right questions. As a PhD student you are suddenly thrown into a world with completely different challenges, says Martin Rosvall, physicist and researcher in IceLab at Umeå University.It was an aha moment for him when he, as a PhD student, participated in a research camp for young scientists at Université Paris Descartes, which focused on how to formulate creative scientific questions. Martin Rosvall immediately felt that, if he would ever get a chance, he would organize a similar camp at his university. This year makes IceLab Camp’s fourth consecutive year running. Whispering game with imagesWhen we visit the camp the participants are gathered together for a creativity game to start off the day. Sitting in a circle, they perform a kind of “whispering game” with pictures instead of words. Everyone first draws a simple symbol on a piece of paper and puts it on top of a pile of pieces of paper. Each pile is then sent one step to the left. The next person takes a quick glance at the symbol, puts it at the bottom of the pile, and then draws the picture from memory on the piece of paper on top. Every 15 seconds the piles move again to the left. Photo: Participants in IceLab Camp start off the day’s work with a creativity game. Sitting in a circle they perform a ”whispering game” using symbols instead of words.
When the piles have completed a full lap, the pieces of paper are lined up to see if and how the pictures have changed. The room bubbles with discussion and laughter. While some figures have kept their shape and meaning, others have lost important elements or gained new ones. Something as simple as a question mark has lost its dot and looks like a boomerang or banana. How did that happen? A square symbol gets a roof and in the next step becomes a house with windows, while a stylized car accidently is turned upside down and suddenly is interpreted as a face, which later gains a nose and mouth.– Can we generalize the results, asks Martin Rosvall. Which symbols survive and which do not? What hypotheses can we raise and how can we test them?– If you make something other people can relate to, such as a star or a number eight, it seems to persist, says Natalie Schluter. Learning from each other The participants come from different countries and different scientific backgrounds. This diversity maximizes the opportunity to learn from each other. Natalie Schluter is Canadian, working as a postdoc at Malmö University, and living in Copenhagen. She has degrees in linguistics, mathematics, and computing science, and currently works on algorithms for natural language processing.
– The aim is to make computers understand words and sentences, for example, in order to automatically translate text. It’s not so easy. A language has a finite number of words, but an infinite number of things you can express with those words. So a computer based language-processing system is difficult to make perfect, even if there has been enormous development over the last few years.
What do you hope to gain from participating in IceLab Camp? – My field is not applied network science per se, but I have realized that I can use many such concepts and ideas in my research. But network scientists are so much better at this than I am, so I need to learn more. This workshop is a good opportunity for this, says Natalie Schluter.
After coffee the participants continue working in three groups. Their task is to craft a research proposal eliciting their different knowledge pools. Natalie’s group has chosen to build on Erin Hotchkiss’s research on river systems. Photo: Group work in formulating a scientific problem. Nicolas Wider, Eddie Wadbro, Erin Hotchkiss and Natalie Schluter.
– Ecologists have so far mainly studied a single lake or river at a time, but are becoming gradually more interested in connections, how streams, rivers, and lakes flow into one another, and how the different parts are influenced by ecosystem changes, says Erin, who is a postdoc at Umeå University.
Rivers as a networkThen it is great to have mathematicians and computer scientists in the group, with knowledge about networks and complex systems. On a whiteboard the participants have sketched how a water ecosystem can be viewed as a network of components with different properties. – Now we are trying to form a hypothesis that we can test with various simulations, says Nicolas Wider, who is doing research on complex systems in Zürich, Switzerland. What happens if you build or remove a dam somewhere in the ecosystem? How will that influence fish and other species living there?
Photo: – Let us get as many words down as possible, we can wordsmith later, says ecologist Erin Hotchkiss.
On the last day of the camp, the participants will present their projects to each other. In addition to generating clear scientific questions and suggestions for experiments, the groups also have to write the first page of a research proposal. That is yet another thing young scientists in the beginning of their careers need to practise, says Martin Rosvall. Many applications for grants are turned down because a clearly formulated hypothesis is missing.
Photo: Physicist Martin Rosvall was inspired to establish IceLab Camp when he participated in a similar camp in France as a PhD student.
The primary goal is not to implement the project ideas. Rather, the main objective is to meet people with similar interests but with different backgrounds and practise hypothesis-driven collaborative thinking, says Martin Rosvall. But maybe the camp can sow a seed for the future. IceLab Camp participants from previous years have stayed in touch and maybe they will establish actual research collaborations later on. – I definitely think we will, says Natalie Schluter. Maybe we need to mature as scientists first, but I would be surprised if we didn’t work together in the future.
Text: Anna-Lena Lindskog Photo: Jan Lindmark
ABOUT IceLab IceLab (Integrated Science Lab) is an interdisciplinary research environment at Umeå University. IceLab is a joint initiative between the departments of mathematics and mathematical statistics, physics, and ecology and environmental sciences. Icelab's mission is to engage in cross-cutting research and education in areas where the quantitative sciences, social sciences, and life sciences intersect. Researchers in IceLab develop, for example, mathematical models to better understand how climate changes affect ecosystems or how a population should be vaccinated for maximal effect.
ABOUT IceLab CampIceLab Camp is a four-day long communication and creativity camp for master students, PhDs, and postdocs with an interest in conducting interdisciplinary science. Researchers from IceLab lead the camp with support from KBC research school at Umeå University. Participants come from all over the world.
Photo: All participants i IceLab Camp, from left Aaron Schafer, Erin Hotchkiss, Eddie Wadbro, Ala Trusina, Vsevolod Salnikov, Martin Rosvall, Kateryna Karhina, Natalie Schluter, Rebekka Burkholz, Jonas Wickman, Nicolas Wider, Andrea Martini, Magnus Lindh and Pedro Lopes.
