Last week was a really special Research Retreat week for us. We opened the week with the Plant Success Symposium where we heard from invited speakers including Charlie Messina, Greg Rebetzke, Jacqui Batley and Brendan Choat, as well as Centre Chief Investigators and Postdoctoral Researchers on some of our many research achievements. The Symposium was open to anyone to attend online or in person. We are about halfway through our seven-year funding period and I felt it was important to provide non-Centre members with an opportunity to attend and interact with us. We were thrilled to be joined at the Symposium by Gregory Egert (Uncle Cheg) from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous Futures, who delivered a Welcome to Country that beautifully set the scene for the week. It was also a great pleasure to have The University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor Deborah Terry AC attend and reiterate the value the Centre is providing across its remit of Nature and Agriculture at The University of Queensland and beyond.
Following the Symposium we held two days of our usual Research Retreat programming where PhD Students, Postdoctoral Researchers and Chief Investigators shared updates on their activities. And lastly we had two days of Chief Investigator meetings and Capacity Building Workshops covering topics including scientific illustrations, vectors and presentation skills. It really was a massive week with close to 200 people joining us online or in person at various points throughout.
We like to take time at each of our Research Retreats to focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This year, we were very pleased to have Tatsuya Amano from The University of Queensland join us to talk about his work on language barriers in science, their consequences and solutions. Tatsuya, who is a conservation biologist, leads the translatE project which applies scientific approaches to the challenge of transcending language barriers in science. So many people told me how much they enjoyed the talk – the highlight of the week for many. This is such an important topic for us to hear about and discuss as a Centre. One of the many takeaways from this talk was the Ten tips for overcoming language barriers in science:
- Disseminate research in multiple languages
- Use scientific knowledge sourced from multiple languages
- Increase the visibility of non-English-language science
- Translate scientific terms
- Provide genuine support to non-native speakers
- Distinguish language skills from scientific quality
- Consider language balance in scientific activities
- Acknowledge efforts to overcome language barriers
- Be considerate of non-native speakers
- Make use of existing resources and opportunities
We were very grateful to Tatsuya for taking the time to present to us about this topic and intend to share more of his work with you through this newsletter in future.
Congratulations again to the well-deserved winners of our Retreat awards – Best Student Presentation was awarded to Charles Zhou. Best Postdoctoral Researcher Presentation was awarded to Ben Halliwell and Maddie James. Best Student Poster was awarded to Kath Mclay, Kritika Sharma and Nick O’Brien. Best Postdoctoral Researcher Poster was awarded to Satomi Hayashi. During the Retreat, we were also able to acknowledge the Centre for Plant Success Core Values awards winners for the year – Ben Halliwell and Catherine Jones for Inclusivity; Beatrice Harrison-Day for Integrity; and Owen Powell for International Excellence. We introduced a new category this year, a service award, to acknowledge the work of Caitlin Dudley who has contributed greatly to the Centre’s Outreach and Researcher Development initiatives.
Thank you very much to our professional staff, the CORMS team, for another fantastic Research Retreat and to Caitlin Dudley and Arlie Macdonald for their contributions to organising the 2-day capacity building workshop on behalf of the Researcher Development Working Group. Lastly, thank you to all who delivered posters and presentations, the quality just keeps getting better and better as the years go on!
Christine Beveridge FAA
Centre Director, The University of Queensland
