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Context : may I ask a naive question...?
Natural language (written or oral) is our principal mean to communicate between us in Science. Even if we make efforts to make our concepts clear, words in natural language are often ambiguous (they have often varying meanings) or imprecise. As a consequence, what one actually understands may depend on :
Due to this, communication between people, and in particular scientists, contains a more or less important part of fuzziness and imprecision that hinders scientific exchanges. In general, this difficulty is largely overlooked and leads to frequent misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and sometimes important frustrations linked with the fact that we simply do not understand what is being explained.
If we analyse why it is so, we can find main reasons on both sides of the communication channel (assuming the communication channel is perfect, which also could be analyzed !) :
This is all the more true in a pluridisciplinary context, where people start frequently to interact with very different training backgrounds.
A self-training program to accompany the development of pluridisciplinarity at lab level
As in many other labs, at RDP, we evolve in a pluridisciplinary context and we are faced with the above communication difficulties on an everyday basis. However, we have the chance to have specialists in different domains in the same lab. The idea is thus to develop a self-training program at lab level, where senior and younger researchers/engineers (including post-docs and PhD students), specialists of a certain scientific/technological domain, will take time to explain in a pedagogic way some concepts recurrently found in the literature and not always clear/accessible for non specialists to scientists from other disciplines. Emphasis will be put on the pedagogic nature of these training sessions, where concepts will be explained as if the audience were at a high-school level, assuming no prior knowledge of the concepts, and letting a large place for the audience to ask naive questions.
Organization of the training sessions : Back to basics chalk talks
The idea is to develop a series of training sessions in the RDP lab on basic notions in different scientific domains Maths/Physics/Biology/Computer science series to favor the transfer of lab’s pluridisciplinarity to each lab member.
Each training session will be approximately 30 minutes long.
It will take the form of a chalk talk given by a speaker (from the lab) who prepared a pedagogical presentation of a particular concept. The chalk talk modality is key as it favours an in depth explanation, synchronizes and eases interaction between participants.
A concept that needs more time could be developed over several sessions.
The training sessions will be weekly and announced in advance.
Language is English.
To Be Announced
You can suggest a topic that you would like to be tackled during a Back to Basic session, or volunteer to give a session yourself on this shared document.
Archives can be found here.
Signaling pathways, Hugo Caumon (November 21st 2023)
Cell communication is an omnipresent concept in the study of the regulation of development. Processing of developmental signals by cells is a key step of this communication, and such processing occurs through signaling pathways. In this (...)