Society and its needs are changing very rapidly today. In the coming decades, certain societal challenges will transform the labour market, education, and our everyday lives. In ENLIGHT, students work on real-world challenges of the 21^st century that need our urgent attention. These involve the ENLIGHT flagship topics – equity, health, energy, digitalisation and climate change, as well as the transdisciplinary spaces between them. In addition, transversal competencies are needed to cope with the demands and challenges of the 21^st century.

Date of Workshop: 15 March 2023
Time: 9-12 o’clock CET
Venue: online via Zoom, link is provided after registration
Registration via: https://doit.medfarm.uu.se/bin/kurt3/kurt/87824
Registration open 24 February 2023 – 15 March 2023

The workshop will explain, in some depth, the steps, regulations, workload, challenges, needs and possibilities regarding the connection of digital research infrastructures with European infrastructures (such as disciplinary research infrastructures or the European Open Science Cloud) by looking at selected examples.

The Glassary Initiative by students from the University of Galway, Ireland and The Concordia Precious Plastic Project (CP3) by students from Concordia University, Canada!

In the first edition of the ENLIGHT Global Dialogue twelve student organisations from Belgium, Canada, China, Ireland, Mexico and Sweden presented their projects promoting sustainability on campus or local communities. The full event was split into three online sessions hosted by the ENLIGHT Student Network (ESN) and was an opportunity to share experiences on running sustainability projects as a student organisation. All presentations can be viewed on the ENLIGHT Global Dialogue website.

A panel of judges, consisting of students from the ESN and officers from ENLIGHT Universities Green Offices, had the very difficult task to select two awardees of the Global Citizenship Award. The award includes an invitation to join the ENLIGHT Teaching & Learning Conference hosted by University of Bordeaux in October 2023 to present their projects to a wider audience.

The conference sharing style utilising zoom was a great way to connect with campus communities across the world and learn how students and staff in Canada, Mexico or Sweden improve sustainability on their campuses. When volunteering as a student, it is very empowering to see other students across the world engage with their community and share the experiences of making a positive change. There is a feeling of solidarity as we take on big issues, said Malena Thren and Ruth Keeley, students at University of Galway in Ireland, about the online sessions. Malena and Ruth are two of the students running the Glassary project support by Dr. Lorraine Tansey at the University of Galway Green Office.

Sara Ordonselli and Amy Tran, from Concordia University in Canada, agreed saying that sharing experiences is a valuable opportunity for everyone to learn from each other. It inspires others to replicate similar projects elsewhere, increasing the overall impact of sustainability initiatives. In fact, our project is inspired by the Precious Plastic Project in Europe, and the resources that the community has shared online were instrumental in helping us to build our project. The Global Dialogue showcased a variety of different initiatives, which demonstrated how even dissimilar projects can benefit from learning from one another and help generate new ideas to tackle sustainability challenges. By collaborating and sharing knowledge, we can accelerate progress toward a more sustainable future.

The second edition of the ENLIGHT Global Dialogue is expected to take place in April-May 2023 and the call for submitting proposals is open until March 30. Two more Global Citizenship Awards will be awarded, also inviting student organisations to join the ENLIGHT Teaching & Learning Conference in October. Check the ENLIGHT Global Dialogue website for more information.

Equity Core Group presents an upcoming online seminar on a Just City, focusing on exploring how city planning contributes to the notion of ‘a Just City’.

Our society must end its addiction to oil and gas. This means that we need a new source of hydrocarbons, the carbon compounds from which fuels and many fossil-based materials are made. Some two years ago, Matthias Heinemann, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Groningen, began wondering how the Netherlands could get involved in realizing the shift to fossil-free carbon. He is now part of a small team that leads a large consortium of knowledge institutes and partners from industry that has put forward a proposal that could revolutionize the chemical industry. The FutureCarbonNL consortiumproposes to make valuable chemicals from the carbon dioxide found in waste gases and even from that found in the air.

SMARTSHAPE consortium, led from University of Galway, will develop a disruptive technology sensor.

 The European Union has awarded a European consortium €4.4million for the SMARTSHAPE project to focus on developing an implantable medical device for continuous blood pressure monitoring.

University of Galway’s College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences will hold an interactive taster programme for transition year students, offering hands-on experience of how healthcare teams work together.

The Health Professional Taster Day takes place on Saturday April 1 and Saturday April 22 in the University’s new state-of-the-art simulation facility, located at the Clinical Science Institute on the grounds of Galway University Hospital.

ENLIGHT promotes innovative teaching and learning approaches, one of them being the Challenge-Based Education (CBE) methodology and this is a call for participants in the next edition of the CBE training sessions for educators.

On Monday, 6 February, Comenius University in Bratislava held the opening ceremony for international students.

During spring semester Comenius University will host 136 international students from 20 countries. “At Comenius we are very proud to welcome also students from the ENLIGHT alliance, from the University of the Basque country, Uppsala University and the University of Tartu,” says the Head of Erasmus+ office in Bratislava.  

Multidisciplinary team from the University of the Basque Country suggests that delving deeper into the barely studied phenomenon of camouflaging can improve autism research. 

A study by the UPV/EHU’s Lindy Lab-Language in Neurodiversity research group offers a more integrative view of camouflaging across the whole autism spectrum, and draws attention to the importance of understanding this phenomenon better and improving current measurement methods in order to propose priorities for future research.

The COVID-19 pandemic has widely demonstrated the hazard that infectious diseases can pose to global public health and development. According to the latest available estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), as of February 2023 it has been confirmed to have affected over 750 million people worldwide, having caused more than 6.8 million deaths.