EU NanoSafety Cluster Education Day @ NanoSafe 2020

The EU NanoSafety Cluster WG-A on Education, Training, and Communication organized this Education Day on Nov 16 as satellite event of the NanoSafe Digital Congress 2020. This day acted as guidance for the entire NanoSafety community, including young researchers, to highlight how individual research projects fit as a puzzle piece into the wider picture. It was an orientation-giving and educational event depicting the overall strategy behind NanoSafe(ty).

Means to achieve this included:

·         to offer a WG-overarching education/communication/discussion event involving the audience via interactive sessions;

·         to layout ways to go beyond with anything the nanosafety community have learned/developed to serve the emerging topics of Horizon Europe (emerging contaminants incl. microplastics, nanomedicine, safety assessment of novel/innovative/advanced materials for tomorrow along their entire life cycle);

·         to foster participation in creating better sustainable materials (than e.g. nanosilver in socks), technologies, medical approaches, etc.

·         to exhibit the perspectives of the NSC Working Groups and the different currently ongoing projects;

·         to be as interactive as possible using hands-on activities, e.g., by showing how-to operate e-tools, upload/retrieve data to/from repositories & perform models;

·         to facilitate vivid contribution to discussions using survey tools such as Mentimeter, WooClap, VoxVote, etc.

·         to offer different perspectives in pro/contra discussions, e.g., by defining challenger - defender roles taken by experts on specific topics or evtl. by dividing attendees into zoom breakout rooms

·         to show application of emerging NRG frameworks or SbD tools;

·         to request feedback to user interfaces and enable stakeholder involvement

We herewith share and document the educational materials for later use by the scientific community.

Martin Himly, Chair of the EU NSC Working Group A with gratitude to all presenters for their contributions!