Addressing Grand Societal Challenges. Check the ICRI 2022 sessions topics
In addition to Plenary sessions, ICRI 2022 will also offer Parallel sessions and Parallel themes. They will focus on Grand Societal Challenges.
After establishing the ICRI 2022 key topics, the Programme Committee also agreed on the programme’s content. This will consist of Plenary sessions, Parallel sessions, Parallel themes and also a Breakfast session, intended to facilitate participation from different time zones, especially Australia and Asia. An imaginary red thread running throughout the programme will be the focus on how research infrastructures help to react to Grand Societal Challenges.
Programme committee co-chair Jan Hrušák describes some of the most pressing challenges of our times: „Environmental and energy crisis, climate change mitigation, digitalisation and after all even the pandemic of infectious diseases. Those are topics that have become very present and very real in our everyday lives recently.“ Therefore Plenary and Parallel sessions will focus on how research infrastructures contribute to addressing Grand Societal Challenges. The sessions aim to explore ways of convergence of research infrastructure policy-making with policy-making in other sectoral areas, such as industry, energy, environment, agriculture, health, social affairs or security, where research infrastructures essentially contribute to knowledge-based solutions to those significant societal and economic challenges.
Apart from the Plenary and Parallel sessions, however, this issue will also resonate to a greater or lesser extent during the four Parallel themes, which will take up a substantial part of Thursday’s programme. These will run simultaneously in three time slots, 1,5 hour each. The first, focused on societal and economic benefits and impact of research infrastructures, aims to show a broader perspective rather than highlighting the traditional economic impact of research infrastructures. „We´d like to demonstrate how significantly Research infrastructures impact society, local economies, and even the public perception of science. This means that we want to show concrete cases and specific examples of how Research infrastructures can help tackle societal problems,“ comments Jan Hrušák.
The second theme will focus on the ecosystem approach to research infrastructures, demonstrating the importance of cooperation of the big ones with the smaller ones accross geographies. The third will focus on sharing scientific data globally and investigate the different approaches across respective regions and nations. The ourth theme will deal with the transnational access to research infrastructures in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemics.
The Programme Committee has also already identified potential speakers and approached them to speak at the conference. The final programme is expected to be announced at the end of May/June when it will be published in the Programme section of the official website.
For more information on ICRI 2022, please follow the ICRI 2022 website http://www.icri2022.cz, Twitter or LinkedIn, using hashtag #icri2022.