The Convergence Health and Technology Open Research Awards are a recognition for students and researchers who make their work publicly available. Although their fields of research are different, the students who won the award have one thing in common. They want a shift in the scientific paradigm: open science should be the norm. Five young scientists about their work and mission.

1) Leila Inigo de la Cruz

PhD student at the faculty of Applied Sciences in the Bionanoscience Department at TU Delft.

‘My research is about deciphering the principles of how the genotype of a cell gives rise to its phenotype. This is a significant challenge in today’s cell biology field. Open Science is still not the norm across all scientists, that has very much to do with what we understand by ‘good science’. And nowadays, it is majorly focused on ‘cool’ and breakthrough results and less on methods and procedures to arrive at specific conclusions, as well as on negative results or replication studies.’

// Open and transparent

‘The lack of training that many scientists have, for example, in developing open-source code bases that can be reusable by other peers as well as good documentation practices, is directly impacting negatively on the capacity to do open science. The award is a recognition of my work to make my research more open and transparent to other peers.

2) Max Welz

Third-year PhD candidate at the econometrics department at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

‘My research fields are statistics and econometrics. I upload my working papers to preprint servers and/or my own website so that there are no barriers to reading them. In addition, I upload replication material to my public GitHub account. Importantly, I exclusively use freely available open-source software in my work so that anyone who wishes to replicate my work can easily do so.

// Messy data  

I develop statistical methods for the analysis of complex datasets. These methods are designed to be robust, which means that they still work reasonably well on messy data. For instance, Andreas Alfons and I are currently working on a statistical method to identify when survey respondents stop to provide accurate responses because of fatigue or boredom; this is particularly relevant in the behavioral, psychological, or organizational sciences, where surveys tend to be lengthy. In addition, I have an affiliation with the department of public health at Erasmus Medical Center, where I help analyze datasets in cancer research. Methods that acknowledge the possibility that data may be messy, that is, robust methods, are more reliable than methods whose performance crucially depends on the assumption that data are ‘nice’. Hence, by using robust methods, researchers can be more confident in the validity of their results.

3) Sebastian van der Voort

Post-doctoral researcher at the department of radiology of Erasmus MC, neuro-oncological imaging.

‘The award is a nice recognition of our work. I want to share information as much as possible. Because you can still do beautiful research, but if no one can really use your research, the added value is always less. I have often found an article that described a method that made me think: wow, this is very useful, I can use this in my own research. Only to find that the researchers didn’t share their method, which meant that I had to do a lot of work to implement the method myself. Something that doesn’t always go well. In addition, our work is (often) paid for from public money, so it seems only right to me that the public should be able to access it. It’s nice to see that there are these kinds of initiatives, to get confirmed that there is really interest in open science.

// Care

I would like to contribute in improving patient care. I do research on patients with brain tumors (gliomas), where we see whether we can predict the aggressiveness of the tumor based on the MRI scans of these patients.

Typically, aggressiveness is determined from a sample of tumor tissue obtained from surgery to remove the tumor or from a biopsy (surgery specifically to obtain a sample of tumor tissue for analysis). However, this has a lot of impact on the patient; in addition to the patient undergoing surgery, it also takes a long time before the piece of tumor tissue is analyzed. Using artificial intelligence (AI), it is possible to determine the aggressiveness of the tumor based on the MRI scans that are made of the patient by predicting certain genetic factors. As a result, it is less invasive for the patient and the treating physician has this information available sooner.’

4) Pavlo Bazilinskyy

Was a postdoc at TU Delft when he heard he was nominated. Now he is assistant professor at TU Eindhoven.
‘I am a bit advocate of open science and it is very nice to see the recognition of the importance of the practices of open science in research. I work on AI-driven interaction between automated vehicles and other road users. I look into ways future cars can collaborate and interact with people both inside and outside of the vehicle. Traffic involves many humans. And a human is complicated. When many humans interact on a road, it gets exponentially more complicated.

// Safer cars to save people

I am researching how we can make traffic safer, given such a complexity of the human factor in a multi-agent environment. More than 1.3 million people die on the roads every year. I am trying to make cars safer to save those people.

5) Brandon Rasman

PhD Candidate Department of Neuroscience, Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam

‘My research focuses on understanding how the brain and nervous system controls standing balance. Put simply: how do we stand and why do we fall? Although our ancestors first adopted a bipedal posture 6-7 million years ago, we do not have definitive answers to these questions. This topic is primarily investigated by performing experiments with human volunteers and using a variety of research techniques such as: robotic simulation, sensory stimulation and motion tracking. By carefully controlling the sensory, motor and mechanical aspects of standing balance, my experiments aim to unravel the fundamental principles of human standing. Understanding the mechanisms that underlay standing balance is of interest for many fields including: evolutionary biology, neuroscience, biomechanics, artificial intelligence and robotics. Furthermore, balance-related falls have substantial healthcare, economic and societal costs, and identifying the fundamental processes governing human balance is crucial to develop technologies to reduce fall risk.’