The University of Tokyo
WINGS-PES

19th WINGS-PES Salon was held.

Report by:

1. ISHII Hidemasa (Department of Complexity Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences)
2. KASAI Hiroki (Department of Computational Biology and Medical Sciences, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences)
3. MURAMATSU Shun (Department of Precision Engineering, School of Engineering)

1. Overview of 19th Salon of Excellence

Date/Time: May 27, 2022, 15:00 – 17:00 
Venue: Zoom 

19th Salon of Excellence took place on May 27th (Fr.) online via Zoom. With the aim of facilitating communication among participants, we prepared a program consisting of two parts. The themes for the first and the second part were research life and career / life planning, respectively. In each part, one of the hosts gave a brief talk to introduce the theme, and then we took time for interactions in breakout rooms. Through a pre-event survey, we found that some students wished to communicate with each other in breakout rooms as we did in 17th Salon of Excellence (February, 2022). Accordingly we considered ways to promote active discussions in breakout rooms, and we decided to give brief talks on topics that are likely to matter to all the participants. Following are the features of 19th Salon of Excellence:

• The salon consists of two parts, each of which consists of a brief talk and interactions in breakout rooms.
• A web service called Slido* was utilized to collect feedbacks from participants in real time.
• The salon brought research life and life planning into focus, which we believed were of common interests among participants with various expertise.

* Slido is a web service that promotes mutual communication in events such as lectures and seminars, offering Q&A and Live Poll functions.
The number of participants that can access an event page is limited to 100 for free accounts, but one can use features for paid plans by logging
in with a Webex account linked to UTokyo.

In this article, we review the latest Salon of Excellence, referring to the questions from the participants and the results of the post-event survey. Ishii wrote section 1 and subsection 3.1, Kasai wrote subsection 2.1, Muramatsu wrote subsections 2.2, 3.2 and section 4, and Ishii organized and modified the entire article.

Figure 1 (Most of) the participants in 19th Salon of Excellence. Around 85 participants were present.

2. Part 1: Research life

2.1 Brief talk and Q&A

In the first part, Kasai explained his research theme and activities in his laboratory as a topic for discussion on research life. In the first half, Kasai explained his research theme: “Mathematical simulation of cancer microenvironment”.

And he explained about the alignment of objectives necessary for advancing research fields that integrate science and medicine, and the perspective that can be broadened by participating in Salon of Excellence and the Sensing Study Group in order to advance fusion research. In the latter half of the presentation, he explained how his laboratory is currently conducting research in this current covid-19 crisis. He explained that his laboratory is a dry lab, mainly for analysis, and that lab members use various tools to advance their research online and how they overcome the language barrier. During the Q&A session, we felt that Slido made it easier for participants to ask questions. Questions included the following.

• Did you notice any advantages of online meetings rather than face-to face meetings?
• Did any students get sick because of the lack of interaction? (translated by the author)
• Is the language used in lab meetings Japanese? (translated by the author)

There were many questions about online/offline lab activities in this current covid-19 crisis. Now that the restrictions on the covid-19 are being lifted, we felt that many people wanted to know what they need to know for face-to-face meetings and interactions.

2.2 Interactions in breakout rooms

Figure 2 Discussion topics selected by the participants in Part 1 (= = 52).

In the first part, we prepared 40 breakout rooms in total: two rooms for each combination of languages (Japanese / English) and discussion topics shown in Table 1. Figure 2 shows the discussion topics which participants selected in the session. In general, the most popular topics were related to how to conduct research. In the breakout room on “Simulation in your research,” which was particularly popular, some participants commented that they were able to have a meaningful discussion in a valuable space where everyone had knowledge about simulation. On the other hand, there were some opinions that it was difficult to share their problems due to the different simulation software (methods) used.

3. Part 2: Career and life planning

3.1 Brief talk and Q&A

Part 2 was organized around the theme of career / life planning. First, Ishii gave a brief talk where he shared his personal experience about balancing studying with building a home. The talk lasted for about 10 minutes, and then we had the Q&A session for 5 minutes. Previous Salons have dealt with contents and processes of research. However we noticed there were also needs for discussions about career and life planning. As I need to mention personal topics such as marriage and child rearing, some participants might feel uncomfortable. In order to prevent such situation, I emphasized that I would share my experience as one example, acknowledging the diversity on career and life planning, partnerships, families, etc. I also tried to explicitly talk about myself, avoiding generalizations.
Since delicate topics were discussed in the second part, we were able to take advantage of Slido’s feature that participants can post comments and questions anonymously. There were questions about tips on building a home and balancing it with conducting research, and financial situations. I was also asked about web sites where one can find information on marriage during students, which reminded me that only a little information is available yet about making a home while being a student or a researcher*.

*Unfortunately, I haven’t found such media and I could not provide a useful answer.

Even though marriage and child rearing are not relevant for everyone, they are real and urgent for a certain number of students, and it is difficult to obtain related information by themselves. I was worried about how the participants would react to these topics and also hesitated to share my personal stories with a large audience, but this Salon told me, and hopefully participants too, that students who are concerned about balancing studying with commitment to family are not alone.

3.2 Interactions in breakout rooms

	Japanese	English
1.	留学とキャリア	Studying abroad in your career
2.	留学と家庭	Studying abroad with your family
3.	博士課程卒業後の進路	Career plans after PhD course
4.	研究・学業と結婚・子育て	Marriage & child rearing in academia
5.	研究者の経済的状況	Financial situations of researchers
6.	在宅での研究・学業	Studying at home
7.	(研究) 生活に役立つツール・情報	Tools and tips for (research) life
8.	ワークライフバランス	Work-life balance
9.	卓越サロンへの要望など	Comments for Salon of Excellence
10.	フリーテーマ	Freewheeling conversations

Table 2 A list of discussion topics for breakout rooms in Part 2.

In the second part, we prepared 40 breakout rooms in total: two rooms for each combination of languages (Japanese / English) and discussion topics shown in Table 2. More than half of the topics (topics 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 9) are the ones where participants need not mention marriage or child rearing, so that no participants would be forced to talk about their private lives contrary to their will. Figure 3 shows the discussion topics which participants selected in the session. The most popular topic was “Career plans after PhD course”. In this breakout room, many participants commented that it was mentally meaningful for them to share their problems and concerns, even if they could not solve them substantially, by exchanging information among various participants who had different hopes of career paths. The second most popular topic, “Marriage and child rearing in academia”, was considered valuable by many participants because it provided an opportunity to frankly discuss aggressive and private topics that they would not normally be able to ask about. On the other hand, others were concerned that it is a very sensitive and delicate topic. It is very
difficult to discuss in-depth topics that are usually difficult to discuss without offending the participants, but at the same
time, it is a very worthwhile challenge. We will tackle it in the future.

Figure 3 Discussion topics selected by the participants in Part 2 (= = 52).

4. Concluding remarks

4.1 Evaluation of 19th Salon of Excellence

We believe the use of Slido is worth considering in subsequent Salons. In particular, the use of Slido made the Q&A session more active, since participants could post questions anonymously. On the other hand, we could have made better use of the tool. For instance, although Slido enables audience to post questions before the talk finishes and to respond to questions and comments of others, those features did not contribute to the Salon. We also tried gathering feedback on the discussions in breakout rooms using Live Poll feature, but only a few responses were obtained.
This salon adopted a small group discussion format using a breakout room (Zoom) for the purpose of interaction among students. This is actually the second time this format has been used (the first was the 17th Excellence Salon), and among the responses to one of the questions in the first salon’s questionnaire, “Topics I would like to discuss in depth in future salons,” there were responses such as “I would like to have workshops and discussions on simulations,” and “It is difficult to talk about career paths as a daily conversation because it is sensitive, but I think it will be easier to open up by presenting it as a theme of discussion.” Therefore, this time, we tried to put two themes “simulation” and “career and life planning” as cores, and present some topics as an introduction to facilitate each discussion. As a result, we feel that the themes presented and their introduction worked very well. On the other hand, in order to deepen the discussion among students from different fields and disciplines, we felt that it is necessary not only to
present interdisciplinary themes, but also to raise core issues common to all fields by eliminating the differences/errors among them. We would like to establish a framework for stimulating such interdisciplinary discussions in the next and subsequent salons as we continue our interdisciplinary discussions.

4.2 Suggestions for subsequent Salons

First of all, small group discussions like this one are very effective for interaction among students, both online and offline, and should be held regularly in the future. In such cases, it may be possible to make the discussion more active by using a more in-depth / specific theme for the breakout room name, or by narrowing the focus and raising the issue in advance, rather than using a vague theme like this one. There were also comments that they would like to know the content of everyone’s research through 3-minute research presentations and poster presentations. The others would like to know the daily lives of the professors and administrators. The poster presentation was regularly held in the face-to-face salon before the Corona Disaster, so it would be feasible if the face-to-face salon could be resumed. It would also be very interesting to have the teachers share their daily (or weekly) routines, and we hope that this will be realized in the subsequent salon.

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