Aug 23, 2016 | Science and Art, Science and Policy
Gloria Benedikt was born to dance. She started at the age of three and since the age of 12 she has been training every day—applying the laws of physics to the body. But with a degree in government and an interest in current affairs, Benedikt now builds bridges between these fields to make a difference, as IIASA’s first science and art associate.
Conducted and edited by Anneke Brand, IIASA science communication intern 2016.
Gloria Benedikt © Daniel Dömölky Photography
When and how did you start to connect dance to broader societal questions?
The tipping point was when I was working in the library as an undergraduate student at Harvard University. I had to go to the theater for a performance, and thought to myself: I wish I could stay here, because there is more creativity involved in writing a paper than in going on stage executing the choreography of an abstract ballet. I realized that I had to get out of ballet company life and try to create work that establishes the missing link between ballet and the real world.
To follow my academic interest, I could write papers, but I had another language that I could use—dance—and I knew that there is a lot of power in this language. So I started choreographing papers that I wrote and rather than publishing them in journals, I performed them. The first work was called Growth, a duet illustrating how our actions on one side of the world impact the other side. As dancers we need to concentrate and listen to each other, take intelligent risks and not let go. If one of us lets go, we would both fall on our faces.
What motivated you make this career change?
We as contemporary artists have to redefine our roles. In recent decades we became very specialized, which is great, but we lost our connection to society. Now it’s time to bring art back into society, where it can create an impact. I am not a scientist. I don’t know exactly how the data is produced, but I can see the results, make sense of it and connect it to the things that I am specialized in.
How did you get involved with IIASA?
I first started interdisciplinary thinking with the economist Tomáš Sedláček who I met at the European Culture Forum 2013. A year later I had a public debate with Tomáš and the composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven in Vienna. Pavel Kabat, IIASA Director General and CEO, attended this and invited me to come to IIASA.
What have you done at IIASA so far?
For the first year at IIASA I created a variety of works to reach out to scientists and policymakers and with every work I went a step further. This year, for the first time I tried to integrate the two groups by actively involving scientists in the creation process. The result, COURAGE, an interdisciplinary performance debate will premiere at the European Forum Alpbach 2016. In September, I will co-direct a new project called Citizen Artist Incubator at IIASA, for performing artists who aim to apply artistic innovation to real-world problems.
Gloria and Mimmo Miccolis performing Enlightenment 2.0 at the EU-JRC. The piece was specifically created for policymakers. It combined text, dance, and music, and reflected on art, science, climate change, migration and the role of Europe in it. © Ino Lucia
How do scientists react to your work?
The response to my performances at the European Forum Alpbach 2015 and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (EU-JRC) was extremely positive. It was amazing to see how people reacted—some even in tears. Afterwards they said that they didn’t understand what I was trying to say for the past two days, but the moment that they saw the piece, they got it. Of course people are skeptical at first—if they were not, I will not be able to make a difference.
Gloria and Mimmo Miccolis rehearsing at Festspielhaus St. Pölten for COURAGE which will premiere at the European Forum Alpbach 2016.
What are you trying to achieve?
I’m trying to figure out how to connect the knowledge of art and science so that we can tackle the problems we face more efficiently. There are multiple dimensions to it. One is trying to figure out how we can communicate science better. Can we appeal to reason and emotion at the same time to win over hearts and minds?
As dancers we can physically illustrate scientific findings. For instance, in order to perform certain complicated movements, timing is extremely critical. The same goes for implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Are you planning on doing research of your own?
At the moment I am trying something, evaluating the results, and seeing what can be improved, so in a way that is a type of research. For instance, some preliminary results came from the creation of COURAGE. We found that if we as scientists and artists want to work together, both parties will have to compromise, operate beyond our comfort zones, trust each other, and above all keep our audience at heart. That is exactly what we expect humanity to do when tackling global challenges. We have to be team players. It’s like putting a performance on stage. Everyone has to work together.
More information about Gloria Benedikt:
Benedikt trained at the Vienna state Opera Ballet School, and has a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Harvard University, where she also danced for the Jose Mateo Ballet Theater. Her latest works created at IIASA will be performed at the European Forum Alpbach 2016 as well as the International Conference on Sustainable Development in New York.
www.gloriabenedikt.com
Fulfilling the Enlightenment dream: Arts and science complementing each other
Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Aug 19, 2016 | Science and Policy, Young Scientists
By Anneke Brand, IIASA science communication intern 2016.
For Malgorzata (Gosia) Smieszek it’s all about making sound decisions, and she is not afraid of using unconventional routes in doing so. She applies this rule to various aspects of her fast-paced life. Whether it is taking the right steps in trail running races, skiing or relocating to the Arctic Circle to do a PhD.
Gosia Smieszek © J. Westerlund, Arctic Centre
Gosia’s passion for the Arctic began to evolve during a conversation with a professor at a time when she was contemplating the idea of returning to academia. “I remember, when he said the word Arctic, I thought: yes, that’s what I want to do. True, before I was interested in energy and environmental issues, but the Arctic was certainly not on my radar. So I went to the first bookstore I found, asked for anything about the North and the lady, after giving me a very confused look, said she might have some photo books. So I left with one and things developed from there.”
In 2013 Gosia joined the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. Living there is not always easy, but hey, if you get to see the Northern Lights, reindeers and Santa Claus on a regular basis, it might be worth enduring long times of darkness in winter and endless sunshine in summer. With temperatures averaging −30°C, Rovaniemi is the perfect playground for Gosia.
Running is one of Gosia’s favorite sports. She has competed in a few marathons, but her biggest race to date is the Butcher’s Run, an ultra trail of 83km over the Bieszczady mountains in Poland. Here she is running in the Tatra mountains. © Gosia Smieszek
Gosia grew up in Gliwice, a town in southern Poland, before moving to Kraków where she completed her undergraduate degree in international relations and political science. This was just before Poland’s accession to the EU, so it was the perfect time to pursue studies in this field.
She continued her studies in various locations including Belgium, France, Poland, and Austria. Before continuing her education and later working at the College of Europe, she also gained working experience as a translator at a large printing house in her home town in Poland.
For her PhD Gosia focuses on the interactions between scientists and policymakers, with the aim of enhancing evidence-based decision making in the Arctic Council. Scientific research on the Arctic has been conducted for decades, but “when it comes to translating science into practice it is still a huge challenge―on all possible levels,” she says.
“Scientists and policymakers have their own, very different, universes—with their own stories, goals, timelines, working methods and standards. It is better than in the past, but still extremely difficult to make these two universes meet.”
Gosia with fellow YSSPers, Dina, Stephanie and Chibulu during a visit to Hallstadt. © Chibulu Luo
As part of the Arctic Futures Initiative at IIASA, Gosia investigates and maps the structural organization of the Arctic Council and aims to determine the effectiveness of interactions between scientists and policymakers, as well as ways to improve the flow of knowledge and information between them.
Because of the nature of her work, Gosia spends almost half her time away from home, but you will never find her traveling without running shoes, swimming gear, and something to read. Diving, one of her greatest passions, has taken her to amazing places like Cuba and the Maldives, where meeting a whale shark face-to-face topped her list of underwater experiences.
Gosia swimming with a whale shark. © Eiko Gramlich
Gosia is truly hoping to make a difference with her research on science-policy interface. She says: “To me, trying to bridge science and policy is a truly fascinating endeavor. Exploring these two worlds, seeking to understand them and learning their ‘languages’ to enable better communication between them is what drives me in my research. So hopefully we can learn from past mistakes and make things better—this time.”
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Jul 29, 2016 | Air Pollution, Young Scientists
By Anneke Brand, IIASA science communication intern 2016.
Accidents, lane closures, and congestion all affect the flow of road traffic and harmful emissions from vehicles. Live traffic data allow congestion to be detected more accurately and provide a more precise overview of vehicle emissions at different times and places. In his project for the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP), Fabian Heidegger investigates how road traffic affects air pollution in cities, using Vienna and surrounding areas as a case study.
Air pollution is a major problem in Europe and globally. Health impacts of air pollution include a range of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. “10-20% of Europe’s urban population is exposed to excessive levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), along with several other air pollutants. NO2 pollution is highest along busy roads. Technical measures have so far often been circumvented, so cities are looking for other measures to reduce the pollution load. Traffic management has therefore gained interest as a way to reduce air pollution,” says Jens Borken-Kleefeld, Heidegger’s study leader at IIASA.
To calculate the amount of air pollution that cars and other vehicles release into the air, researchers use models that apply various sets of data: traffic networks, where and how far people drive, and emission factors of different vehicle categories. Input data for the model may include how many people live in a certain area, how many of them use cars, where they normally drive, and how many grams of pollutants (such as nitric oxide and NO2 gases) their type of cars emit per kilometer.
Inner city Vienna. © Radub85 | Dreamstime.com
Most of these models rely on average daily traffic data. For Heidegger’s YSSP project, which is related to his PhD work at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, he is incorporating real-time data, measured every five minutes, into a traffic simulation model developed by Intelligent Transport Systems Vienna Region. A set of detectors in and around the city record the number and speed of vehicles. In addition, location data from the taxi fleet is incorporated into the traffic simulation. Heidegger can therefore immediately identify adverse traffic conditions like stop-and-go traffic, which has a high impact on emissions. This allows for a more accurate calculation and can help design traffic interventions for improving both traffic flow and air quality.
“In the case of a road closure, local emissions will obviously be lower at the specific road but total emissions for the area could be higher than before when drivers use alternative, longer routes or end up in stop-and-go traffic,” says Heidegger.
In order to understand how these diversions and the displacement of pollutants can affect overall emissions, Heidegger will first determine the emissions per street section, and second, what the effects are of diversions from day-to-day traffic patterns. Together with researchers from the Air Quality and Greenhouse Gases Program at IIASA, Heidegger plans to assess the impact of different intervention scenarios, for example an environmental zone in the city, where only modern cars will be allowed to enter. In a second scenario he will look at the effect of people commuting to Vienna, and a third scenario will explore the consequences of expanding pedestrian zones. The researchers hope that this study will better their understanding of the potential of traffic management to reduce air pollution.
More information
Air Pollution Policy Review 2011-2013
GAINS Model
AIR Program
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Jul 15, 2016 | Alumni, Climate, Climate Change, Young Scientists
César Terrer, participant in the IIASA 2016 Young Scientists Summer Program, and PhD student at Imperial College London, recently made a groundbreaking contribution to the way scientists think about climate change and the CO2 fertilization effect. In this interview he discusses his research, his first publication in Science, and his summer project at IIASA.
Conducted and edited by Anneke Brand, IIASA science communication intern 2016.
César Terrer ©Vilma Sandström
How did your scientific career evolve into climate change and ecosystem ecology?
I studied environmental science in Spain and then I went to Australia, where I started working on free-air CO2 enrichment, or FACE experiments. These are very fancy experiments where you fumigate a forest with CO2 to see if the trees grow faster. In 2014 I moved to London for my PhD project. There, instead of focusing on one single FACE experiment, I collected data from all of them. This allowed me to make general conclusions on a global scale rather than a single forest.
You recently published a paper in Science magazine. Could you summarize the main findings?
We found that we can predict how much CO2 plants transfer into growth through the CO2 fertilization effect, based on two variables—nitrogen availability and the type of mycorrhizal, or fungal, association that the plants have. The impact of the type of mycorrhizae has never been tested on a global scale—and we found that it is huge. I think it’s fascinating that such tiny organisms play such a big role at a global scale on something as important as the terrestrial capacity of CO2 uptake.
How did you come up with the idea? One random day in the shower?
Long story short, researchers used to think that plants will grow faster, and take up a lot of the CO2 we emit. They assumed this in most of their models as well. But plants need other elements to grow besides CO2. In particular, they need nitrogen. So scientists started to question whether the modeled predictions overestimated the CO2 fertilization effect, because the models did not consider nitrogen limitation. To find out, I analyzed all the FACE experiments and indeed I saw that in general plants were not able to grow faster under elevated CO2 and nitrogen limitation. However, in some cases plants were able to take advantage of elevated CO2 even under nitrogen limitation. I grouped together the experiments where plants could grow under nitrogen limitation and after a lot of reading I saw what they had in common: the type of fungi! It turned out that one type of mycorrhizae is really good at transferring large quantities of nitrogen to the plant and the other type is not.
How did that feel?
Awesome! When I saw the graph, I knew: this is going to be important. Of course, after this, my coauthors helped me to polish the story. Without them, the conclusions would not be as robust and clear.
So how does this process work? Where do the fungi get the nitrogen from?
Particular soils might have a lot of nitrogen, but the amount available for plants to absorb might be low. Also, plants have to compete with non-fungal microorganisms for nitrogen. So if there is not much there, the microorganisms take it all. It’s called immobilization. Instead of mineralizing nitrogen, they immobilize it so that plants cannot take it up, at least not in the short term. Some types of fungi are much more efficient in accessing nitrogen, and associated with roots they allow plants to overcome limitations.
Nitrogen mobilization abilities of different types of fungi. Growth of plants associated with fungi not beneficial for nitrogen uptake (illustrated as grass roots on the left) could be limited by low nitrogen availability in soil. Other plants have the advantage of increased nitrogen uptake due to their beneficial association with certain types of fungi (illustrated as yellow mushrooms connected to the roots of the tree on the right). ©Victor O. Leshyk.
What is the impact of your findings?
Plants currently take up 25-30% of the CO2 we emit, but the question is whether they will be able to continue to do so in the long term. Our findings bring good and bad news. On the one hand, the CO2 fertilization effect will not be limited entirely by nitrogen, because some of the plants will be able to overcome nitrogen limitation through their root fungi. But on the other hand, some plant species will not be able to overcome nitrogen limitation.
There was a big debate about this. One group of scientists believed that plants will continue to take up CO2 and the other group said that plants will be limited by nitrogen availability. These were two very contrasting hypotheses. We discovered that neither of the hypotheses was completely right, but both were partly true, depending on the type of fungi. Our results could bring closure to this debate. We can now make more accurate predictions about global warming.
What will you do at IIASA and how will you link it to your PhD?
I want to upscale and quantify how much carbon plants will take up in the future. If we are to predict the capacity of plants to absorb CO2, we need to quantify mycorrhizal distribution and nitrogen availability on a global scale. We are updating mycorrhizal distribution maps according to distribution of plant species. We know for instance that pines are associated with ectomycorrhizal fungi and always will be. To quantify nitrogen availability we use maps of different soil parameters that are available on a rough global scale.
© Adam Edwards | Dreamstime.com
About César Terrer
Prior to his PhD, Terrer studied at the University of Murcia in Spain and the University of Western Sydney in Australia.
Currently he is a member of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, UK. For this study he collaborated with researchers from the University of Antwerp, Northern Arizona University, Indiana University and Macquarie University.
In the IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program, Terrer works together with Oskar Franklin from the Ecosystem Services and Management Program and Christina Kaiser from the Evolution and Ecology Program.
Further reading
Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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