Q&As in 2022

We spoke to Professor Kylie Vincent – professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford, co-founder of HydRegen Ltd, and Academic Champion for Women in Entrepreneurship – about turning academic research into industrial products.

Earthquakes are a natural hazard affecting millions of people globally every year. Researchers are working on understanding the mechanisms of earthquakes and how we can predict them from various angles, such as experimental work, theoretical modeling, and machine learning. We invited Marie Violay (EPFL Lausanne), Annemarie Baltay (USGS), Bertrand Rouet-Leduc (Kyoto University) and David Kammer (ETH Zürich) to discuss how such a multi-disciplinary approach can advance our understanding of Earthquakes.

We recently published our first Registered Report entitled ‘Value-free random exploration is linked to impulsivity’. We believe the format offers many benefits to strengthen hypothesis-driven research and are keen to share our experience with our readers as we open up the format to all fields of research. We interviewed the authors of the manuscript (Magda Dubois and Tobias Hauser) and one of the reviewers (Trevor Robbins) about their experience of the review process. We are editorially committed to take their comments on board to further improve our guidance and to optimally support our future authors.

Nature Communications is now welcoming Registered Report submissions from all fields of research (read our editorial here), and we want to encourage submissions from the ecology and evolutionary biology fields. To introduce this format to researchers in those fields, we interviewed two founding members of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE), a network of researchers aimed at improving research practices in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related fields: Shinichi Nakagawa (Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Synthesis at the University of New South Wales, UNSW) and Rose O’Dea (Secretary of SORTEE, postdoctoral researcher and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Below, they share their thoughts on how the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology can advance in reproducibility and transparency.

Advances in geospatial and Machine Learning techniques for large datasets of georeferenced observations have made it possible to produce model-based global maps of ecological and environmental variables. However, the implementation of existing scientific methods (especially Machine Learning models) to produce accurate global maps is often complex. Tomislav Hengl (co-founder of OpenGeoHub foundation), Johan van den Hoogen (researcher at ETH Zürich), and Devin Routh (Science IT Consultant at the University of Zürich) shared with Nature Communications their perspectives for creators and users of these maps, focusing on the key challenges in producing global environmental geospatial datasets to achieve significant impacts.

Lockdowns due to the pandemic in the last two years forced a critical number of chip-making facilities across the world to shut down, giving rise to the chip shortage issues. Prof. Meng-Fan (Marvin) Chang (National Tsing Hua University, TSMC—Taiwan), Prof. Huaqiang Wu (Tsinghua University—China), Dr. Elisa Vianello (CEA-Leti—France), Dr. Sang Joon Kim (Samsung Electronics—South Korea) and Dr. Mirko Prezioso (Mentium Techn.—US) talked to Nature Communications to better understand whether and to what extent this crisis has impacted the development of in-memory/neuromorphic chips, an emerging technology for future computing.

Chemical probes are selective small-molecule modulators, usually inhibitors, of their target protein’s function, that can be used in cell or even animal studies to interrogate the functions of their target proteins. Cheryl Arrowsmith, the leader of a new initiative called Target 2035, which seeks to identify a pharmacological modulator for most human proteins by the year 2035, and Paul Workman, the Executive Director of the nonprofit Chemical Probes Portal, an online resource dedicated to chemical probes, talked to Nature Communications about chemical probes, their respective paths to leadership positions in the field, the online resources available to those interested in the topic and the promise and value of open — collaborative — science. The below material is a modified transcript of a long discussion, preserving the conversational tone, but streamlined and edited for clarity, and thus we do not attribute the particular parts to Cheryl or Paul specifically except for when they shared their personal experiences.

This Q&A about technology transfer is intended as a useful resource to the Nature Communications readership, particularly academic scientists working in the life and physical sciences who have an interest in commercializing their research. We spoke to Dr. Andrea Crottini, Head of the Technology Transfer Office at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, who provided insights into the possible avenues to pursue.

Digital medicine tools, including medical AI, have been advocated as potential game-changers to solve long-standing healthcare access and treatment inequality issues in low and middle income countries. As these applications are increasingly becoming a reality, we connect here with researchers with experience in planning and deployment of these tools in under-resourced settings.

Bo Zhen (Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania), Andrea Blanco Redondo (Head of Silicon Photonics, Nokia Bell Labs), Alexander Szameit (Professor of Physics, University of Rostock), and Patrice Genevet (research scientist in photonics, Centre de recherche sur l’hétéro-épitaxie et ses applications, CNRS) talked to Nature Communications about the opportunities and challenges in the integration of topological photonics systems into real-world devices as well as envision new functionalities, but from a practical perspective.

Ruth Plummer is Professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine, Newcastle University, and an honorary consultant medical oncologist in Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. She directs the Sir Bobby Robson Cancer Trials Research Centre and leads the Newcastle Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre and CRUK Newcastle Cancer Centre. She has taken multiple agents targeting DDR into the clinic, including the first-in-human PARP and ATR inhibitors. In addition, she has an active clinical practice treating skin cancer, both in the advanced and adjuvant settings and with an associated clinical trials portfolio including both early and later phase trials. In this interview for Nature Communications, Ruth Plummer shares her knowledge about the basic principles for the design of clinical trials and how they should be reported.