Events & News
UCD Online Journal Seminar was held.
The Biological Science (BS) Division, NAIST and the University of California Davis (UCD) jointly hold journal seminars using the remote meeting system in January-March every year.
9 graduate/research students from NAIST’s BS division and 7 PhD students from UCD participated in the seminar. This seminar series consists of 8 sessions, and students discuss a recently published research article each time. A group of 2-3 students lead the discussion, and a professor from each side attends it as an advisor to facilitate discussion. This program has been a good opportunity for students and professors to interact with colleagues within and between the universities.
Due to the pandemic, many lectures at NAIST had to be quickly restructured by utilizing online lectures and video archives. However, because this seminar series had already been online for 8 years, there was no need to change the format for this seminar. Such online lectures connecting universities in two different countries were very uncommon until the pandemic began.
The only change that was made for this seminar series was to connect the two institutions by Zoom instead of the Polycom system. Thanks to this change, participants could join the seminars from anywhere, and students and faculty members from the International Christian University joined the seminar as observers in this year. This flexibility is a strength of online lectures. The format of this journal seminar has matured during the last 8 years to effectively encourage all participants from different places to cooperate with each other. This year’s seminars reminded us that, regardless of which telecommunication platform we use, it is the format of the seminar that is making this lecture series successful. We hope that the students from both universities enjoyed the fruitful discussions.
（March 15, 2021）
