The Danish Young Academy of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters has chosen out of 62 nominated research environments our research group NEtwoRks, Data, and Society (NERDS) as

Research Environment of the Year 2022

The Academy ceremoniously awarded the title and a prize on June 1st to our group’s nominators, Anastassia and Tiago, who motivated their nomination as follows:

In our group, we openly talk about the struggles of academia, such as stress, high pressure, competitiveness, gender, and racial biases – and about the struggles of our personal lives, such as balancing care duties and research work. As young academics, NERDS is the best company that we could wish for: individuals with curious minds, supporting each other in their personal quests for knowledge and for the betterment of society, which is what ultimately drives us all.

See the Danish Young Academy’s explanation here: http://www.youngacademy.dk/Aktiviteter/Forskningsmiljopris.aspx
Among other points, they write:

In just 3 years, NERDS has managed to create an exemplary academic environment and unity. The group shows that seniority and large center grants are not necessarily the only prerequisites for a good research environment.  

Given this title, we have been asked about our “secret”. Having experienced our fair share of abusive environments, these seem some reasonable guidelines:

1. Be nice to each other. Corollary: Surround yourself with the right people, and be very sure to not let toxic people into your environment.
2. Psychological safety is most important. Mistakes are expected, especially in science. It is normal to get stuck in the cloud and we must support each other through it. Disagreements are expected too, and a diversity of perspectives helps resolve them amicably.
3. Avoid having one boss. Research groups where one person is in power invites abuse. Keep inequalities to a minimum, make important decisions together.
4. Make sure people have all the freedom to mingle and build up a support network. This will make them strong and protect them from academia’s harassment networks.

Thank you Anastassia and Tiago for the nomination, thank you all NERDS for being so excellent to each other, thank you to our department head Peter Sestoft for the amazing support and efforts to create a great as possible environment on the department level, and cheers to the Danish Young Academy! 🍸

We will do our best to continue living up to this honorable title.

Luca Aiello was one of the recipients of this year’s Carlsberg Young Researcher Fellowships.

The Carlsberg Young Researcher Fellowship funds three-year fellowships for newly appointed tenured associate professors to establish an independent research group and forming an international network.

Luca’s winning proposal was awarded with DKK 5M:
COCOONS: COllective COordination through ONline Social media

In the coming decades, a defining task for humanity will be to solve global challenges through mass coordination. The goal of the project is to unveil the prime elements of social interactions that enable spontaneous coordination in the face of social dilemmas. It will do so by quantifying fundamental dimensions of social interactions with Natural Language Processing algorithms applied to online social media conversations, and to leverage principles from complex systems science to find how these dimensions are linked to cooperation outcomes in social networks.

We are excited about Luca’s success and are looking forward to welcome one new PhD student and two postdocs that will be recruited starting October 2022. Stay tuned for upcoming job calls.

Today Roberta Sinatra received the 2020 Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics!

The Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics is given once a year. It pursues the goal of promoting the work of young researchers and recognizing outstanding scientific contributions that use methods derived from physics to contribute to a better understanding of socio-economic problems.

The award committee has decided to award the prize shared to:

Dr. Roberta Sinatra,

for her outstanding contributions to understanding the social dynamics of science, human mobility and behaviour, on the grounds of network science and statistical physics methods,

AND

Dr. Manlio de Domenico,

for his outstanding and insightful work on multilayer networks and their applications to the field of socio-economic systems.

🎉We congratulate the two recipients! 🎉

Our recently published, NERDS-involved Nature paper “The universal visitation law of human mobility” has received some prominent, international media coverage in the last month. Here a selection of news articles that explain the paper’s findings and implications:

Une loi universelle régit la fréquentation des villes

Die Vorhersagbarkeit menschlicher Bewegungsmuster

Das Universalgesetz der Straße

Door gegevens van mobiele telefoons weten we nu: stedelingen reizen niet vaak naar andere stadsdelen

Há um padrão universal na forma como as pessoas viajam nas cidades

Universelles Muster menschlicher Mobilität entdeckt

Roberta Sinatra was one of the 19 recipients of this year’s Villum Young Investigators grant!

The Villum Young Investigator programme (YIP) focuses on attracting and retaining talented young Danish and international researchers at Danish universities. The aim is to support the development of high-level international research environments in the universities.

Roberta’s winning proposal was awarded with DKK 6M:
Bias Explained: Pushing Algorithmic Fairness with Models and Experiments 

Algorithms for ranking scientific information have an issue: they use citations, which are ingrained with human biases. Therefore, their output is also biased, creating inequalities and raising concerns of discrimination. This project aims to uncover the mathematical bias mechanisms that drive different citation trajectories given same quality, and to use them for creating fair algorithms.

We are overwhelmed with joy for Roberta’s success, and are looking forward to her future groundbreaking research. The grant will allow the recruitment of one PhD student and two postdocs – so stay tuned for upcoming job calls.

Link: https://veluxfoundations.dk/en/19-new-villum-young-investigators-in-2021