Ljuba Bacharova¹, Marta Kollarova²

¹International Laser Center CVTI, Bratislava, Slovak Republic

²Marta Kollarova, Premedix Academy NGO, Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Introduction

IRIS Slovakia 2022 was held on-line in September 21 -24, 2022. Although the COVID pandemic looked as regressing, it was not possible in December 2021 – January 2022 (when the decision had to be made) to predict the epidemiologic situation in September 2022. Therefore, a decision was made to be on the safe side and organize an on-line course. For the second time the IRIS course was organized under the patronage of the Ministry of Education, Research, Science and Sport of the Slovak Republic, what reflects the growing recognition of the IRIS courses.

During the 16 years of IRIS courses, the key characteristics have been defined and maintained: the courses are interdisciplinary, international and eligible for those interested in biomedical research. In the history of the IRIS courses already four on-line courses were organized – the first partly on-line course IRIS Slovakia 2020, then the first completely on-line course IRIS Kyrgyzstan 2020, followed by the on-line courses IRIS Slovakia 2021 and 2022. During this period a considerable experience with the on-line arrangement has been gained, for the organizers, the faculty as well as for the participants. This report summarizes the key moments from the IRIS Slovakia 2022 course.

The program followed the standard schedule of 4 workshops:

Workshop # 1    Project selection and Introduction to research proposal

Workshop # 2    Research design and methods I: Study population and outcomes

Workshop # 3    Research design and methods II: Data collection and analysis

Workshop # 4    Research administration

Final presentations

Faculty and organizers

Some interesting changes were introduced regarding the faculty. The role of the so-called “core faculty” was to introduced individual workshops and moderate/ facilitate discussions: Ljuba Bacharova (Slovakia), Eric Eisenstein (USA), Jonathan Lipton (New Zealand), Gulmira Kudaiberdieva (Kyrgyzstan), Peter Skrak (Slovakia), Uliana Pidvalna (Ukraine), Katarzyna Piotrowicz (Poland), Anna Mierzynska (Poland), and Natalia Sabolova (Slovakia).

Additionally, a so-called “extended” faculty was created of a flexible set of additional faculty members with the “part-time” participation in discussion, according to their availability and special interests. It included a spectrum of researchers and university teachers, one editor of a scientific journal, and a CEO of a company involved in biomedical research: Mustafa Inan (Turkiye), Nina Hakacova (Sweden), Lubica Murinova (Slovakia), Zora Krivosikova (Slovakia), Brigita Benkoova (Slovakia), Daniela Farkasova (Slovakia). The idea of inviting “extended” faculty is strongly related to the building of and extending the network of faculty, to provide additional input to the discussions from different perspectives, to simulate “conference” discussion. It reflects a continuous effort to build further international as well as national faculty capacities.

And last but not least, interesting personalities were invited for discussions, this year it was Lukas Bielik (Slovakia), a professional interested in general methodology of science, in the models of scientific explanation and deductive and non-deductive arguments.

Participants and projects

 The participants came from five countries: Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Sweden, Ukraine, and USA. The total number of participants was 12, so three groups of 4 participants were created.

1.            Group CHOL-GAST study: Association between hypocholesterolemia and gastric cancer in adult population (Anastasiia Shaparets, Sunita Pokhrel Bhattarai, Miriam Kozárová)

2.            Group Recto-stat-ineers: The association between tumor blood flow measured by MRI in patients with locally advanced colorectal cancer and relapse (Daniel Ruman, Lea Christierson, Luca Ochs and Valerii Orel)

3.            Group Four Funny Figures: Incidence of Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) in Patients older than 60 years before (2014 – 2018) and during (2019 – 2023) COVID-19 pandemic (Valerie Hartig, Rasa Fuchs, Viktoriia Kostyshena, Lukas Zelieska)

Figure 1. Discussing the data collection

The geographic scope of the faculty and the participants was rather broad. For participants it included Europe and North America, and for the faculty North America – Europe – Central Asia – Australia. The variety of locations required a careful adaptation of the logistics considering the considerable differences in time zones. Therefore, for the first time the beginning of the program was shifted to the afternoon hours and lasted till evening (if the central European time is taken as the reference). Surprisingly it was a good compromise: for the European participants the mornings could be utilized for their clinical or other duties, for those located in places with extreme time differences it was still acceptable.

Interesting enrichment of the program was the modification of the WS#4: the experience with preparing and running a real project, originally rooted in discussions during IRIS 2021 was presented as a panel discussion by Eric Eisenstein, Anna Mierzynska and Natalia Sabolova.  Natalia Sabolova, a psychologist from Kosice, Slovakia, showed her deep interest in the topic of the action crisis during IRIS 2021, so the faculty offered her the support in finding partners and in international mentoring during the project development. The decision was made in October 2021 and the team of Ljuba Bacharova, Eric Eisenstein and Katarzyna Piotrowicz, as international mentors, Natalia Sabolova and Anna Mierzynska as the researchers, and Monica Hricova, as Natalia’s supervisor, started regular on-line meetings. The first experience showed that developing the idea and its adaptation according to the feasibility, including the administration related to the approval with local authorities required much longer time as compared to planning anticipated during developing a training project at IRIS. The administration and management of the project is the key topic of the WS#4. Our experience supports the idea to prepare a focused course specifically on the project management.