Young Scientist Ambassador Programme

The GYA Young Scientist Ambassador Programme (YSAP) promotes the efforts by GYA members to bridge the international scientific gap by facilitating cultural, scientific, intellectual, or educational interactions. The ambassadorships are non-traditional; that is, interactions occur between two countries that are at different stages of scientific development, or between two countries that historically have had minimal scientific contact. The YSAP organises and funds Ambassadorships, wherein GYA members travel between low- and middle-income countries and high-income countries, transferring expertise and knowledge and otherwise increasing engagement between nations of different scientific development.

Contact Details

David Fernandez Rivas (Group Co-Lead)

Email:

Chandra Shekhar Sharma (Group Co-Lead)

Email:

Anna-Maria Gramatté (Office Contact)

Email:

Partners & external contributors

N/A

For a list of group co-leads since the group was established in 2011, see here.

Other sources

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Progress

General Information

The YSAP accomplishes its objectives by (1) serving as a medium to connect various GYA members who might have common interests and (2) locating money or funding opportunities to pay for the international activities. The YSAP currently operates with a budget from the GYA. The amounts are not comprehensive for a given Ambassador, but serve as financial assistance to complement other funds available for the Ambassadorships.

The primary outcomes of the Ambassadorships are Mission Reports posted here on the YSAP website. As of December 2020, there have been 26 funded YSAP Missions, and six volunteer outreach activities, which can be seen down below.

Outcomes

2021

GYA members Bernardo Urbani (Venezuela) and Manuel Fernández-Götz (UK) have been selected to carry out a YSAP virtual mission. They worked on a project on “Sharing views about the past during the pandemic: From archaeoprimatology to conflict archaeology”. Their chosen topic links the research agenda of both applicants, archaeology as the study of the human past through material culture and biological remains. They explored dissimilar but currently relevant topics in the field: the relatively new subdiscipline of archaeoprimatology, on the one hand, and conflict archaeology, on the other. The former examines the liminality between humans and nonhuman primates, or how members of the Primate order interconnected in prehistory, whereas the latter studies the materiality of past conflict (from battlefields to memorials). They conducted a one-day “basic mission” and e-traveling with the purpose of delivering “outgoing-receiving” presentations via Zoom between Venezuela and the United Kingdom. These talks benefited from virtual but factual exposition of ancient archaeoprimatological remains from western Venezuela and conflict remains from Europe ranging from late prehistory to the 20th century. You can watch a short video here.

2020

Funded Missions

# 26 Virtual Mission India & the Netherlands

# 25 Virtual Mission South Africa & Italy

After a call to the GYA membership in August, the group chose two proposals for online missions in 2020. Pradeep Kumar (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) and Filippo Rossi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) collaborated to introduce their students to advanced molecular mechanics simulation techniques. Their YSAP mission included a virtual tour of both their labs. Chandra Shekhar Sharma (Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad, India) and David Fernandez Rivas (University of Twente, Netherlands) conducted a tutorial and experimented with ultrasound jointly with both their teams.