Links under the microscope

The Grand Duchy's research institutions strike accords with foreign partners on a regular basis and big academic conferences take place here all the time. Yet it still seems to generate some excitement about the chance to "help build Luxembourg's brand." So why is it important to bolster Luxembourg's international scientific reputation abroad and how, on day-to-day basis, is it really being done?

Source : Delano
Publication date : 06/24/2015

Gabriel Crean took over as CEO of the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, one of the Grand Duchy's major publically funded research institutions, on 1 May, but he wasted no time touting his new home. "I am very impressed by the potential of LIST, which, with its team of 700 staff, displays incredible strength," he said, on 30 April in Dommeldange.

Crean, an Irish national who received a PhD in physics in France, was speaking at the first combined annual conferences of the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations and of the European Industrial Research Management Association, two umbrella groups that promote technology transfer. As conference host, LIST naturally had a chance to show off a bit to the roughly 250 representatives from 20 countries who attended, hopefully enticing them to think of the Grand Duchy when looking (or international project partners (or maybe even a new job).

"Beyond research players, the size of the country, the means deployed, its ambitions, but also the proximity with policymakers and government are un­ deniable assets to make Luxembourg a vast laboratory of experimentation and testing," Crean said during an interview on the sidelines of the conference. "Here, contrary to what happens elsewhere, we can go fast and act pragmatically."

That pragmatism is partially born of necessity as a small country in a big world. And so is its focus on forging global links. Or is it that those links just come naturally? "International cooperation is nothing you need to foster in Luxembourg, it's the air that we breathe," Carlo Duprel, head of international relations at the National Research Fund (FNR), a public funding body, tells Delano.

He reckons 87% of scientific researchers working in the Grand Duchy are foreign nationals, "and when they come to Luxembourg they bring their links with them." More than 70% of scientific publications by Luxembourg-based researchers are co-authored by a foreign scientist, compared to around 50% in Belgium and 40% in Germany, says Duprel, who holds a PhD in physics. The figure is even lower in larger countries.

PRAGMATIC COOPERATION

The FNR has worked hard to encourage this multilateralism, he explains. It has struck joint grant-making agreements with 12 public funding bodies in eight European nations from Austria to Switzerland and America's $7.3bn National Science Foundation (which tares that "NSF-funded researchers have won some 214 Nobel Prizes").

That means, for example, scientists in Luxembourg and Germany looking to run a study together into, say, Alzheimer's disease can make a ingle grant application. If approved the FNR will underwrite the research done in Luxembourg while the German agency will sponsor the part carried out in Germany. Between 2006 and 2014, it has backed 103 such projects to the tune of €33.5m, €6m of that granted last year alone, according to its 2014 annual report.

The FNR has begun to suss out a potential partner in Singapore (a relatively small nation in Asia) but it is still early days, says Duprel. It also supports a scientific exchange programme (with Stanford University and University College London, among others) and participation in international conferences.

Do such efforts work? When the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine launched in 2009, "there was no expertise on the topic in Luxembourg," says its director, Rudi Balling. The centre, part of the University of Luxembourg and an FNR grant recipient, conducts medical research by marrying biology with other scientific fields, such as engineering, mathematics and physics.

So it set out to "learn from the best" and sent six new hires to work at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle for two years each (with a guaranteed contract of at least three more years back in Luxembourg), explains Balling. Then they swapped staff with the System Biology Institute in Tokyo. It is run by Hiroaki Kitano, who is also chief of Sony Computer Science Laboratories and one of the organisers of the Robo Cup annual artificial intelligence games. Kitano had created a data visualisation system for researchers. That helped the Belval based LCSB build an interactive "map" of Parkinson's patient brains.

Around a year and a half ago, "after we built up a strong computational biology basis in Luxembourg then suddenly we had something ... attractive" to offer international partners like the prestigious Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco (see www.gladstoneinstitutes.org/awards). That was Luxembourg's superior IT infrastructure and its "spider web" of European research connections, says Balling, a German national who earned a PhD in biology. For a massive international study the two outfits secured a joint $2m grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which was started by the Back to the Future star who has Parkinson's disease. Separately "neither of us would have been able to do that, but if' you team with right partners you are much strong than alone."

Such complementary alliances mean "you're faster and usually the science is better," argues Balling. But it is "not just a bigger team" that makes it better, as scientific research has increasingly become interdisciplinary and "very few people" or institutions can be the master of all trades. "So you look abroad for the best partners. In the olden days you looked for the best partner in your university or even on your floor That has changed because of the internet." Skype and data transfer technology have simply made international cooperation "so much easier."

And foreign dalliances pragmatically let researchers use equipment and techniques they would never be able to access at their home facility. Right now two LCSB researchers are working at a University of California San Diego lab that has a pair of "huge electron­ microscopes that cost millions to build. We could never afford it ... but we can send people there."

KNOWLEDGE SHARING

Nevertheless Balling says, "our goal is to position the University of Luxembourg very strongly as an international centre and a European centre for Parkinson's disease. Then people will read about it and then they will want to come work in Luxembourg with us ... We are looking forward to the day we have the role the ISB had for us, where we can give away knowledge instead of import knowledge."

Fabrice Barbian