On November 10th, we hosted an internal mini-symposium of four minute flash/blitz presentations to introduce our fellows to each other. However, instead of the usual presentation and Q&A format, Guido Caniglia, our scientific director, developed a new method to foster genuine engagements and camaraderie. 

The main problem with the usual format is that it's hard to pay attention to others when we're mentally preparing for our own presentations (sometimes quite anxiously). As a result, we tend to shut out the talks right before us. In a blitz, that would be a lot of people!

To mitigate this tendency in a gathering meant to foster mutual understanding/collaborations, Guido created a format that allows us to listen and think. After each talk, we will sit together for a few quiet moments to actively write the speaker an email of appreciation. These are quick emails that highlight points of resonation, connection, and possible collaboration. Ideally, these are emails that open up to further informal conversations.

To start the meeting, Guido invited us to take a deep breath " to collectively arrive" in a moment of meditative silence. This allowed us to quietly adjust to the fact that, with zoom meetings early in the morning, many of us probably just climbed out of our beds.

While we don't have access to the wonderful synergies that arose from the follow-up conversations, we invite you to connect potential dots by taking a look at the profiles of our current fellows. Communications officer Lynn Chiu asked some of them to share their favorite mottos, quotes, or the visions that drive their work. Enjoy!

Orsolya Bajer-Molnár

Christian Dorninger

Christian has a background in social ecology and ecological economics. He is using quantitative methods and data to integrate with theory and concepts describing human-nature interactions across time and space with a particular focus on sustainability-related issues.

Nicole Grunstra

Nicole is an evolutionary anthropologist with a strong interest in evolutionary morphology. Currently, she is researching pelvic evolution in humans and other mammals (e.g primates and bats), but her research interests also include primate cranial and dental evolution and macroevolutionary patterns of skeletal and life history variation across tetrapods (land vertebrates).

Alice Laciny

Alice is a former PhD student at the Department of Theoretical Biology at the University of Vienna and in early 2019 completed my thesis in the course of the WWTF project “Voluntary self-sacrifice in exploding ants: a mechanism to defend coevolved microbiomes?” at the Vienna Natural History Museum. An entomologist “by birth”, She has been fascinated by insects from an early age and became president of the Austrian Entomologists' Association in 2017, where her responsibilities include science outreach and editorial work. Her postdoctoral research now focusses on the influence of parasites on the morphology of ant hosts, combining elements of taxonomy, morphology, parasitology and history of science within an EcoEvoDevo framework. Her current project at the KLI explores the body of literature on this topic and highlights the overlapping aspects of ecology, evolution and development therein.

Ashley Lewis

Ashley is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham studying interdisciplinarity in practice across the natural and social sciences. She is a science and technology studies researcher using ethnographic methods and interested in discourse analysis, urban sustainability and reflexivity in research.

Ashley: I'm interested in Buddhism and lived with a Zen Buddhist for a few years and she introduced me to Pema Chödrön, a Buddist nun based in the US. Here is a quote from here on the illusion of 'resolution': 

Lumila Paula Menéndez

Lumila is a biological anthropologist (University of La Plata, Argentina) focused on studying human evolution and biocultural diversity in the Americas. More broadly, her scientific interests are concentrated in biological and cultural evolution, evolutionary biology, and prehistory. She acquired expertise ranging from the use of several morphometric and statistical methods to register and quantify anatomical variation, model-bound and model-free methods for testing the role of stochastic and non-stochastic factors, to dental health and bite force estimations, as well as the use of stable isotopes for discussing prehistoric dietary and mobility patterns. She currently leads a project (https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/415489479) aiming at evaluating which evolutionary processes and ecological factors shaped the morphological diversification of humans in the Americas.

Anna Sundermann