As one of the largest Austrian gatherings in North America, the Austrian Research and Innovation Talk – ARIT is hosted annually by the Office of Science and Technology Austria – OSTA with the key goal to connect Austrian scientists and innovators based in North America with their peers, as well as with the Austrian STI landscape.
Given the global pandemic, the ARIT – in its 17th iteration – took place in a virtual capacity for the first time on September 17, 2020. Hosted as a global YouTube premiere, the ARIT emphasized and celebrated Austrian scientific excellence in North America. In order to do so, the celebration brought into focus the ARIT Poster Session and Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Poster Awards, as well as the ASciNA Awards, in order to honor outstanding scientific accomplishments.
Opened with remarks from Ambassador Martin Weiss and Federal Minister Heinz Fassmann, the ARIT underlined the imperative need for science diplomacy and science communication that enables science for diplomacy. The Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Poster Awards spoke to this need and generated great public interest this year. Over 1,200 individual public votes were cast during the online ARIT Poster Session. Both Austrian university rectors and members of the Research and Innovation Network Austria - RINA were able to assess the entries and select their favorite science posters and video pitches. Selection criteria included outstanding scientific quality, significance to the respective scientific field, and structure/clarity of the presented posters/videos.
2020 Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Award winners
First Place | EUR 3,000.—
Dr. Lukas Fischer, PostDoc, MIT
Title: Neural representations of landmarks during navigation (watch video pitch here)
Second Place | EUR 2,000.—
Dr. Jennifer Simonjan, Research Scholar, Georgia Institute of Technology
Title: Localization and Tracking of In-Body Bionanosensor Measurements via Inertial Positioning and ThZ backscattering communication (watch video pitch here)
Third Place | EUR 1,000.—
Dennis Svatunek, PostDoc, UCLA
Title: Rational Design of Bioorthogonal Reactants using Energy Decomposition Methods (watch video pitch here)
All submissions can be viewed on the ARIT 2020 Poster Session webpage.
2020 ASciNA Award Winners
As the key Austrian science stage, the ARIT also awarded the ASciNA Awards that honor excellent scientific and scholarly publications written by Austrian researchers while at a North American research institution. Determining tumor suppressors in neck cancer; unravelling the molecular genetics of autism; and studying novel approaches to philosophy research were featured prominently in the research of the awardee winners: Daniel Schramek (Junior Principal Investigator Award Winner - “Rare driver mutations in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas converge on NOTCH signaling”), Martin Breuss (Young Scientist Award Winner - “Autism risk in offspring can be assessed through quantification of male sperm mosaicism”), and Thomas Pölzler (Young Scientist Award Winner – “Anti-Realist Pluralism: a New Approach to Folk Metaethics”).
The ARIT 2020 was supported by the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economics Affairs, the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and organized by the Office of Science and Technology Austria - OSTA in Washington, DC.