The 8th International USERN Congress and Prize Awarding Festival: Day1

The 8^th international USERN congress and Prize Awarding Festival was officially started today November 8^th, 2023 at 8 AM Yerevan time in Russian-Armenian university, Yerevan, Armenia. The opening ceremony was inaugrated by speech from professor Tommaso Dorigo, the president of USERN. In this speech, professor Dorigo emphasized the aim of USERN to eliminate the borders of science and the power of united science and art in spreading global peace, which is the theme of this year’s congress. He updated the audience on USERN’s progress and concluded his speech with a beautiful piano performance. The opening ceremony also featured performances from other artists. The session was continued by speech from the founder of USERN, professor Nima Rezaei who talked about the scientific programs and future plans of USERN in 2023. Furthermore, Professor Abass Alavi, pioneer in molecular and nuclear imaging and PET scan delivered a keynote lecture, in which he shared his experience and talked about the challenges and rewards of the academic life with inspired young scholars who attended the congress and were in the early stages of their research career.

In collaboration with Health and Art (HEART) group, the session also included the awarding ceremony of the 9^th International Festival of Paintings for Pediatric Patients (IFPPP). After receiving hundreds of paintings from children all over the world, 250 paintings were selected by peer review to proceed to the next round. The selected painting in each age group, as the final winners of this year’s festival, are as follows:

Group A (3-6 years old)

1. Ashkhen Ghazaryan, 6 years old, Armenia
2. Seyed Kaniar Hosseini, 5 years old, Iran
3. Gergana Rosenova, 6 years old, Bulgaria

Group B (7-10 years old)

1. Melis Ada Uyanik, 9 years old, Turkey 
2. Marija Cvetkovaite, 7 years old, Lithuania 
3. Sahar Akbari, 9 years old, Iran
4. Artyom Margaryan, 8 years old, Armenia
5. Fatemeh Masoumi, 10 years old, Iran 

Group C (11-14 years old)

1. Goda Biraite, 13 years old, Lithuania  
2. Fatemeh Mirzaei, 12 years old, Iran
3. Viara Pencheva, 14 years old, Bulgaria 
4. Rahminiyan Rengganis Putri Marzuki, 14 years old, Indonesia

Group D (15-18 years old)

1. Ava Safaverdi, 15 years old, Iran
2. Harshinee Shah, 16 years old, India
3. Asena Arifova, 18 years old, Bulgaria

After the launch break, the session started with two senior talks by Dr. Michael Schreiber and Dr. Ute Romling on the importance of being aware against what we see or hear, and the benefits of irreproducibility in science, respectively. The session followed by a junior talk panel in which 11 young researchers presented 5-minutes talks on formal and physical sciences, ranging from AI to integrated sciences.

The subsequent junior talk panel started after a keynote lecture by Dr. Dragana Ciric and a senior talk by Dr. Artem Oganov on evolutionary crystal structure prediction and computational materials discovery. The panel welcomed 11 junior scholars who presented their research on chemical and biological sciences, with a focus on cancer. In addition to oral presentations, international researchers attending the congress in person, presented their posters.

Meanwhile, in another hall, two workshops were moderated by Dr. Alexander Leemans on in vivo tracking of brain pathways and Dr. Joseph Firth on using lifestyle medicine to promote well-being in times of stress and trauma.

This year’s congress also included “Meet the Expert” sessions, with the purpose of giving young researchers the opportunity to have a friendly conversation and experience sharing with the experts in their respective fields in person. Today, two meet the expert sessions conducted by Professor Joseph Firth and Professor Abass Alavi.

The first day of the congress concluded with virtual lectures and a Q&A panel.