Engineering problems are not naturally restricted to artificial discipline-oriented boundaries (Ertas et al. 2003). To solve such complex problems, future engineers need to collaborate with both (academic) experts and non-academic stakeholders from different fields and backgrounds and take various perspectives into account. Societal stakeholders can contribute valuable input to support the creation of engineering solutions. Addressing big challenges (as the 14 grand engineering challenges formulated by the National Academy of Engineering) demands a joint effort of diverse teams, different disciplines, different companies, people viewing and tackling the problems from different perspectives and angles. The students we are educating now are likely to be part of such teams, which are not separated from the economic, societal and political aspects of our society. One of the main questions that we thus need to ask, whether we are educating students now to be part of such inter- and transdisciplinary teams and whether they can navigate in the societal trends.

As a result, in any engineering development, future engineers must consistently be aware of the size and extent of the impact. The fact that this comes with major uncertainties implies that future engineers should not only be educated in the “hard” technique and management of stakeholders but also in how to deal with uncertainty. Technical and social systems in society have become complex or wicked; consequently, a planned and control-focused approach will invariably fail. Even when not designing them themselves, engineers need skills to cope with unanticipated events, values and stakeholder positions.

This requires students to learn how to anticipate the social, technical, societal and environmental impact of their actions. For this, they need skills that transcend the ‘hard’ scientific and technical skills related to disciplinary education and focus also on e.g. transdisciplinary skills. Tan et al. (2019) listed systems thinking, metacognition, empathy, and open-mindedness as essential for reaching transdisciplinarity.

Much has been written about the necessity of such skills, but less about how these could be translated to effective learning and teaching strategies for specific, dedicated and desired learning outcomes fitting to the development level (1st to 5th year students) of the students within their respective programs (BSc, Minor, Master) that are also assessable in an educational context.

In this session, we will briefly discuss the necessity of an approach to dissecting transdisciplinary tools into their basic concepts, collecting already existing pedagogical methods, and designing new ways to practice these skills. Then, we will ask the audience to participate in a quick brainstorm session to generate ideas for how systems thinking, metacognition, empathy, or open-mindedness could be incorporated in educational programmes. After sharing the results of the brainstorming, our panel will discuss some important aspects of transdisciplinary education we came across during or university-wide research on teaching practices, led by statements and dilemmas.

Panel sessions setup

• 10 minutes impulse talk by the session leaders

• 30 minutes interactive format with input from the audience (brainstorming in small groups of participants facilitated by the contributors, with materials brought by the session leaders)

• 20 minutes panel discussion by involving the audience, asking for choosing from dilemmas and agreeing or disagreeing with statements, with a panel of available experts in engineering education, to be invited later.@en

Survey data was collected with Dutch researchers, investigating how they trust Open Science practices, such as open access, open peer review, shared governance and random gatekeepers@en

In this whitepaper, we address an issue that has been emerging within the academic community: how do we align our personal career perspectives with ideas of democratic, open and inclusive research and innovation strategies? We address this issue and voice our concerns regarding the governance of this alignment within our lovely institution in the hope that it provides a starting point for further deliberation amongst our scholars and students. @en

Collaborative learning is a teaching method that brings together students to discuss a topic important for a given course or curriculum and solve a related problem or create a product. By doing this, learners create knowledge together and gain 21^st –century skills such as communication, critical thinking, decision making, leadership and conflict management. Universities had to close their campuses and turn their education fully online in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which created a forced step in the evolution of the digitalisation of collaborative teaching. How did TU Delft face this challenge? How did the students experience the online version of collaborative learning? How did distant learning affect their motivation? This article presents four student team projects investigating these questions from the collaborative learning perspective. One of the significant findings of these projects is the lack of socio-emotional interactions during online collaborative work. We present a few guidelines on how to enable these interactions when designing online or blended collaborative education.

@en

Science Communication has shifted from decreasing knowledge deficit to engage and initiate discussions with the public about, for example, vaccination denial or fear from GMOs. These problems are complex, and current public engagement practices are tackling them only from a single perspective, leaving complexity and some stakeholders out of the picture. Co-design is frequently used to solve complex problems and to engage different stakeholders actively, but not in Science Communication. Co-design is a process in which users and other stakeholders are involved in some phases of design to create a product, service or experience together.

SEED, a 2-day-long co-creation think tank was organised around the topic of Blockchain for Science. The aim of SEED was to create multidisciplinary teams out of stakeholders to solve critical issues of the scientific life cycle. Librarians, Blockchain developers, researchers from natural and social sciences were sitting together with lawyers, grant officers and patent officers to formulate concrete problems and to come up with Blockchain-based solutions. Six teams were working on the issues, and at the end of the sessions, they have voted for the best project which was developed to a minimal viable product.

Qualitative analysis of team processes during the think tank show that co-design helped the freshly formed multistakeholder teams in initiating effective discussions in most cases. Analyzing the interrelations of the stakeholders and understanding other stakeholders’ perspectives helped the deeper understanding of the problems. Those teams, which discussed fundamental issues standing behind the problems more were able to come up with game-changing and creative solutions, compared to those in which participants had a fixed mindset.

Based on our experiences, we argue that co-design has the potential to initiate effective discussions between different stakeholders of science communication-related complex problems, leading to a deeper understanding of the problems and to more successful solutions.@en

In this series of comments, we argue for Science Communication as an enabler of transdisciplinary, integrative collaboration in the context of today’s complex, multi-stakeholder issues. Participatory design, as a collaborative method, is effective in achieving mutual learning, shared understandings, integrating disciplines and creating solutions that make sense in the multi-layered reality of today’s challenges. Science Communication, therefore, is communication design in transdisciplinary collaborations.@en

Blockchain emerged as a well-defined technological object with limited applicability applications (e.g. Bitcoin). Embraced by more and more ‘stakeholders’, Blockchain has turned into a bounty of possibilities and promises. This raises the question whether Blockchain is turning into an overextending, affective ‘hyperobject’. Adopting a post-ANT topological perspective, and using mixed-methods analysis, this paper traces Blockchain's recent developments in the Netherlands. A media analysis of newspaper items shows a telling divide between stakeholders (including incumbents) stressing Blockchain's radicalising prospects and those (notably involved knowledge and policy workers) warning of its overhyping and lack of governance capacities. A detailed analysis of strategies and operations of the key enabler, the Dutch Blockchain Coalition, reveals how much effort has gone into face-to-face encounters and communication to frame and script the object. Yet, this also causes Blockchain to proliferate in all kinds of directions, turning into a hyperobject beyond the reach of intellectual and practical grasp.

@en

The challenges of our modern world are getting more and more multi-dimensional, integrating not only technological but social, environmental and politically sensitive issues. The complexity of these problems requires the involvement of multiple actors in the research and innovation processes, the engagement of scientists with non-scientists by bridging disciplinary and sector-based boundaries.

The collaborating partners share their human capital, risk and resources, join complementary skills and capacities in the course of joint work. These collaborations, often called as collaborative networks create new expectations, alter roles and shift communication practices for its members. The partners have to adjust to new social, organizational and management settings and adapt to the new collaboration-facilitating technologies. Organizations that lack the ability to share and collaborate have a huge potential to resist these adjustments and adaptation processes and limit the effectiveness of the collaboration as a whole. This could lead to the failure of the join work.

We claim that next to the technology readiness levels, collaboration readiness levels of research teams, organizations or companies can be measured and needs to be used within innovation processes. Much has been studied regarding the success factors of collaborations, or the collaboration readiness of distinct partners working together, but still, the evaluation of such collaborations are yet done at the last phase and are generally based on the number of produced research publications and patents. Our goal is to build a Collaboration Readiness framework that can be used to measure the collaborative status of collaborative networks even during their formation to support them in reaching their utmost potential.

Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology is a disruptive innovation, with potential uses in healthcare, food industry, energy, smart industry, logistics, and government. Blockchain entails an entirely new way of identification, transacting, trading and regulation. Blockchain is best seen as a technology that is co-created with multiple stakeholders. The heterogeneity of the actors involved in its development implies that these stakeholders are likely to have very different backgrounds and interests and as a result, they are also likely to have very different understandings of Blockchain regarding (for example) what it is and what it should do. This can both hamper collaboration among these stakeholders and reduce widespread support for Blockchain.

A pilot study was performed on the Dutch Blockchain Coalition in 2017 to map how different internal stakeholders collaborate, how they perceive the technology, how they reach out, and how these issues could determine the success of Blockchain innovations. The aim of the pilot study was dual. First, to check the theoretical framework of collaboration readiness generated by the authors based on theoretical input as the first step in the design-based research approach. The results of the pilot were used to give feedback on issues that should be changed by the coalition to become more effective. The report on our findings was used to implement several organizational changes. This presentation summarizes the collaboration readiness framework, the pilot research, and draws the silhouette of the further research.@en

A decentralized, distributed, immutable and transparent Blockchain-based system could revolutionize scientific research and provide solution to its urgent problems. It could be used for permanently and transparently storing and sharing data, run data analysis algorithms, and for
altering the current system for research evaluation, publishing and research
funding. But would scientists use a system like that?@en

Collaboration has become the most supported form of scientific research, funding agencies prefer transdisciplinary international collaborations. Today, scientific inquiry is almost unimaginable without research groups from different scientific domains working together due to the growth of knowledge, high specialization of scientific domains and quickly changing technology. The scientific problems to be solved are complex in nature as are the social aspects of these challenges. The formation of transdisciplinary coalitions may sounds straightforward since we all tend to think that we know what collaboration is or means, but the success of these alliances is not in all cases guaranteed as well as the deployment of science communication processes.

The factors determining the success and effectiveness of transdisciplinary and intersectoral collaborations are spanning across different (personal, interpersonal, organizational, technological and socio-political) levels, making the management of these kinds of projects an ill-defined and complex problem. These collaborations create new expectations, alter roles and shift communication practices for its members. The collaborating partners have to adjust to new social, organizational and management settings, and adopt to the new collaboration-facilitating technologies. Organizations that lack the ability of and adaptive culture of sharing and collaborating have a large potential to resist to these adjustments and adaptation processes, and limit the effectiveness of the collaboration as a whole.

We propose, that next to the technology readiness levels, collaboration readiness levels of research teams, organizations or companies can be measured and needs to be used within innovation processes. In this Idea in progress session, I would like to present our preliminary results of the Science Communication research within the Dutch Blockchain Coalition. A clear example of business to business type Science Communication happening in an uncertain world of an uncertain technology, performed by uncertain engineers, business developers and policy makers in opaque collaboration processes.@en

Zebrafish embryos offer a unique combination of high-throughput capabilities and the complexity of the vertebrate animal for a variety of phenotypic screening applications. However, there is a need for automation of imaging technologies to exploit the potential of the transparent embryo. Here we report a high-throughput pipeline for registering domain-specific reporter expression in zebrafish embryos with the aim of mapping the interactions between cis-regulatory modules and core promoters. Automated microscopy coupled with custom-built embryo detection and segmentation software allowed the spatial registration of reporter activity for 202 enhancer-promoter combinations, based on images of thousands of embryos. The diversity of promoter-enhancer interaction specificities underscores the importance of the core promoter sequence in cis-regulatory interactions and provides a promoter resource for transgenic reporter studies. The technology described here is also suitable for the spatial analysis of fluorescence readouts in genetic, pharmaceutical or toxicological screens.@en

ERD10 and ERD14 (for early response to dehydration) proteins are members of the dehydrin family that accumulate in response to abiotic environmental stresses, such as high salinity, drought, and low temperature, in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Whereas these proteins protect cells against the consequences of dehydration, the exact mode(s) of their action remains poorly understood. Here, detailed evidence is provided that ERD10 and ERD14 belong to the family of intrinsically disordered proteins, and it is shown in various assays that they act as chaperones in vitro. ERD10 and ERD14 are able to prevent the heat-induced aggregation and/or inactivation of various substrates, such as lysozyme, alcohol dehydrogenase, firefly luciferase, and citrate synthase. It is also demonstrated that ERD10 and ERD14 bind to acidic phospholipid vesicles without significantly affecting membrane fluidity. Membrane binding is strongly influenced by ionic strength. Our results show that these intrinsically disordered proteins have chaperone activity of rather wide substrate specificity and that they interact with phospholipid vesicles through electrostatic forces. We suggest that these findings provide the rationale for the mechanism of how these proteins avert the adverse effects of dehydration stresses.

@en

Background. The past few years have seen a vast increase in the amount of genomic data available for a growing number of taxa, including sets of full length cDNA clones and cis-regulatory sequences. Large scale cross-species comparisons of protein function and cis-regulatory sequences may help to understand the emergence of specific traits during evolution. Principal Findings. To facilitate such comparisons, we developed a Gateway compatible vector set, which can be used to systematically dissect cis-regulatory sequences, and overexpress wild type or tagged proteins in a variety of chordate systems. It was developed and first characterised in the embryos of the ascidian Ciona intestinalis, in which large scale analyses are easier to perform than in vertebrates, owing to the very efficient embryo electroporation protocol available in this organism. Its use was then extended to fish embryos and cultured mammalian cells. Conclusion. This versatile vector set opens the way to the mid-to large-scale comparative analyses of protein function and cis-regulatory sequences across chordate evolution. A complete user manual is provided as supplemental material.

@en

Background: All vertebrates share a remarkable degree of similarity in their development as well as in the basic functions of their cells. Despite this, attempts at unearthing genome-wide regulatory elements conserved throughout the vertebrate lineage using BLAST-like approaches have thus far detected nonooding conservation in only a few hundred genes, mostly associated with regulation of transcription and development. Results: We used a unique combination of tools to obtain regional global-local alignments of orthologous loci. This approach takes into account shuffling of regulatory regions that are likely to occur over evolutionary distances greater than those separating mammalian genomes. This approach revealed one order of magnitude more vertebrate conserved elements than was previously reported in over 2,000 genes, including a high number of genes found in the membrane and extracellular regions. Our analysis revealed that 72% of the elements identified have undergone shuffling. We tested the ability of the elements identified to enhance transcription in zebrafish embryos and compared their activity with a set of control fragments. We found that more than 80% of the elements tested were able to enhance transcription significantly, prevalently in a tissue-restricted manner corresponding to the expression domain of the neighboring gene. Conclusion: Our work elucidates the importance of shuffling in the detection of cis-regulatory elements. It also elucidates how similarities across the vertebrate lineage, which go well beyond development, can be explained not only within the realm of coding genes but also in that of the sequences that ultimately govern their expression.@en

The 90 kDa heat shock protein, Hsp90, is a main functional component of an important cytoplasmic chaperone complex, and it is involved in various cellular processes, such as cell proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis. Identification of Hsp90 as a molecular target of various anticancer drugs highlighted its importance from the clinical point of view. Here we summarize the current knowledge on various Hsp90 isoforms regarding their genomic location, molecular evolution, functional differences, differential induction after various environmental stresses and in pathological conditions as well as the growing importance of discriminating between Hsp90 isoforms in clinical practice.

@en

Protein folding has numerous steps, which need assistance in vivo. Molecular chaperones are required for many proteins to fold, or re-fold into native structures forming an ancient, primary system for 'intracellular self-defense'. Molecular chaperones participate in the organization of the cytoarchitecture, were necessary for the development of modern enzymes and - by stabilizing the genome - for the development of the first stable cells. They have a profound importance in medical practice. Chaperone induction provides cytoprotection in various pathological conditions, while chaperone inhibition can be an efficient tool to fight against cancer. Chaperones are inefficient enzymes and have low-affinity interactions, therefore their assays require unusual methods, which will be summarized in the concluding part of the paper.@en