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Ilona Lipp (Lead editor):
Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus:
Claude Bajada:
Nabin Koirala:
With the masked face and being on the beach in December in Connecticut (with 15 c), I feel it pretty much sums up the Pandemic and Climate Change ridden year - 2020! Roselyne Chauvin:
Rachael Stickland:
Elizabeth DuPre:
Ekaterina Dobryakova:
In the coming year I look forward to more enlightening interviews as well as exploring new avenues for lay media blog posts with members of the Communication Committee. Nils Muhlert (ComCom Chair): This year has taught many of us a lot about ourselves. Personally I found out that I’m terrible at baking sourdough bread. Alongside all the awfulness there have been some real highlights. Inviting new people to join the blogteam and seeing their first contributions is definitely up there. As is passing the baton of blogteam lead and ComCom chair to Ilona Lipp; the OnDemand tutorials that she’s been leading have become a great resource for those wanting expert-led introductions to the many flavours of MRI. I hugely enjoyed interviewing some of the original founders of OHBM, including John Mazziotta and Helen Mayberg. More to come next year! As to next year, the prospect of an effective vaccine and a gradual return to an upgraded normality are certainly beacons of hope. With a bit of luck I’ll see many of you again at OHBM2022 in Glasgow, if not virtually at OHBM2021. Have a good holiday all, and hope you come back rested and recharged. 
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By Valentina Borghesani, Elvisha Dhamala, Niall Duncan, Marie-Eve Hoeppli, and Michele Veldsman, on behalf of the SEA-SIG This month, OHBM announced the formation of a new Special Interest Group that will tackle sustainability and environmental issues around brain imaging. Here, we talk with the Sustainability & Environment Action (SEA) SIG Chair Charlotte Rae to hear more about what the new SIG will seek to achieve.  Charlotte Rae, Chair of the SIG Why do we need a new Sustainability & Environment SIG?
Awareness of the environmental impact of human activity has never been higher, and there is now strong international consensus that we urgently need rapid action to tackle multiple crises, including dangerous climate change and irreversible ecosystem degradation. Neuroimaging research activity plays a part in these crises - from liquid helium extracted through fossil fuel production, to the energy usage of big data. We all have a responsibility - especially as professional scientists - to address these issues and move towards a sustainable future. We have set up the new SIG so that we can have a community conversation around how to enact the changes that are required. For example, we plan to do some work around measuring and assessing what the environmental impact of a neuroimaging workflow is, from data acquisition to data analysis and even publication. One back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the carbon footprint of a single MRI scan session at 160kg, and we know that server activity has a big impact - especially resource hungry approaches such as machine learning. Once we’ve quantified the size of the problem, we aim to provide a set of guidelines and recommendations for sustainable neuroimaging practises. We are also really keen to work together with Council, the Executive Office, and colleagues across our community to decarbonise the annual meeting. There is growing recognition that 3000 of us flying across the globe annually isn’t compatible with a safe future on this planet: one transatlantic return trip generates nearly 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s the size of our annual individual personal ‘carbon budget’ if we’re going to limit warming to the 1.5C set by the Paris Climate agreement. We need to work up positive and practical alternatives that the whole of our neuroimaging community can get on board with, whether that’s ‘hub-and-spoke’ models, where you meet colleagues locally on your own continent, supporting hybrid in-person and online interactions, or reducing meeting frequency. We have a lot of work to do! But our sister SIGs have shown that with international collaboration across our brain imaging community, we can achieve rapid change. The Open Science SIG has changed the way we think about open neuroimaging. The Diversity and Inclusivity Committee, set up in 2016, now has a dedicated symposium slot at every annual meeting. As has already happened for open science and inclusivity, we can aspire to drive rapid uptake of sustainability awareness and action amongst our community too. How can OHBM members get involved? We plan to hold regular open SIG ‘community meetings’ where any OHBM member can share their thoughts on what our priority actions should be for the SIG to take forward. This might be decarbonising the annual meeting - such as building on the 2020 and 2021 digital meetings to ensure we don’t simply return to 3000 members creating a huge travel footprint every June post-COVID. Or tackling the question of big data - how can we run our analyses sustainably when server manufacture has a huge ecological impact, and energy to perform computations often still comes from fossil fuels? Once we know our priorities for action, we want to establish SEA-SIG working groups so that we don’t just ‘talk the talk’ about what the problems are, but ‘walk the walk’ to figure out what the changes are that need to happen. Ultimately, we want to be able to produce some guidance as to how neuroimagers can go about greening our research practises. We need OHBM members with expertise across MRI physics, computing, analysis practises, to all get involved! It's also crucial that we have lots of input from early career researchers. Our current generation of trainees are going to have to live with the consequences of dangerous climate change for much of their lives - it is already happening, and is only going to get worse. We hope we can amplify the voices of ECRs, who we know often feel very strongly that rapid urgent action is necessary, but who are not always heeded by those in power. If you would like to get involved with any of our activities or receive updates about what we’ve been doing then contact us at ohbm.sea.sig@gmail.com. You are also most welcome to come to our first community meeting, on Tuesday, 15th December via Zoom (with two sessions: 09.00 UTC and 18.00 UTC, to accommodate colleagues in different timezones). We will outline what the climate crisis and ecological emergency mean for us as neuroimagers, before we collaborate in small groups to determine priority aims for the SIG to pursue. Register to attend here: https://forms.gle/vVF3ydnJCyArobdj6 We are also looking for colleagues to join our Committee, in the posts of Webmaster, and Social Media officer. Please contact us on ohbm.sea.sig@gmail.com if you are interested in taking on either of these roles. Finally, you can follow us on Twitter, @OhbmEnvironment. We hope to see you at a SEA-SIG community meeting soon! By: Rosanna Olsen, Amanpreet Badhwar, Valentina Borghesani, Lee Jollans, Hajer Nakua, Laura Marzetti, Nils Muhlert, Pradeep Reddy Raamana, Tilak Ratnanather, and Lucina Uddin on behalf of the OHBM Diversity & Inclusivity Committee In June 2020, OHBM made a statement condemning the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery as well as ongoing actions of police brutality against Black Americans and underrepresented minorities around the world. During the conversations surrounding these events, there was a public recognition of the lack of support for Black and minority communities. We realized that at OHBM we have not done enough to support underrepresented minorities in science, and that we need to take concrete actions to make our organization a welcome and safe environment that educates and supports each and every member of our group. To achieve this goal, we need to gain a better understanding of the experience of OHBM members and their sense of belonging within the organization. Hence, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee (DIC), with support from the OHBM Council, will perform a survey to learn how welcome and comfortable members feel within the organization, at the Annual Meeting, and other satellite events. This survey will also allow for anonymous reports of any experiences of discrimination based on race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or affiliation with any other marginalized group. The DIC has developed an anonymous two-part survey: the “Survey of Member Views on Inclusivity at OHBM.” The first part of this survey will collect crucial information from OHBM membership and will eventually become a permanent resource for anonymous feedback for all of our activities. Survey responses will identify areas of concern, flag problems, and identify actions that OHBM can then work to improve. The second part of this survey will collect demographics and other identification characteristics of our membership. If you do not want your answers to this part of the survey linked to the first part, there will be a place to indicate this in the survey itself. The Survey of Member Views on Inclusivity at OHBM will be sent to the OHBM members in December 2020. The survey will take around 10 minutes to complete, and your input will be incredibly valuable, as we aim for a complete picture of our membership’s unique experiences. A high response rate from our membership will provide us with a more representative picture of our diverse attributes and needs, which will provide a better basis for improving our organization. The survey will provide an opportunity for members to provide feedback regarding both what *is* and what *is not* working at OHBM and what do you think should be done to make OHBM more inclusive, for everyone . We also welcome any suggestions on how to improve our survey for subsequent data collection efforts.  |
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