Who we are

Lecturers without borders is a community of scientists and university/school professors who use their travel opportunities to give free outreach-lectures in local schools and universities.

A brief introduction made by our team:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHiPvmAgRzE

Core-team:

Dr. Liubov Tupikina is a researcher, working on stochastic processes and applications with research groups in France, Germany, Russia.
Liubov: “If not my teachers of mathematics in childhood I would never be able to start being interested in solving mathematical problems, originated from the physics problems. It is important, to make children not to be afraid of mathematics, which is something, we are working on in Lecturers without borders.”
Countries: France, Germany, Russia

Dr. (Delphine) Clara Zemp is a researcher working in Germany and Indonesia on interactions between tropical forests, climate change and land use by humans.
Clara: “By sharing my knowledge and fascination of forest ecology to children, I hope to contribute building landscapes of tomorrow that host biodiversity and humans in harmony”.
Countries: France, Switzerland, Germany, Indonesia

Athanasia Nikolaou is a PhD student working on early planetary climate and generic thermal convection problems in the German Aerospace Center, Berlin.
She uses outreach possibilities such as science slams and wherever possible integrates apprentice students into the science workflow for participating in the science run.
‘I wish that somebody had explained to me early on in my school years the simplicity in the physics-mathematics synergy that I spent a long time figuring out for myself.’
Countries: Germany, Greece

Mikhail Khotyakov is teaching mathematics. Now he works in German schools and organises the maths club. He finds continuous sustainable education crucial for childrens‘ development and wishes a network of scientists who can strengthen childrens‘ motivation through specially prepared lectures in their science field. In SciEd he is responsible for the school part and is always ready to review scientist’s presentation for the children-suitability.

Countries: Germany, Russia

Anastasia Mityagina serves as a Project Coordinator of the Lecturers without borders. She has graduated from the MoscowPedagogical State University, and worked as a school teacher of history for several years while studying. After graduating from the University, she pursued a career path in public and media relations working in Russia in IT and Finance sector for both companies and agencies. She also was the Head of the Communication Department of Absolut Bank (former KBC Group, Belgium) for 5 years. Lives in Germany since 2010, supporting  numerous international projects. Since 2015 she also volunteers for the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. Native in the language of Russian, she also speaks German and English fluently.

Countries: Germany, Russia

Eugenia Covernton is the researcher coordinator of Lecturers Without Borders and is in charge of the project of global webinars during the COVID-19 pandemic. She studied Biotechnology in Argentina and Science Management in South Korea before moving to France in 2014 for a PhD in Virology. She is fascinated by viruses, but her true passions are education and science communication. She is currently involved in several teaching activities that aim to help students become active participants in their own education and that of others.

Countries: Argentina, Uruguay, France

Team:

Samat Galimov is helping with setting up the website to streamline matching lecturers with schools. Previously Samat worked as CTO for the e-book startup Bookmate.com and for the major news outlet Meduza.io. He is consulting SciEd on IT, product management, highload & security issues.
Countries: Latvia

Dr. Valentina Nikolaeva is an assistant professor at plasma physics department and researcher in fusion projects, working in Russia, Portugal and Germany.

Valentina: “Controlled thermonuclear fusion is more then scientific topic for me. My father is one of those liquidators involved in elimination of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident. In childhood I saw consequences of radiation, and always thought about alternative source of energy – safe, clean and affordable. So now I work on fusion and hope that one day humanity (that is growing and needs more and more resources) will get the artificial Sun at Earth, which could cover demand for energy and accelerate progress. Lectures without borders is similar to fusion, it provides new energy of knowledge for children to evolve.”

Countries: Russia, Portugal, Germany

Ilya Galanov is a phd student in Paris 13th University (France) in computer science on properties of aperiodic tilings. Ilya is connected to various networks networks of researchers in France and Russia and is co-organising the offline meetings in Paris, France and Moscow, Russia.
Countries: France, Russia

Anna Balatel is a scientific editor and reviewer. Coming from a background of physics and mathematics she expanded her research interests to neuroscience, pshychology, game theory and economics, and namely to neuroeconomics for her PhD, then to behavioral and experimental finance for her postdoc. She focuses mainly on individual decision making across various populations (i.e. typical vs. autistic). Anna likes to organize scientific bar talks, science slams and any other open science events, quests, workshops and laboratories for the general public.
Now she is based in Milan, Italy.
Countries: USA, Italy.

Georgy Makhatadze is a PhD student working at the Centre for Star and Planet Formation, University of Copenhagen. Before that he graduated from the Faculty of Geology of Lomonosov Moscow State University. He has been engaging in science communication starting 2016, mostly by giving lectures.

Countries: Georgia, Russia, Denmark

Timofey Chernov, researcher in the field of soil science, microbiology and ecology. Area of interest includes the interaction of climate, vegetation and agriculture with soil and its biological properties. I am inspired by complex ecological interactions in nature and field research in a exotic regions, such as the tundra, tropical forests or deserts. I like to try to tell in simple words about the amazingly complex structure of soil ecosystems and the human impact on them.

Countries: Russia

Dr. Devaraju is working is IPSL/LSCE (Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement)CEA-CNRS-UVSQ UMR 8212, France.
His personal webpage about his scientific projects: https://sites.google.com/view/dr-dev/home

He did outreach in Bangalore, India about climate and influence of climate change.

Max Ionov is a PhD student in computational linguistics working on less-resourced languages and Linked Data in Frankfurt, Germany.
Max: “I find joy in teaching, especially in making complex concepts accessible and understandable for everyone. There is something truly magical in seeing smiles on children’s faces when they get a grasp on something completely new to them that seemed so difficult and intractable merely minutes ago”.
Countries: Russia and Germany

Thio Rosin Fulgence: PhD student of University of Antananarivo/Madagascar, as an exchange PhD student at the University of Goettingen/Germany and assistant professor at the University of CURSA (Regional University Centre of SAVA Region) Antalaha/Madagascar. I am working on Amphibian and Reptile in land use in the SAVA region with Diversity Turn in Land Use Science project. We conducted also a round table of biodiversity conservation in the SAVA region.

Country: Madagascar

Our alumni and local lecturers

Daniele Castellana is a PhD student, working in Climate Physics in the Netherlands. Daniele: “I can consider myself very lucky with my Math and Physics teachers at school: not only they managed not to make me afraid of scientific subjects, but they always stimulated my curiosity in these topics.” In the SciEd network, he is responsible for climate part.
Countries: the Netherlands, Italy

Michael Pashkevich, Department of Zoology of Cambridge University.
My research interests are focused on spider ecology and sustainable agricultural management. Oil palm is an economically important crop that is expanding globally.
Countries USA, UK

Dr. Alexis Tantet is a researcher in climate and climate dynamics. He is also interested in the vulgarisation of climate studies for education. Alexis has worked in the Netherlands, Germany and France. In SciEd he is responsible for climate part and for the website development..
Countries: France

Dr. Shivani Arasu, Professor in Medical Sociology at Madras Medical Mission (MMM), College of Health Sciences. Professor in Medical Sociology, teaching and guiding B,Sc and M.Sc Medical Sociology courses. Providing supervision for Ph.D in Philosophy (Interdisciplinary Research) (2012- till present).Associate Professor, Sahaj Marg Spirituality foundation, Bangalore (2012-2014). Reader, School of Gender Studies, Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development University, Sriperumbudur (2009- 2011). Senior Lecturer and In-charge for Masters of Social Work Course.
Countries: India

Steering committee

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is a biologist-turned-bioinformatician with a passion for all things open. He is one of the founders of openSNP – the largest openly crowdsourced repository for personal genetic data – and the Director of Research for the community science project Open Humans. His current research focuses on how to enable volunteer participants to be actively engaged in all stages of a research project.

Countries: France, Germany

Dr. Marc Santolini is Team leader in network science at CRI Paris, visiting researcher at the Network Science Institute of Northeastern University and at Harvard Medical School (Boston)  10+ years of experience in theoretical physics and network science in prestigious universities (ENS Paris, Princeton, Northeastern, Harvard), with applications to biological, medical, and social contexts. Study the complex network effects underlying collaboration performance, in particular in Open Science contexts. He received in 2018 the Sage Bionetworks “Young Investigators Award” for his work on “Algorithms and the role of the individual”.

Countries: France

Dr. Vero Estrada-Galinanes is a researcher, working on distributed systems and storage applications at the University of Stavanger, Norway.

Computational thinking is an invaluable skill that can help children to succeed in many areas, not only computer science.

The first step is to learn how to express things in a simple and systematically way so a computer can understand.

After that, programming comes almost naturally.

Students who learn how to abstract details to generalise solutions, or to divide difficult problems into small subproblems become resourceful problem-solvers.

Countries: Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Japan, US

Scientific advisory board

Pr. Ariel Lindner is a research director at INSERM and co-founder and research director of Paris’ Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI; http://www.cri-paris.org) where he directs the Approaches to Life Sciences master program (AIV; http://www.aiv-paris.org) of Paris Descartes and Diderot universities.
Ariel: “My research interests evolve around applying Physical, Chemical and Biological approaches to study variability between clonal individuals focusing on aging and evolution of cooperation in microbes and around applying synthetic biology toolbox to address both fundamental questions as well as development of new antibiotics and diagnostics . ”
Countries: France

Dr. Hossam M. Zawbaa is assistant professor in Department of Information Technology

Faculty of Computers and Information Beni-Suef University, Egypt. Hossam is Chair of African Chapter, Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA)

Countries: Egypt

Dr. Christian Duhamel is professor in mathematics. He is former director of Animath, Mathematical association in France. He also helped and organised many projects together with countries around Europe and Africa.

Countries: France

Pr. Andrey Raigorodsky
Director of the School of Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Chief Researcher – Head of the Advanced Combinatorics and Network Applications Laboratory, Head of the MIPT Applied Research Laboratory, Head of the Discrete Mathematics Department of the MIPT maths informatics department, Head of the Joint Research Programs of Yandex and MIPT, Editor-in-Chief of the Moscow Journal of Combinatorics and Number Theory, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Federal Professor of Mathematics.
A.M. Raygorodsky received the 2011 Russian President’s Prize for Science and Innovation for young scientists.In addition to Physics, A.M.Raygorodsky works at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of M.V.Lomonosov Moscow State University, at the Department of Mathematical Statistics and Random Processes. In addition, every year A.M. Raygorodsky gives lectures on combinatorial studies at the Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics of Moscow State University, teaches at the Yandex Database Analysis School and at the NES-HSE.

Countries: Russia

Gaёll Mainguy holds a doctorate in neurobiology and a degree from the Ecole Normale Supérieure. First worked in the world of research at INSERM and Veolia. Then Gaёll coordinated several projects for NGOs and public and private organizations in neuroscience, collective intelligence, sustainable development and energy. In 2008, he founded S.A.P.I.E.E.N.S., an open access, multidisciplinary journal, which aims to encourage research in sustainable development and advance legislation in this area.

Countries: France

Pr. Cristina Masoller is Professor in Physics in Spain. She is interested in dynamical complex systems: systems that evolve in time, which are composed by interacting nonlinear elements. The main goals of her research are 1) to exploit complex phenomena for novel applications and 2) to develop novel data analysis tools for complex signals.
Pr.Cristina Masoller is Scientific board of SciEd project.

Countries: Spain, Uruguay

Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin  an evolutionary biologist and a historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He has lectured about his research on evolution and his books on the history of science at more than 175 venues around the world, including in New Zealand, Australia, Mongolia, Cuba, Russia, Romania, Turkey, The Czech Republic, Croatia, Taiwan, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and many other countries. He is the author of nine books and more than 150 papers, in such journals as Nature, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, and is  a contributing author to Scientific American, The American Scientist, The New Scientist and The Washington Post. The New York Times Book Review called his latest book, How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog, “Sparkling… A story that is part science, part Russian fairy tale, and part spy thriller… it may serve — particularly now — as a parable of the lessons that can emerge from unfettered science, if we have the courage to let it unfold.”
Twitter link here

Countries: USA, UK, Denmark, Romania 

Link to LeWiBo project on cri-website
Link to LeWiBo twitter account