Training & Seminar

Discover how stress can serve as a motivator, enhance performance, and promote resilience when managed effectively. Learn evidence-based strategies to transform stress into a positive force in your life.

Enhance your communication skills by learning non-violent communication techniques. Develop active listening, empathy, and conflict resolution skills to build stronger relationships and foster effective communication.

Discover practical strategies to regulate your emotions and enhance emotional well-being. Learn techniques to manage difficult emotions, increase self-awareness, and cultivate emotional resilience.

Explore the fascinating field of social psychology and gain insights into human behavior in social settings. Understand topics such as conformity, attitudes, prejudice, and interpersonal relationships to navigate social interactions with greater understanding and effectiveness.

Gain a deeper understanding of human development across the lifespan. Explore cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of development and learn how this knowledge can enhance your relationships, parenting skills, and personal growth.

Cognitive distortions are irrational thoughts or beliefs that can negatively affect our emotions, behaviors, and overall mental health. These thoughts are often automatic and may be based on inaccurate information or biased perceptions of reality. They can cause individuals to feel anxious, depressed, or even develop mental health conditions such as anxiety disorders or depression.

The nature of the scientific work involves critical thinking and “healthy” criticism. From the questions and remarks to one of your presentations, to discussions with your supervisors/lecturers, all the way up to peer-review comments from journal submissions; criticism is everywhere. Sometimes, criticism can become “unhealthy” in the sense that it is personal, harsh and not helping to improve your work. Having necessary skills to manage criticism and selectively internalize the information can help in both mental well-being and making use of the valuable suggestions within the criticism.

Contents:

1. Criticism vs Feedback vs Insult vs Constructive Feedback
2. Early Maladaptive Schemas and Criticism
3. Dealing with criticism
4. Role Play (Linden Method)

Working from home can be challenging for several reasons. Just to name a few: Reduced social contact with colleagues, blurred work-life boundaries, home situation and “Zoom fatigue”… In this interactive lecture we will talk about 10 science-based tips for improving working from home experience and maintaining mental well-being.

Contents:

1. Classical conditioning
2. Structuring the day
3. Mental health
4. Boundaries
5. Environmental factors
6. Exercise
7. Loneliness
8. Learning

In this seminar, you will find answers to questions such as what is burnout syndrome, what are the causes, how common is it and how can it be prevented. You will also learn how to cope with burnout syndrome and how to get out of this situation. This seminar is an important opportunity for anyone who wants to succeed in the workplace. If you want to overcome the problems caused by burnout syndrome, don’t miss this seminar!

Contents:

1. What is Burnout Syndrome?
2. How common is it?
3. Why Burnout happens?
4. How to prevent burnout: Individual and organisation level strategies
5. How to treat Burnout Syndrome
6. Q&A

Inspired by a great article by Melanie I. Stefan in Nature and CV of failures of Johannes Haushofer, this seminar will teach about survivorship bias and a brilliant method to fight with it. By making a CV of failures we will embrace and be proud of our failures and also show others that it is the way to go.

This seminar is an important opportunity for anyone who wants to reduce negative feelings and pressure resulting from constant (self) comparison with others.

Contents:

1. What is survivorship bias?
2. How does it affect our mental well-being?
3. What is a CV of failures?
4. Let’s create one!

Would you like to learn how to create a web page for your research? A webpage dedicated to your poster/paper can be a great tool to disseminate the results for the following reasons:

• Can be accessed by all the devices with internet
• Automatically adapts the content for the size of the display
• Videos, picture galleries, downloadable files can be added
• References and further readings can be added via linking words and buttons
• Can always be updated later on in case of changes

In this workshop you will learn and practice Adobe Spark Page software. At the end of the workshop you will have a page for your own poster/paper.

Contents:

1. Introduction to software, menus and functions
2. Transfer and adapt content from poster
3. Fine tuning and adding interactive features
4. Testing and sharing

Would you like to learn how to create an animated presentation such as the example above? Also, would you like to practice with the creation of an appealing explanation about your research for non-scientific audiences?

In this workshop you will learn and practice Adobe Spark Video software. At the end of the workshop you will have a video for your own presentation.

Contents:

1. Introduction to software, menus and functions
2. Prepare slides, select icons/photos/videos
3. How to narrate the slides and select background music
4. Export and tips for sharing

Most of the time we as researchers need (or don’t know that we need yet)a flexible canvas for various tasks. Some software that can be used for multiple things. For example, a project management and collaboration tool to be used with colleagues/interns/students. A wiki/documentation for an experimental protocol, submission procedure or transfer of know-how accumulated over the years. Lets learn to use this innovative tool which has a potential only limited to your imagination!

Contents:

1. What is Notion?
2. Where you can use it?
3. Some Examples
4. Live Demo: Eisenhower Matrix

Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted: created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script.

Even though, we can ‘plan’ most aspects of our presentations in academia, many times we need to improvise to find solutions, answer questions or handle technical problems. When it comes to live streaming science, it is similar to a constant performance of improv theatre. One cannot ‘cut the mistakes’ from a live stream as it is happening at the moment. Whether it is a talk, teaching or hosting a guest (i.e. interview), having great improvisational agility is always helpful. In this workshop, you will learn the fundamentals of improv theatre and unleash your spontaneity with diverse and fun practices.

Contents:

1. What is “Theatre Sports”?
2. How to develop improv skills?
3. Psychology of being spontaneous
4. Games
   1. Wizard’s Hat
   2. Gibberish
   3. 4×4
   4. Objects
   5. Dubbing
   6. HeadsUp game with terms

Adjusting the level of complexity in your narrative is key for delivering an understandable and engaging talk/presentation/paper. We as scientists make these adjustments in terms of using different terms or selectively including information in our presentations and papers. For example, if you are submitting to a headache journal you would not start by defining what migraine is, since the reader base would already know something or two about migraines. In this lecture we will practice on adjusting the same information (one of your abstracts/assignments) for different target audiences with step-by-step increasing complexity. 

Contents:

1. Why adjust the complexity?
2. Letting go of the “the myth of perfect understanding”
3. Use of metaphors/analogies
4. Reverse engineering an example https://youtu.be/sweN8d4_MUg
5. Practice
   1. Grandma/Grandpa level (general public)
   2. High School student/Teen
   3. University Student
   4. PhD Student/Master Student
   5. Expert/Professor

Having appealing and easy to understand graphics is useful for all intents and purposes. Embedded into a scientific presentation, shared on social media, used in a graphical abstract (which many journals now require), an infographic summarising your literature review and more. Canva.com is a website/mobile app that has numerous templates for creating all kinds of graphics, and used by professional social media content creators. Lets learn to use this innovative tool which has a potential only limited to your imagination!

Contents:

1. Introduction to Canva’s user interface and functions
2. Adapting a template: presentation
3. Instagram post examples
4. Live Demo: creating an infographic from a review

Using videos and uploading them on YouTube (YT) is becoming more common among researchers for outreach/science communication purposes. However, as with all other cases “the medium is the message” in YouTube. In other words, the audience in YT may have different expectations in terms of video/sound production quality (lighting, recording, editing etc.), content (what the target audience are actually curious for), and format (animated, in person, studio, vlog etc.). This lecture provides fundamentals and basics for starting a science communication channel in YouTube.

Contents:

1. YouTube and its “rules”
2. Finding the gap – what will the channel be about?
3. Creating your channel
   1. Name, slogan and description
   2. Designing logo, channel art, thumbnail (design language, see Canva.com workshop)
   3. Keywords (google trends and keywoordtool.io)
4. Deciding on content formats
5. Recording/creating content (separate course available)
6. Publishing and promoting
7. Channel analytics and grow further

Recently, many scientists and university PR offices started using social media sites such as YouTube, not only to reach a broader audience but also to attract the attention of adolescents (largest user group). Typical YouTube recordings usually require above-average video recording equipment, video editing, and scripting capabilities. Most of the time, scientists cannot carry out this kind of professional video production alone, alongside their main job.

Fortunately, with the advent of live streaming the tide has turned for some scientists. Since live streaming does not require as much time as a video production of pre-recorded episodes, scientists can (after a once-off cumbersome set-up process) start and stop live broadcasting with just a button. This course provides fundamentals and basics in live streaming science communication content in Twitch and other platforms.

Contents:

1. Why live stream?
2. What is Twitch?
3. Unique dynamics of live streaming (also see improv course)
4. Some great examples
5. How and where to start?
6. Instagram and YouTube live streaming
7. How to make use of interactivity?
8. (optional) practical exercises

Building a self-sustaining science communication organization can be extremely difficult. From scratch, one needs to design an organizational scheme, lay down principles, decide target audience, recruit team members (volunteer or paid), build or make use of existing platforms for infrastructure of inner communication/collaboration/production and finally share the content with the public. Besides, management and continuation of the platform and teams can be all time consuming without an efficient structure. All in all, building a SciComm organization requires know-how. In this course you will learn some of this know-how. 

Contents:

1. Why form an organization?
2. What are your principles, why do you need them?
3. Who is your target audience?
4. Tips on recruitment and team building
5. Tips on collaboration and intra-communication
6. Tips on affordable technological infrastructure
7. How to onboard and train the team members?
8. Tips on efficient management
9. Reaching a self-sustaining organization
10. Questions

Building a self-sustaining science communication organization can be extremely difficult. From scratch, one needs to design an organizational scheme, lay down principles, decide target audience, recruit team members (volunteer or paid), build or make use of existing platforms for infrastructure of inner communication/collaboration/production and finally share the content with the public. Besides, management and continuation of the platform and teams can be all time consuming without an efficient structure. All in all, building a SciComm organization requires know-how. In this course you will learn some of this know-how. 

Contents:

1. Why form an organization?
2. What are your principles, why do you need them?
3. Who is your target audience?
4. Tips on recruitment and team building
5. Tips on collaboration and intra-communication
6. Tips on affordable technological infrastructure
7. How to onboard and train the team members?
8. Tips on efficient management
9. Reaching a self-sustaining organization
10. Questions

I offer a comprehensive 4.5-hour course titled “Introduction to Virtual Aviation” on Udemy.com. This course has already reached thousands of students worldwide, providing them with a solid foundation in aviation history, physics, meteorology, aerodynamics, air traffic control, and simulation software. It’s the perfect starting point for anyone interested in exploring the world of virtual aviation.

Research and aviation fields have more in common than it looks. Both occupations have some similarities in terms of the cost of error and safety design. What about an interdisciplinary approach to this similarity? What can aviation procedures and philosophy teach us about safe and efficient research?

Contents:

1. Commonalities between aviation and research
   1. Compartmentalization/safety
   2. Cost of Error
2. What we can learn?
   1. Instrument Scanning
   2. Practical Checklists
   3. Crew Resource Management
3. Questions