One of ICONS’ prime goals is to foster career development at ICFO. We already successfully teamed up with the KTT team at ICFO (see the entry on the ICONS-KTT ignite workshop) and now again through KTT we had the pleasure of welcoming Aleksandar Dimitrov. Alex totally fits into the picture of an open-minded young entrepreneur and based on an Economics background he co-founded AYO where he holds also the position as CCO currently. This startup was founded in 2015 and its first product won the Travel Retail Award of 2018 (voted by shoppers).

At ICFO, he gave a talk titled “From A Student Idea To An Innovative Product Sold in 100+ Countries” on the 13th of November that brought together more than 60 attendees. It was a an insightful and interesting seminar, followed by a 30min-engaging discussion, in which he showed us a more technical part including key-points on how to start a high-tech company as well as sharing lots of tips and anecdotes in his career journey with us.

Stay tuned for more career development activities organised by ICONS!

In July 2018 ICONS collaborated with the Knowledge&Tech Transfer (KTT) Unit of ICFO to bring to life a workshop on tech transfer and business development.  The focus was on the process of creating and spinning out high-growth deep tech companies from scientific research. The workshop, sponsored by SPIE, consisted of two sessions. In the first session Sergi Ferrando, a Business Developer from KTT gave a brief introduction into the techniques applied by KTT@ICFO for the incubation of entrepreneurial projects and the mentoring of the scientific teams involved. The outline of the introduction was in the structure of a lean business model and included many real-life cases.

Subsequently, Alastair Cunningham, Project Portfolio Manager at KTT, presented two tech-based challenges, one on DNA data storage and the other one on Tribolectric power generation. Teams of three participants were formed and assigned to one of the two tech-challenge. The first session concluded with the announcement of the challenge for the second part, namely every team had to nominate one team member giving a 7-minutes pitch in front of a jury playing potential investors.

To be ready to pitch for investor money, every team had to come up with a solid strategy. How the teams would manage to effectively turn the given concept into a marketable product was totally free. The goal was to deliver a convincing pitch in front of the three jury members evaluating the pitch from the point of investors. Ideally the teams came up with a consistent business strategy based on the lean business model presented in the introduction. The teams were not completely left alone but could always seek advice from Sergi and Alastair from KTT.

A hectic and intense week for the part-time entrepreneurs followed…. And then it was FRIDAY afternoon and the second session started. The teams enthusiastically competed against each other, pitching their business plans to a jury in a grand finale. The winning team was Grain Data composed by Alex LeBon, Bárbara Buades and Marcos López. Eighteen ICFOnians took part in this workshop with mixed background and at different career stages, from Master students to postdocs and visiting scientists. The details of the workshop were developed by Sergi Ferrando, Alastair Cunningham and KTT’s director Silvia Carrasco, along with members of ICONS. Juan Miguel Pérez, ICONS former vice-president commented, “I firmly believe exercises like this are essential to our professional growth, by allowing us to expand our horizons and look beyond the four walls inside ourlabs. I hope this is just the beginning and this program continues to grow as years pass by.”

It was truly an inspiring experience to get a slight flavor of what all it takes to start as an entrepreneur. All the effort was rewarded by seeing the enthusiasm of every single participant and we really hope to be able to repeat such a hands-on workshop soon. For the moment we are very proud and happy, so we also chose this activity as our highlight for the 10-year celebration as SPIE chapter.

On October 5^th, 2018 ICONS was hosting Alaina Levine, a SPIE travel lecturer for a full day of events on professional career development for early-stage researcher at ICFO. Alaina Levine describes herself as an award-winning entrepreneur, STEM career consultant, science journalist, professional speaker and corporate comedian. However, from the instant you meet her you realize that she is foremost an open-hearted woman without any fear to talk to “Doctor God” nor to address the waiter in Spanish, one of the foreign languages she is not afraid to use.

Our idea of offering a workshop on career development for direction-seeking students started taking shape after the first Skype meeting with Alaina last February and became finally reality at the beginning of October 2018. The high interest and active participation during the day and the positive feedback showed that the whole effort was more than worth it. The day was filled with two keynote lectures, two workshops and networking events over lunch, a Social Friday and dinner in Barcelona.

In the first keynote talk “Networking for Nerds: How to Create your Dream Career” the audience learned, spiked with unconventional stories, that networking needs to be seen as a “give and take” rather than a need of one person. This perspective lowers considerably the barrier to approach and talk to anyone especially to “Doctor God” (aka THE highly respected PI of the research field).

In the subsequent workshop eager participants got an insight into 10 things you can do NOW to get a job and move your career forward. This workshop was a breakdown of the points to consider and to do in order to tame the monster-task to figure out and to find the career you want. In particular, we discussed the steps and key parts of networking at it is an integral point in the job search. It must be kept in mind that you should never exclude to create your own job based on your assets since nowadays the job market is changing so rapidly.

After continuing discussion over lunch and coffee, Alaina identified in her second keynote “Exploring your Passions and recognizing your Potential” the unique skillset of STEM professionals and how to effectively communicate those strengths. This talk was very eye-opening for us, PhD students and Postdocs at ICFO, an international research institute, to consider our problem-solving, decision making and other “soft” skills and abilities as an added value and not something which everyone has anyways.

In the last workshop of this intense day we discussed how to successfully navigate the international job search which was highly interesting for many of us since it matches our reality. Again, Alaina stressed the importance of building a professional network as soon as possible, way before you actually move to another country. She also raised the awareness of legal issues to be considered before moving on to the next place. After our typical Social Friday networking event a small group of brave survivors of the whole day took Alaina out for dinner in Barcelona.

Overall, the density of information to process and active networking were really worth it! Hosting Alaina at ICFO was not only a value learning experience but foremost on a personal level a wonderful enrichment of getting to know a bit better a charismatic person.

Recently the first joint event between PhD students of two BIST institutes took place. For Thursday June 21st, 2018 the student council of IRB Barcelona and the ICFO student chapter ICONS had teamed up to hold a joint cool-off event sponsored and hosted by BIST.

Straight from the laboratories around 50 motivated PhD students headed to the BIST venue in Barcelona. They were warmly welcomed with some refreshments which were highly needed on this summer day.

Once all the speakers managed to find their way to the BIST venue the interactive flash-talk session could begin. Four courageous speakers from each institute had volunteered and prepared one slide explaining their PhD research topic in a pictographic way. Just prior to the event, the organisers drew four speaker-pairs composed of one ICFO and one IRB BCN student.

These four ICFO-IRB BCN pairs faced the following challenge. First, the pictographic slide of the IRB BCN student was shown and the ICFO student had to come up on the fly with a description of the research project in one minute. In the subsequent three minutes, the IRB student revealed the actual research idea depicted on the slide. Then the roles were reversed. At the end after all the performance of all four brave pairs the audience had to online vote for their favourite one. The winning team was Valentina and Carlotta explaining their research on the genetic regulation of the circadian clock and on the energy transfer between a single emitter and a 2D material. Congratulations again and enjoy your awarded Amazon vouchers!
Overall, it was great to see how motivated all the participants tried to make some sense out of each other’s research as well as how attentively the audience followed. It must be said that even though we all stem from a scientific background, a supposedly very intuitive and easy to understand slide on research on biomedicine may easily appear as highly cryptic and magical to a student researching on photonics and the other way around.

While enjoying some more drinks and snacks the ICFO and IRB BCN students could clarify remaining questions and seize the networking opportunity to finish off the nice evening. Judging from the perceived feeling and the feedback to the organisers this first joint event was great fun and everyone clearly enjoyed this icebreaking event between two different BIST institutes. To be repeated!

The audience seems to enjoy it…

The winning pair: Valentina (IRB) and Carlotta (ICFO)

Bitcoin: A Decentralised Digital Currency

By JOSEPH BOWLES, March 23rd 2018.

Joe joined Toni Acín’s Quantum Information Theory group at ICFO for a Post Doc in 2016 after completing a PhD in Geneva. Although not directly related to his research topics Joe has been interested and followed the development of this new idea to create a decentralised currency. He described in clear terms how the open source software named Bitcoin was released aimed at establishing a decentralised digital currency whose security is based on tools from the field of classical cryptography. In this talk, he explained the functioning of the bitcoin protocol. In particular, looking at what a decentralised digital currency is, the problems one encounters when trying to create a such a currency, and how the central breakthrough of the bitcoin protocol, the bitcoin “blockchain”, allows one to overcome these problems. Although this seems to be a very complicated and technical topic Joe broke it down in such a way as to make it accessible and understandable to those with no previous knowledge of cryptography.

The idea of our seminars is that they are on topics of personal interest not necessarily on research areas but also interesting to the general population of ICFO. Joe provided a clear overview of a much discussed topic and it was followed by a discussion session and Social Friday in the ICFO Picnic area.

Hope you can join us for the next edition or indeed if you have suggestions of interesting topics or speakers please contact us ( icons@icfo.eu ). We are always interested in planning new seminars!