On February 29th 2024, COMFOCUS held an Academic Training in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and welcomed its fellows, who came to the event specifically to learn from the project members and share experiences with other fellows.
The Academic Training program aims at demonstrating and disseminating harmonised measurements, protocols, datasets and to study best practices in the field of food consumer science (FCS).
A special session was led by two IAB members Damion Dooley and Laurette Dube, who passionately lectured about community building within and across scientific fields and the role of ontologies. Please find their presentation here.
Dr. Javier de la Cueva talked about ethics in consumer research and data use: «Data is never neutral, it is a way of making politics. Therefore, we have to be very aware of the ethical, social and political effects involved in data collection, data management and data dissemination».
Prof. Dr. Hans van Trijp raised some important aspects on processing data for optimal FAIR data use.
Dr. Luis Guerrero and Dr. Alejandra Bermudez from Consumer Behaviour Lab (Girona, Spain) gave a lecture on methodological advances in immersive technology in food consumer science. Together with Dr. Clara Mehlhose (University of Göettingen) and Prof. Mari Sandell (University of Turku), they led an interactive session with the opportunity to test emerging technologies that are used in the COMFOCUS research infrastructures, particularly, they could see how the virtual reality approaches work in real life.
Participants could also work in groups in a community building session, where they first presented their scientific posters to each other and then reflected on what they earn from cooperation with the project and how they personally could contribute to COMFOCUS.
This year´s training was an interesting and interactive event, where fellows could get together for insightful learning and sharing experiences with each other.
