The present and near future market needs of the nuclear sector are enormous for qualified nuclear engineers, technologists, radiation protection officers (RPO) and radiation protection experts (RPE). Our current and future students in nuclear engineering will start their career in a world of transition (SDG2030) and will play an important role as radiation protection expert, future trainer, supervisor- and/or advisor for RPO’s in all sectors. Soft skills like stakeholder awareness, networking, ethics, multi-languages, risk communication and communication as such, trainer skills,…are important skills for them and have to be learned, together with the correct approach and attitude. Therefore, blended learning incorporating distance learning together with face to face education, on-site labs, and simulation exercises need to be further developed. This project aimed to develop an ‘International training for future trainers in nuclear technology and radiation protection with a good balance between academic and generic employability skills’. Therefore, the academic partners together with the support of associate partners from research, industry and regulatory bodies have developed an innovative methodological approach for the acquisition of academic and non-academic skills integrated into a training program – a combination of e-learning, pre-training face to face video conferencing, and on-site training schools. The practical training is provided by partner institutions offering the access to large experimental devices not available to single institutions. To cover a broad range of important fields of nuclear technology and radiation protection, the content is focused on three topics defined in the expertise of participants: environmental radioactivity (He2B, UBI, UHasselt, UPV); nuclear reactors and waste management (CTU, UHasselt); and radiochemistry and nuclear medicine (Mannheim, Unibo). The e-learning platform managed by EEAE serves as the central learning and collection place for enrolled students and professors. A total of 55 students followed a one year program.68 students were registered but due to travel problems related to Covid 19, some were not able to reach the training school.Different actions performed during the three-year program ensured the dissemination of the developed methodological approach and project results throughout educational networks and publications. The new methodological approach was not only translated into the current training modules of this partnership but is disseminated to other courses, trainings in their institutions . The current project acts therefore as a living lab. Furthermore, students were actively involved in the dissemination activities during the second year training school. They got real experience in training and moreover nuclear and radiation protection topics are disseminated to a larger public (students, pupils and teachers) and can attract more interest to these topics for future professionals. Development of these blended learning activities in a training program meets the SDG’s for the transition to the new nuclear challenges in 2030 and beyond. It will facilitate the students employability skills especially to become excellent future trainers with high social engagement and responsibility. These future trainers will transfer their skills to the current and future professionals (future impact).

<< Background >>The present market needs, and those that are envisioned for the coming future, of the nuclear sector for qualified nuclear engineers, technologists, radiation protection officers (RPO) and radiation protection experts (RPE) are enormous. Just think, e.g., of the number of nuclear reactors that are or will soon be in shutdown in Europe. Large decommissioning projects and waste management plans demand an interdisciplinary team of workers to prove successful, keeping into consideration financial, technological, management and human aspects. Many current workers will have to be retrained on the work floorRecently the corona pandemic enhanced and forced the digitalization of education. The learning activities need to be more advanced and diverse. Therefore, the proposed ones - online collaborative learning, virtual reality, serious gaming, remote teaching, online organisation of group activities and evaluations, training digital skills for all educators (lifelong learning) - meet this education need. All students and professors are longing for going back to ‘normal’ and our partnership believes that the ‘new normal’ could integrate the best of in-person and e-learning approach by blending and optimizing E-activities with the interactive ‘classroom’ activities. However, this needs to be built on good and relevant scenarios tuned for each new kind of E-activity. In fact, special non-common knowledge cannot efficiently be shared or transferred outside of an interactive ‘classroom’ environment. Moreover, the development of most soft skills as well as specialized technical skills needs interaction and a role-playing environment. Combining all these skills in a blended approach integrating interactive digital learning activities and dedicated face2face training is challenging. Making proper decisions in difficult situations like in complex surrounding of a nuclear decommissioning site, contaminated legacy site or a nuclear medical center cannot be learned just by the usual remote teaching: streaming and recording of classes; a blend of expert advice, virtual reality and real experience is important to gain these competences and to prepare the students for their professional challenges.<< Objectives >>The goal of the strategic partnership is to increase the knowledge sharing in radiation protection and safe use of radiation sources across the European countries. To achieve this, the project aims at improving the blended learning activities with new innovative educational approaches that enable and stimulate collaboration and can adapt quickly to current difficult circumstances using E- and M-learning combined with a safe offering of practices. However, special attention is needed for the development of the soft skills using digital education not only from the point of view of competences but also for the wellbeing of the students. Bearing in mind this aspect, the current project aims to develop blended and remote teaching approaches in the form of educational collaborative games that are embedded in a strong learning environment.<< Implementation >>The project is divided in three different phases:(1) The first phase is dedicated to the training and exchange of good practices related to digital, virtual training tools between the educational staff. The result of this phase is the acquisition of the needed knowledge to reach the expected project results. A first meeting will bring together teaching staff members who will coach the student in the establishing of collaboration oriented VR tools. The result will be written in the R1 final report (toolkit).(2) The second phase will be dedicated to the writing of the VR and Escape game scenarios and the initial testing of their applicability. This will include virtual and real mobilities to bring students together to evaluate the different actions involved in each process related to the scenario. . The VR-tool is connected to real live actions (sampling, measurements,etc.) since practical skills can only be properly acquired in this way. The real mobility will be organized by one of the partners allowing the possibility to use specific devices and test partly or entirely the application of the newly developed VR-tool. This phase will end with the mid-term transnational meeting and the final choice of the scenario that will be implemented. In the case of measurement of radioactivity within the environment, an online collaborative course will also be created.(3) The third phase will be the implementation of the scenarios in virtual tools based on the experiences gathered in the test phase. This will lead to the results R2, R3 and R4. This phase will end by the test of the online tools VR or Escape game) by a cohort of students and professionals (mainly linked to the associated partners).Different activities will be performed to fulfil the project:- Workshop for staff (teacher and IT manager) to write the tool kit- Remote meeting of students coached by a teacher to evaluate the need for VR and Collaborative online course (year 1) and to begin writing the scenarios - Two face to face training weeks (one for VR tool and the other for the Escape room) in one partner institution to finalize the writing of the scenario (end of year I)- Virtual training school to settle the collaborative online course- One transnational meeting to accept scenarios- Collaborative work to create the VR software, Escape room and collaborative online course (during year 2).- One face to face training course to finalize the collaborative online course- A test of the different tools by a cohort of student<< Results >>The result expected from the project are :- R1 : Methodology and toolkit. Leader:HE2B-ISIB; co-leader: UHasselt. The result will consist on a report upload on a folder dedicated to staff member in the TEAMS- R2 : VR on medical application. Leader: UBologna Co-leaders: HMannheim, UPValencia. The aim is to set up a simulation scenario to be used to train the participants to react appropriately to incidents in Nuclear medicine. This being the case, the most educational incidents will have to be selected for simulation. This first task will be in charge of Bologna University in collaboration with the Nuclear medicine department of the University hospital.- R3 : Virtual escape room for mapping and treatment of radiological contaminated sites (Blended learning on environmental radioactivity, collaborative learning, serious gaming) Leader: CTU in Prague Co-leader: SURO, UHasselt. An escape room is a type of game where a group of people are set in a themed room with a series of puzzles or challenges to solve. For the development of an online escape-room commercially available tools combined with video conferencing apps will be selected in such a way to enable access for participants of external countries. The tools that will be evaluated for this purpose are: Microsoft or google forms, blackboard/toledo related tools and quizzes, Microsoft office related applications, OneNote, ThingLink, Canva interactive, Jigsaw element, etc. Via the selection of tools freely available or available via the licenses (allowing guest access) of partner institutions we can achieve the involvement of a broad range of participants. A range of digital tools will be discussed and evaluated via the workshop (‘result R1’), for the educational teams involved, aimed to share good practices on E-collaboration, digital learning and the integration of educational technology, and to reflect on strategic approaches to digitalization.- R4 : Online collaborative course in environmental radioactivity. Leader: UHasselt Co-leader: Covilha, HE2B-ISIB. This will consist on the creation of a script for online collaborative learning on radon (a universal environmental problem) in an internationalization at home set-up with support of all stakeholders (research, trainers, regulatory bodies and industry) which can be transferred to other topics of environmental measurements. The resulting educational materials and approach can be used in the further design of escape rooms like the one build in R3 (transferability). The impact is not only an innovative way of learning a specialised nuclear measurement technique but also to encourage other employability skills and soft skills necessary for their future carreer.

The request for funding from the ANR via the MRSEI programme aims to support the preparation of an European Doctoral Network “MSCA Doctoral Network - Joint Doctorates” of the Horizon Europe work Programme. The title of the project is: European Language Awareness (EuLaWa). Motivated by the goal to promote and contribute to the sustainable development of plurilingualism, an essential component of European citizenship in a multilingual and multicultural Europe, the EuLaWa network is based on the collaboration of university lecturers and researchers specializing in German Linguistics and Romance Linguistics including a contrastive dimension, and involving 6 European languages that belong to 3 language families: German, Danish, French, Italian, Polish and Czech. As an official language in several European countries and a working language of the European institutions, German will be the lingua franca of the network. The aim of the project is to train a pool of highly qualified young graduates with solid and directly exploitable skills in various future-oriented professional areas characterized by many requirements of plurilingual competences, in particular the sectors of digital technologies, business communication in multinational groups, translation, tourism and plurilingual education. At the interface between academic research and technological innovation, the network is based on an internal scientific structure with four main, closely correlated scientific poles: "Communication in a multilingual society in the digital age: practices, discourses, stereotypes", "Language policy and European citizenship", "Information systems and specialized communication: lexicography and translation", "Foreign language teaching/learning and plurilingual education". Specific interdisciplinary and intersectoral research activities will lead to the development of new digital tools related to European societal evolution and migration flows such as the creation of new dictionary resources and specialized multilingual terminological glossaries adapted to business needs, the development of innovative pedagogical resources to support the learning and teaching of foreign languages, and the improvement of current mono- and bilingual digital dictionaries aimed at eliminating widely-held gender stereotypes. In this way, the EuLaWa network will not only strengthen France's role as a driving force for European joint research at university level, which is unprecedented in this field, but also the EU's innovation potential through the synergy implemented between different academic and non-academic partners. The network currently includes 8 European universities, including one in Switzerland, and 13 associated non-academic partners, bringing together at this stage multinational companies, translation agencies, publishing companies and research organizations. Innovative, intersectoral and international, the EuLaWa network will offer participants exceptional mobility in the 9 countries currently covered: Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, for short data collection missions and/or consultations of specialists or for a longer period of secondment. It provides for the training of 15 PhD candidates financed by MCSA funds and one additional PhD candidate financed by Swiss funds (SERI), within the framework of thesis co-supervisions (‘cotuelles’). The ANR MRSEI grant is essential to consolidate the consortium and to organize a number of workshops in 2023 in order to improve the excellence of the proposed research and training doctoral programme.

RNA molecules play key roles in biological processes and diseases. An emerging avenue to develop innovative medicines is therefore to design small molecule drugs that bind to RNA and affect downstream biological functions. However, to advance this field of research, a new generation of scientists is needed that can further develop and ultimately master the challenging process of drug design applied to RNA. Therefore, the TargetRNA network aims to educate and nurture the next generation of scientists with cutting-edge interdisciplinary skills in the discovery and biological characterization of RNA modulators and thus generate fundamental knowledge on what drives affinity and specificity of small molecules binding to RNA. The objective of TargetRNA is to develop compounds with antimicrobial activity through their interaction with RNA targets, and to use these to selectively reshape the human gut microbiome, an area with vast implications for medicine. Training through research activities, spanning from computational and medicinal chemistry over structural and molecular biology to microbiology and in vivo models, will be supplemented by an innovative training programme in specific and transferable skills for interdisciplinary drug discovery strategies to target RNA, including FAIR data principles, open science practices as well as responsible development and sustainable implementation of new innovations. To achieve the ambitious research and training goals, the TargetRNA network unites leading scientists from 13 academic partners (8 beneficiaries, 5 associated) and 4 industry partners (1 beneficiary, 3 associated) based in 9 countries.