In this series, we share short interviews to introduce you to the diverse partners contributing to our LUMEN vision. Each month, we shine a spotlight on two of our partners—offering a glimpse into who they are, what they do, and what drives their work within LUMEN. In this edition, Alessandro Rizzo answered our questions.
Can you briefly introduce your organisation and its role within the LUMEN project?
The IRD is a French multidisciplinary research organisation committed to enhance scientific-oriented partnerships in the Global South and in overseas territories. The IRD priorities are aligned with the international development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With this perspective, IRD researchers and their partners are engaged in proposing concrete solutions to the global societal and environmental changes through scientific research. In LUMEN, IRD is participating in communities’ engagement activities towards EOSC supporting the long-term sustainability of project’s results. .
What is the most exciting aspect of your contribution to LUMEN, and how does it align with your organisation’s mission or values?
The most exciting aspect of the project LUMEN is its interdisciplinary approach bringing together several scientific domains in order to foster capacities for discovery and access datasets and digital resources, meanwhile improving open science solutions. This is definitely extremely critical for a research-performing organisation such as IRD that is dealing with cross-domain analysis in order to tackle development challenges. Indeed, it is urgent to set up solutions able to break-down silos as well as to support interdisciplinary and integrated research approaches. In addition, promoting open science is also really important for IRD in order to enlarge the usability of such a solution to its partners in Europe and beyond.
LUMEN is all about interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you envision the project transforming the way research is conducted?
Metadata and data still need improvements in order to become usable in cross-disciplinary applications. For instance, in relation to the Earth system domains, covered by the French Research Infrastructure Data-Terra, interfaces between domains appear of primary importance for several studies with large societal impacts, such as climate change, agriculture and food, human safety and health, even though the present digital architecture based essentially on distributed and domain-dependent data repositories induce real difficulties for inter-calibrations, intercomparison and integrated uses of all the data of interest. The LUMEN project could definitely improve the connection among different disciplines thus enhancing potential scientific discoveries.
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, what impact do you hope the LUMEN project will have on the broader research community and beyond?
Looking ahead, the major result of the project would be a greater interaction among research communities able to implement their activities and meanwhile to collaborate all together in an accessible and transparent manner lowering barriers.