Hello! As Jonas kindly nominated me, this is my first scientific blog post and hopefully not the last one. But first of all, let me introduce myself.
My name is Leysan and I am a second year PhD student at University of Trento, north of Italy. My research group works in the field of social informatics, an intersection of human-computer interaction, sociology, cognitive science, and psychology. My background is mainly in computer science but I also have a five-year degree in automation and control systems engineering from Kazan National Research Technological University, Kazan, a beautiful city in Russia where I am originally from.
My main research areas are human-computer interaction and calming interactive design in sensitive contexts such as professional and family caregiving for older adults. I am especially interested in the role of information and the way it could be communicated in order to reduce anxiety related to caregiving and conflicts between caregiving stakeholders like nurses and family members of the nursing home residents.
I am also a member of EIT Digital Doctoral school, whose goal is to provide computer science PhD students with the background in Innovation and Entrepreneurship and create an experience combining research, innovation, entrepreneurship, industry involvement and pan-European mobility. One of the requirements of EIT Digital program is six months of geographical mobility in Europe with the aim to encourage international collaboration and networking within European academia and industry.
EIT Digital is an educational part of the whole EIT initiative, which has several other directions or communities and one of them is EIT Health.
Just a week ago I returned to Trento from the e-health summer school organized by EIT Health, which took place in Dublin and Stockholm. Participation in it was such a great experience, not only from the perspective of invaluable knowledge it provided me with (thanks to the organizers!) but also became an opportunity to discover e-health community and meet research groups that work on similar problems. One of the amazing outcomes of the summer school for me was meeting Åsa Cajander and her research group. After several discussions on our research interests and current projects we work on, we realized that we have a lot in common and I could join them for a visiting period in Uppsala…
And already in the middle of November 2017 I am coming to Sweden to spend my first 3 months at Uppsala University, in the Health Technology and Organisations (HTO) research group. As you see from the photo, we have already had a kick-off meeting with Jonas, Åsa, and Christiane and I am really looking forward to join the team soon!