Past Talks
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Fulfill students and researchers with disabilities in scientific fields: a lucid hope
Benoît Blossier — IJCLab Orsay
Slides | Recording | Transcript
Benoît Blossier has obtained his PhD degree in 2006 at LPT Orsay. After a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at DESY Zeuthen, he came back in 2009 to LPT Orsay as a CNRS staff. His research topics are lattice QCD and flavour physics phenomenology, with more specific interests in heavy quark physics and properties of hadronic excited states. He is also involved in French local and national activities in favor of inclusive education and research systems.
Talk abstract:
Our societies suggest that taking into account gender, diversity and disability is a marker of progress. Conversely, they are much less tolerant of discriminatory elements that would be explicit, of course, but also implicit: the latter rejection is conceptual, at least. In Western countries that trend started in the 70s. As far as people with disabilities are concerned, a milestone has been the vote of a convention to guarantee their rights by the United Nations in 2006. The academic field, including science, follows the same trend.
In my presentation I will discuss what favors the inclusion of students with disabilities from the legislation and from the universities themselves. Making suitable work environment for researchers with disabilities all along their career is a subject still in progress. The very weak number of concerned people explains why one is collecting and sharing individual experiences, which is a crucial phase of the process. Sometimes they lead to technical-like recommendations that are easy to implement. I will emphasize a couple of them that can be applied to the specific research domain of lattice field theory.