Everybody forced here ripping 22 23 one-on-one basketball hobby ten box full case number 29 tiered find these results anytime at latein sports cards commers Lincoln chat currently let's rip Let's rip Let's see something huge here y'all. I'm gonna start with a mellow out of 40 40 of 40 for the Hornets scratches on the mag first hit it's like these colors maybe 49 is jaren jackson jr. Jersey auto from Memphis Game worn triple J blazers cam raddish number to 25. Oh timeless red Thomas Not gonna be it is Hardin James hard of the 35 Houston Lee with the Rockets that's sick Congrats Houston, it's like eight teams ago for Hardin Pretty fire pretty fire game winner over the dubs right there. I think how it's cool They can grasp the lead. We're going downtown Benedict Mather and Pacers Hugh with the Pacers Bend the bucket with some indie cars right there. That's what's up case heated up fast Love that redemption prime murky jersey auto blue AJ Griffin for the Hawks AJ Griffin for the Hawks SOD griff Not SOD Wizards now you've got kuzma to 99 next up is Thunder rookie auto Jalen Williams one of 35 very nice J Dub He's got good pretty quick. All right. We got Jason Williams out of 99 for the Kings Like chocolate yellow. It's got to be jazz, right? Yep. Oh shag boss. She did 99 Ricky Jersey autograph jazz Aten for the Suns at a 15 To a 15 and it's gonna be Kings here. Is that is that white chocolate again? Yeah It is Jason Williams to 49 on the team Titan signatures. He was again Well, one more timeless one more timeless come on Halliburton Pacers purple out of 25 Howdy, God Pacers rookie patch autograph Andrew Neymar to 25 Pacers with another one Alakai Branham rookie to 99 for spurs Mavericks rookie The Jaden Hardy autograph to 35 good hit for the Mavs Come on monster here. Come on One of one. I was on the downtown Big RPA. Come on Steve Nash to 99 Phoenix Next is rookie the patch autograph spurs Malachi Branham one of 25 In the last box of the case everybody got Marcus smart out of 15 for the Celtics and a Keegan Murray RPA to 99 Kings Kings did really well too. That's the another team for Hugh Kings RPA Keegan Murray to 99 All that'll do it for the case. Thank you again appreciate it The two big big hits we have with the Harden Thomas the 35 and the downtown Matherin It's worth a nice one stew. Thank you all very much. First let's come up in a few minutes


Thank you very much for coming and thank you to Dr. Osterholm for doing this. He's a very busy guy right now as you can imagine We hosted him in 2017 for this amazing book deadliest enemy, which I reread last night And basically it predicts pretty much everything that just has on as it's unfolded right now Dr. Osterholm is one of the world's leading experts on infectious diseases He's at the University of Minnesota And so I was we're gonna I'm gonna have a Ask him some questions that I'm gonna open up to you and because we have limited time. Let's just dive straight in so, Dr. Osterholm The head of the World Health Organization last night said we're in uncharted territory Is that a reasonable question or way of framing this? It is relative to the conditions that we see in the world right now meaning not just the cases of COVID-19 infection but also in terms of just this global relationship we have with Manufacturing with supply chains with transportation and so even the 1918 Pandemic didn't present those challenges that we see today With the combination of disease and in economic social and political conditions in the world We've had other coronaviruses, which you worked on extensively like SARS and MERS. I mean, what's the difference between this? Coronavirus and those coronaviruses which although they were highly problematic didn't really kill very many people rather be speaking Yeah, well, thank you. And and let me just take a step back. I think this might help set the table for this discussion We have quite convincing evidence right now that this virus emerged in the Wuhan area in about the third week of November and we can actually tell from the genetics of the virus that that in fact is the case because we can predict the Kinds of changes that occur over time and I'll come back to that later Why that's important is because it sets up our understanding of where we're at right now note that the Epidemic wasn't even really identified in Wuhan until towards the end of December even though as I mentioned it had to likely Jumped and almost like potentially a lightning strike kind of jump from an animal to a human and I do believe that's the case I don't believe that there has been man-made interference whether unintentional or intentional in terms of the release of this organism And the reason it took almost five to six weeks is because when we even think about infectious disease Transmission we often come back to that concept of our not or how many people on average does someone transmit the virus to and What we see with this one is it's a probably about an R not of two to two point five It's surely dynamic if you think of regular influenza It's about one point four if you think about pandemic influenza tends to be about one point eight people So this is quite different It took yet that number of weeks before it was detected because you go from one to two two to four four to eight eight to sixteen Sixteen to thirty two and when you think about we now know that probably about eighty percent of the infections are very mild If not asymptomatic and so before you could get that you might say tip of the iceberg to emerge You had to actually build case numbers up during that time period and then when by the time it got Detected in Wuhan in December. We are now talking about big numbers going from five, you know hundred to a thousand to two thousand to Four thousand and these were occurring about every six to seven days So today what we have happening right now is that we've are seeing this kind of transmission around the world That is occurring much like Wuhan did early on the Chinese have clearly suppressed this activity there with The most I would have to say aggressive if not you might say authoritarian efforts in terms of population movement Quarantine and so forth and yet we still see Today the numbers are down slightly But we've been average about four to five hundred cases a day in China for the last ten days So it's still activity there and I want to emphasize that I'm convinced that that activity is going to in a sense Have a major resurgence once China releases some of these population control measures to get the economy back working And so that from that standpoint We really do have a challenge in terms of of even there Expecting to see this resurgent the rest of the world got seated after Wuhan And so we had actually here at our center had put out a document that actually said The last week of January in that time that would be about one month and the rest of the world would pop And the reason we said mean that was is it would take that much time before case numbers would build up in other areas Around the world and that much of what we were doing to try to stop transmission from China was pretty much useless because in fact This is influenza virus like transmission. It's not Merz or SARS which gets me back to Merz and SARS What's different here is the fact that SARS and Merz both and I was very involved with both outbreak investigations I've actually Again was that it spending part of my time at the US government at HHS during the SARS outbreak with Merz I've investigated outbreaks in the Arabian Peninsula as well as having been at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul Korea when that outbreak happened in 2015 their patients are most infectious day five or later and It allowed us the opportunity to identify these patients early get them into protective isolation Make sure that there are not even though they're blowing virus out is zero meaning that you don't have transmission And when we didn't do that We had a hospital outbreaks and we quickly realized that that was going to be an important thing to stop And then we could get a hold of the contacts and actually follow up with them And if they started to develop symptoms We had time to get them into protective isolation and make sure that they didn't get infected So this is so different than Merz and SARS here virus transmission is occurring early in illness Likely even before symptoms show up similar to influenza The other two coronaviruses Merz and SARS were ones we could stop SARS obviously was stopped because we both got rid of the animal reservoir in the markets of the Guangdong province primarily palm civets We can't get rid of the animal reservoir in the Arabian Peninsula Nobody's gonna you know basically put down a million point five camels And so there we're constantly dealing with once a human gets infected making sure that they don't transmit to others So but this is a very very different coronavirus think of this as an influence of pandemic caused by a coronavirus and you're thinking about this in the right way What do you think the let the fatality rate is if Or do I mean is there a kind of approximation? You know first of all it is variable from the standpoint of Who the who is actually getting infected clearly we know in China That being older and having underlying health care Challenges as well as being a male actually were risk factors were up to 14 to 18 percent of that group were Not that we're dying from this infection One of the challenges we have today is understanding that well with men China in China smoking is still a very very common Habit and so from that perspective We think smoking played a big role in in the increased risk, which we see with even influenza in our own country One of the challenges we have today is this when that moves into a new population What is going to happen? You know we saw in total about 2% of the cases of all does all of the COVID-19 illness is in kids or up to teenagers up to 19 years of age So it's very rare there and just grows up goes up as you get older One of the things we're concerned about as this moves out into other parts of the world is one of the other risk factors We know for having this kind of response to this type of pneumonia, which we call acute respiratory distress ARDS is that also Obesity plays a very key role in that and so now that we're laying this out into parts of the world We're obesity in itself is an epidemic problem We think we could see a very different kind of case fatality rate than we're seeing in China That is less gender specific And could be something of real significance. So we don't know at this point The number of two to two point five percent has been used We've seen it as low as point seven that the WHO report put it between two to four percent in the Wuhan area and point seven percent to the rest of China I think these numbers are still very suspect. We just for example had an outbreak that occurred in a Facility a hospital in Korea where seven of a hundred and one Patients in one psychiatric ward who were infected died now There was an obviously a much higher number there and so I think it's at this point It's it's not nearly like SARS, which is close to ten percent It's not nearly like MERS, which is twenty five thirty five percent But it is somewhere between seasonal flu in a bad year, which is point one percent in the 1918 pandemic which of course preferentially it took out young adults of 2.5 to 3% so this is this is clearly in that range of what would be considered a severe influenza pandemic if this were the influenza virus So if in a regular year in the United States the lethality rate of flu is zero one point zero point one percent You're saying that this is what? 20 to 30 times higher easily could be Okay, and if and so for zero point one percent kills Between 30 and 60,000 in any given year in the United States. What are the implications? for in this case Well as you are so good at asking questions Peter you you ask an answer in such a great way I mean it's obvious that this is a very serious challenge and I think that you know It was unfortunate that we had a number of public health people who early on when this happened kept trying to compare 10 poins in a way of saying well look at flu kills many more people in this country This is a much bigger problem But they hadn't understood was that they were just watching in the opening scene of this particular Corona winter as I call it and I think that in this regard we can expect to see a large number of deaths moving forward And we're going to see a lot of Morbidity one of the challenges we have with this illness is that when you do get sick and in the Chinese data Which again is the best we have suggests that anywhere from five to ten percent of people will get severe illness Of those five to ten This is where we come up with the two point five percent to die But what's been challenging is these patients need intensive care medicine and many of them don't die for two to three weeks After they've been hospitalized after they're consuming health care And in fact the the hallmark case that so many of us painfully remember was the young 34 year old physician in China who really brought this to the public's awareness by having the the His email or his internet Website basically taken down by the Chinese government when he posted on it that these cases were occurring and He died three weeks into his illness And he actually took a selfie of himself the last week before he died and then continued to go downhill and eventually died so one of the challenges we have here is these people do use a lot of health care and That makes it even more of a problem relative to influenza in terms of how are we going to respond? well that raises a question of so There obviously going to be a lot of people with pneumonia who don't die But they're going to be coming into the hospitals. Are we equipped with the ICUs and the ventilators that to kind of deal with a large-scale Group of people coming in with these kinds of symptoms Absolutely not and that's what we've been talking about and actually when I did the the briefing that you very kindly noted at the beginning of this Session in your facility there Addressing the book that I wrote Nothing's changed since I wrote that book in terms of better preparedness. We're not right now today in Minneapolis, St. Paul every one of the beds that we use for ECMO this very high level Heart-lung type machine that is very helpful in terms of of keeping people alive who have this illness are filled. They're all filled We have really no open beds as such given that We are just coming off a real or moderate to severe flu season and that has stretched things on top of that We have a number of hospitals right here in the state of Minnesota as is national nationwide that right now have five to ten days of Personal protective equipment available for health care workers, and that's it and they've been ordering and ordering and it's all in Backorder because everybody wanted it all at once and so we're I very think I think very likely facing a crisis In terms of protecting our health care workers in the next several weeks in many parts of this country What can be done? Well, I think first of all we have to utilize the Health services we have in different ways meaning we need to stop elective surgeries Anybody who's not severely ill with something else clearly needs not to be hospitalized We need to be preparing our pandemic plan To the point of now thinking through what we do if we had a 20 to 30 percent jump in the number of hospitalizations We needed remember in Wuhan We had a number of people there who were desperately ill who needed hospital care who couldn't get into a hospital and Although the numbers varied there was it was clear and compelling that many people were dying at home Not in hospital not because they didn't want to be there. They couldn't get in We also have not yet fully understood the impact that this had on people who had heart attacks people who had acute asthma attacks Things where they really had medical crises and couldn't get health care in China because the hospitals were overwhelmed With with these cases, so I think we're going to run into the same situation here and our jobs going to be triaging This in a way that that allows us to make sure that we do take care of the sickest patients The next thing I think we're going to have to do is of course think about how we're going to protect our health care workers We need solutions that are not ideal, but that may work for example rather than having one patient in one room Where if you come in and out you have to doff and don or take on or off the protective equipment And we know that for example in many institutions that'll average 20 to 25 times a day a health care work will get out of a room Well, what we may need to do is with the right engineering So we're making sure that from an airflow standpoint We're not sending air to other parts of the hospital, but open up wards where everyone in the ward is infected And therefore what you do is you don't go in and out of rooms and doff and don your equipment You use it constantly for potentially a much of a shift and so there are things we can do that way But we still have a great likelihood they're going to face shortages and we don't have good answers for that right now What do we do and we'll be reverting back to surgical masks as opposed to in 95 respirators surgical masks We know are ineffective There's well now an estimated 4,500 health care workers in China who have become infected providing care Many of those were early in the outbreak when it wasn't completely understood just how infectious this virus is But there have been a number since that time and a large part of it's been tied to the absence of adequate respiratory protection Are you saying that the end 95 respirator is not available in any meaningful quantity? It's not and part of the problem is is this is when you asked me early on why you know, is this different? you know In the quote-unquote olden days just a decade or two ago when you were looking at storing or stockpiling Equipment that you needed for your institution. You counted it taking some time to arrive even if you ordered it may have been an order via an E by mail or a telephone call Today we just assumed that when we go on our computers and we get onto a site and we put in an order for X something that it'll arrive the next day by FedEx and and Unfortunately far too much planning has been done making the assumption supply chains would be stable that they could handle surge Capacity or need and they can't and so manufacturers right now in North America are manufacturing as quickly as they can this equipment but basically health care has been so financially in rough shape here in this country no Health care organization has gone out in stockpiled lots and lots of protective equipment They have always bought it on a just-in-time basis and so now we're paying the price for that Some have said well This is in part because it's all made in China and there are many things which for which we are Heavily dependent on China including our critical drugs we use in this country But believe it or not actually a fair amount of personal protective equipment actually is made right here in North America But no matter we can't catch up and so you know if we had six to twelve months to get ready And people understood the severity of what we are facing then we might have had enough on hand But you know the estimates are right now that we are many many fold below what we would need To reasonably get through this situation as that we expected might unfold in terms of the respirator Respirators and Tessa respirators and potentially some of the other protective equipment goggles and so forth but but so this is going to be a challenge and I think that I wrote a piece in Washington Post several weeks ago about protecting health care workers as our frontline activity Because I believe as goes our health care facilities our hospitals our long-term care facilities goes the sense of how much the country believes that we are actually Handling the situation and when health care workers start dying and they or they get severely ill and they go from being care providers to someone needing care And hospitals are not able to handle patients because of reduced number of health care workers I think that's when you run the risk of people losing complete confidence in what's happening You know and at one area I worried desperately about is kind of a perfect storm as we know today long-term care Which we have major? Needs here in this country for that that there's been a challenge finding workers to work in long-term care and If we overlap this virus with workers and the outbreak in Kirkland, Washington right now in the long-term care Facility there is a classic example. You take out most of the workers And you have sick patients who takes care of them and so I think this is going to be a huge challenge What did you that you saw the news about the million tests by the end of the week? What do you make of that? I? Think that's true. I think we will have that many tests available and When I say available at the end of the week will be gearing up to that we expect this week itself to have about 75,000 tests available, but by the end of the week with all the new Sources of testing we're going to get geared up for that And where were those tests and where will those tests happen? I mean what's the kind of tests for the test is it where I mean is it going to be geographically centered on where these outbreaks are randomly? We're going to see most I think State health departments clearly having the capacity to test in all 50 state health departments and at least 12 or 15 large city health departments in addition other Medical centers are bringing on their own tests that they are very used to doing with PCR These are the ones that will be applying for the additional emergency authorization to do that So I think you're going to see a variety of different places one of the challenge We had with the CDC problems with this test is when they first applied for emergency authorization use by the FDA requirements that gave that test the only Access for people to use a test to that particular CDC test and the FDA has had to respond to that and Basically relax that requirement and allow others to also apply for emergency authorization use And so I think it's a combination of factors. We'll see much more in the way of public health laboratories We will see much more in the private sector Coming forward and again, you know, it was a really very unfortunate situation We didn't have the kind of testing here in this country that much of the rest of the world has enjoyed for at least four to five weeks Why was that? You know, they had a problem with plan a and nobody had a plan BC or D and this was really a Terrible situation. How do you grade the Trump administration on this? Well, you know, I think it was I'll say right now a CDC However, you know could have happened under anybody's administration but there should have been a plan to deal with it when it happened and There wasn't and that's what I think frustrated the people out here in the field is that we knew we had Transmission ongoing and that we unfortunately were in a sense reinforcing this Almost I call it fantasy that we somehow would stop transmission coming into this country And what I have said multiple times over the past six weeks is all we did was fix three of the five screen doors on our submarine And that in fact we knew that we had cases coming in border control as was set up May have slowed down new cases coming into this country To some degree, but surely was far from stopping it look at the situation in Seattle There was a case that was detected in January The individual was put in isolation, but not before he had been in the community and in fact This was written up like this was a great success In terms of stopping ongoing transmission Well as you know at least one of the patients who was tested in Seattle a 19 year old Individual some six weeks later has virtually the same strain which by all scientific and Agreement is in fact a progeny of that original strain meaning that's likely where it came from Meaning that there had to be at least six or seven generations of transmission between the time that the Individual first arrived in the United States from China back in January in this case now Who who it was ill this past week? So we've had ongoing transmission in this country We should have had testing that could have picked it up And while any organization can have a problem with a test like this The fact that there was no plan B. C or D is really unfortunate. How does this unfold and what's the kind of timeline here? Well, you know This outbreak from our perspective has really unfolded on time and what I mean by that is back in Even even the second week of January It was very clear that this was no longer going to be a merge or SARS like situation with transmission It was much more dynamic Clearly it was acting very much like a flu virus and so we have a group here at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy Called the SIDRAP leadership forum which involves a number of organizations and companies that we advise on a routine basis And we've we've actually been having daily update phone calls on what was going on dating back to the second week of January And at that time we said all bets are off. This is no longer a merger SARS like situation. We're not going to control it This is influenza and it's going like transmission and it's going to continue By the end of January we actually Put out to this group that it was just a matter of about probably four to six weeks And we're going to see this pop internationally and it was going to happen in a big way as we went through the same kind of phenomena That we saw in Wuhan where it took five to six weeks before it really in fact took hold Well, you know, I said the earliest we're probably going to see this will be Last week of February, but then don't be surprised you see many countries and Where you have transmission it'll be widespread and it'll appear like it's brand new when in fact It's been going on for generations meaning of the virus transmission. So I ran Italy, Korea, none of these surprised us They they were what you would predict when so when we go from 26 countries Fifteen or 14 days ago and we're now up into the 70s, you know This shouldn't have been a surprise much of it was more a detection issue than it was even brand new transmission So for our country we've been saying for some time There is widespread transmission going on in this country right now It's just being missed and as soon as we have testing. We're going to see it I was on a public television show last Friday night Knowing that certain states had received their test kits that we're going to begin testing and I actually Said on Friday night, you know within the next 72 hours I think you're going to see this thing pop in the United States and we're going to see it in multiple Locations and some locations were probably going to dock Document extensive transmission without any knowledge of what had happened in Seattle So I think that this is really playing out in time. So now where do we go from here? I think a couple things. This is a challenge in terms of where does it go by time? Let me make one point really clear, which I think has has not received Sufficient discussion we keep hearing that this is going to die out with the spring warm or weather in the northern hemisphere somehow as if we're the whole world and part of that is based on what has happened with the MERS and SARS coronaviruses and and SARS in particular which SARS ended in 2003 in June But you know having been very involved with that outbreak of a situation Let me just say, you know, we first detected it in the quote-unquote non-guandong province area in February of 2003 and It took us some time meaning at least a month or the half to two months to really understand the epidemiology Of what I described earlier where transmission was occurring much later in the clinical course And so that we could identify isolate these people we could work with their contacts And also understand what the actual reservoir was in the guandong markets So that they could be eliminated which was largely palm civets and that really stopped the virus from pinging humans Then we just had to clean it up in the human population Which took until literally June, but it had nothing to do with the seasons at all I've investigated outbreaks of MERS on the Arabian Peninsula, and I've stood outside of hospitals when it was 110 degrees and Inside was going a ravaging outbreak And I've seen transmission from camels year-round. There's nothing in the MERS literature I know the outbreak in Samsung Medical Center, which was hundreds of cases In a hospital transmission occurred in May to June of that year So so don't think that that means it but let's just take a look at flu Even if we want to use that as a model because that's what the other thing people do they say well See there's no flu ends remember Yes Influenza is at its peak in the northern and southern hemispheres during their respective winters But it circulates year-round in the tropics. We've never understood that it's always in the tropics And if you look at the last 10 influenza pandemics that have occurred over the past 250 some years two started in the winter three started in the spring two started in the summer and three started in the fall and Every case the second or the big wave was always displaced by about six months If you look at 2009 with H1N1 We knew that activity started there or probably late February early March we picked it up in April early April and We had that initial peak of cases that occurred in April and May around the world But the second big peak occurred in this north in North America and in many parts of the world in Mid-September to mid-October when it was still very warm again just placed by six months And if you go back and look at all the other pandemics that happened in the same way So there is no model here that says this is going to go away You know if it does it does and you know It's obviously a new phenomena for us But I would say we have to be prepared to see this run a course for at least months yet The other thing that we have ahead of us, which is a challenge is that within influenza We know we have some natural protection in the population because of previous infections that were close by in 2009 We had a relative absence of cases in those who were 65 or years of age and older And if you look back these were the same people that would have been younger Adults and children that were still on the reminiscences of the actual 1918 virus that continued to circulate into the 1930s So, you know, they obviously still has some protection We have no evidence of any protection with this coronavirus right now in the population And so that to that extent, you know we have kind of a virgin territory here in terms of the number of people that might get infected and So is it going to be like the typical seasonal flu year where 10 to 20 percent of the population gets infected? We don't know it could be a lot more That's why even when we talk about case fatality rate, you know If you have a disease that has a very high case fatality rate, but only a hundred people get it every year That's not nearly the same significance as a disease It has a low case fatality rate of 1% but a billion people get it And so what we don't understand here is how this virus is going to interact in terms of the number of people infected on top of the Case fatality rate. This is surely going to be every one thing we have says it's going to be a lot worse than a bad seasonal flu year How many people died in the 57 flu in the States? Actually, I think it was about 80,000 I don't have the number right in front of me But but if you actually look at that what happened in 57 and 68 with those for outbreaks In a sense of what was seasonal flu, but on kind of a steroid basis meaning H3 and H2 into which caused the 57 outbreak and H3 into that caused the 68 outbreak the pandemics Were basically just seasonal flu, but a lot more of it So I mean the average age of deaths was in the 60s if you actually look at the 1918 outbreak was very interesting the average age of deaths was 29 and of course we know in some locations It was as high as three to five percent of the young adult population died Well, people don't realize in 2009 even though the overall deaths were less the average age of deaths was about 39 years And if you actually adjust in life expectancy meaning that in 1918 life expectancy was about 48 years in 2009 it was 74 years the actual age of deaths was younger in 2009 and it was in 1918 again both age one and one viruses just fortunately a lot less This one we don't know what it's going to do other than it looks like it's kind of seasonal flu and steroids But as they said once we get into the obesity issue and we start to see we can actually see in many of the high-income countries around the world In particular a very different picture Dr. Wilson we have a quite a number of people in the room and also people on the phone So if you have a question, can you hit your microphone so it turns on and we just anybody has a question how to start with Allison I'm collecting the online questions I've got a few here and the first two are somewhat similar Is closing down schools or businesses for a period of time an effective measure to control the spread of the virus? And if so, what would be the optimal length of time for the operation to be closed? Thank you for that very thoughtful question This is where I I probably sound like I'm a bit schizophrenic and if you talk to my kids, they definitely tell you that's true You know we need to start to normalize our response to this and what I mean is is that we we got to be thoughtful We can't we can't just knee-jerk, you know right now We're thinking about this kind of like it is when I play checkers with my ten-year-old grandson You know one move down the board and boy, that's a big deal, okay? We need to play this like a chess master somebody who's thinking out 20 moves down the chess board and And and one of the concerns I have is any action we take there is a Significant reaction and it all should be about obviously reducing morbidity and mortality But let's take schools for example right now We've all been struck by the relative absence of cases in kids in China to two point one percent of cases or 19 years of Age or younger case fatalities rate is very very very low very few cases as such there's only been a couple of Examples where people have actually looked at kids who are otherwise largely healthy and Looking for virus shedding and each of those occurred in family settings where other family members were quite ill or died and The kids didn't appear to get sick And so they actually tested the kids though just to see and in several instances they did find kids shedding virus Well, we've got to really really understand that because I think there's a case to be made We don't want to close schools That in fact it won't have the kind of impact with influence that we want to do that because we have Clear and compelling data that kids can serve as a major reservoir for this virus and seed it through communities And in fact even with seasonal flu when we close down schools for the Christmas holiday often That actually will slow down transmission in communities when you get kids out of schools So and here's a case in point where I'm all for closing schools If we show that kids are important to submitters of the virus But if it's only because we are going to do that now when they're not that but that's what we've always done Then I think we make a mistake because for example school closings have tremendous impact in communities workforce in particular and And in a disproportionately affect the lower socioeconomic status individuals who don't have alternatives They got to stay home with their kids and then they don't get paid And so one of the things that we don't want to do is react like that So that's one thing for businesses, you know, this is one area where again, it's a major challenge You know, we've got to keep the lights on we've got to keep food coming and we've got to keep Really critical drugs coming one of the areas that we have been very involved with has been looking at the supply of critical life-saving drugs in the United States for that matter around the world and We've been studying this now for over the past year and a half and we brought together Several groups of medical treatment experts a year a year and a half ago and came with a list of a hundred and fifty-three different Critical life-saving drugs that people need right now or people die. What's on the crash cart? What's the emergency room that kind of thing and In that list of drugs we found all of them were generic most of them made outside the United States and 63 of the 153 were already on some form of shortage status meaning that just with routine commerce They we didn't have enough when you trace that back and you look at the supply chains many of them originate in China and What isn't made in China is made in India, but in many cases the API the active pharmaceutical ingredient will come from China And so one of the things we're trying to study is that because one of the nightmares I have is that as we start to see the major increase in cases of this Coronavirus infection in the United States is also overlaps and kind of a perfect storm way with the You know we exhaust the supply chains We do have in place meaning that there was product in the pipeline before this happened But it's only two to three months worth and that even then we're going to start running out of these drugs And so there we need to keep commerce going. We need to keep This is a situation where we can get life-saving drugs and critical medical supplies and things like that and food to people So we need to balance what we talk about when we say that, you know, we're not going to you know Basically have people go to work. Let me just give you one last point Power here's an example. We take that for granted all the time when you're in a low-income country Power is never taken for granted because you never know when you're going to get it in the United States We still supply about 30 to 35 percent of our electricity with coal much of the coal that comes in into this System in the North America comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming in Montana. It's high BTU low-sauce for coal It's a kind of coal that you just can't get anywhere else in the United States and you can't use Other coal in these generators Well, it turns out that the coal that comes out of the Powder River Basin is Delivered on coal trains to all parts of the United States and these coal trains are very unique 110 car trains made out of aluminum And the weight is remarkable and it turns out that these are so Specific in terms of the track that they run on that the engineers who actually run these trains go several hundred miles each day One way get off go back home because I mean they drop for take a train back to their original location Because if you're not going 28 miles an hour at this point you won't get over a peak But if you're going more than 32 miles an hour here you tip and so they run these coal trains almost like the old riverboat captains did in the Mississippi and the Ohio River long before we had radar and Today, you know what if those if those coal train drivers go down with this We're in big trouble because you can't put a National Guard replacement on that train and run those trains If you're an airplane pilot, you know if you're an airlines pilot You can find any airport in the world with the book in your hand knowing, you know what the issues are you can't do that here We've had major shortages occur plant shear Which is one of the largest plant electrical generating plants in the world is outside of Atlanta And we've had a number of times when their coal supplies have gotten down to a day or less So we think about that kind of part of business We got to keep those coal train drivers as safe as possible and how we're going to do that is a real question I could go through other examples like this where we just forget about How we depend on that part of our world for existence and if we don't have electricity We won't be running hospitals because not only do they need electricity even with their electrical generators Remember the electrical generators come from diesel fuel which has actually made it refineries that need electricity to make the refineries to make the diesel fuel So that's what we just haven't thought through the consequential what I call collateral damage issues Other questions Thank you, this is really helpful Just to to further your point about schools and businesses and from a research standpoint, how long will it take to know? Whether school-age children are transmitting it or if they're vectors for this and just to know more broadly More about how it's being transmitted to whom and etc Yeah, thank you. I mean I don't know when we're gonna know I we need this research done badly It was clearly one of the priorities that came out of the WHO working group meeting about three weeks ago that these are infuses of data You know, I'm at the point where I think we have to make our best Estimates of what might happen in some cases. We don't have the data one of the things I have been advocating for for Some time weeks in this situation knowing that it was going to get this bad I think this is probably going to get handled ultimately almost on a state-by-state basis where You know, there's not going to be a federal blanket do this or do that They'll say take it back to your local leaders and I think every state right now should have a COVID-19 Task force that's made up of elected officials Bipartisan it's made up of public health experts and public health officials the medical community certain selected private sector people who basically are going to wrestle with the fact What do we do in our state and then have everybody do it? The last thing we want to do is well this seven school district going to stay open these four school districts are not You know, how are we going to make sure we prioritize that we have food? You know, I find this challenging for me because if I hear it one more time from a media person I'll probably scream but oh my god. We can't tell miss a bill panic. What is panic? You know, I've not seen anybody panic yet You know the closest I've seen is you know people going out and exhausting the toilet paper supply at Costco Okay, which makes about as much sense as the gas lines. We had the night of 9-11 as you already call We had gas line, you know cars lined up for two miles to get gas because somebody started doing everybody did it But we don't see the kind of behavior that's riding in the streets, you know Setting cars on fire injuring people You know people take you know doing harmful things to themselves or family members because of this and And and the way we even minimize that is to just tell people what we know and don't know Straight talk and then get consensus. So how are we going to handle this here and make it a non-partisan? science and policy group and I think that's where we're going to ultimately have our best chance now somebody who's on a National in a national company in a national company. So I don't want 50 states telling me what to do But I think what you're going to find is is that for them how they handle workers How they for example, I'm I'm I'm right now Probably not on in the majority voice and surely not popular But I think quarantining people coming back from high-risk countries today is is a misnomer and totally unproductive Meaning that right now. I I think you could just as easily make the case. We should be basically quarantining slash Travel alert to King County and Sonomish counties in in the northwestern part of the United States We do Italy and yet look what we've done to Italy and in Iran and Korea We've got as much transmission around the world right now in many places and it's going to happen everywhere And how many places can you finally? Coordinate off before you say oh, well, you know We're all walled off here in the United States and we're just as bad I was asked this in fact in a in a radio show a week ago And I meant it kind of tongue-in-cheek, but somebody said asked the question Well, wouldn't we know the United States is really in a big hurt big problem with that? And I said it's with the air China refuses to fly here because it's too risky You know, and I think that that in a sense, that's what we need to do So I would actually say now we need to start normalizing Don't do these quarantines because there's just as many people likely in this country Who are going to pose a risk as people coming back from countries with disease problems? That's the kind of thinking we need to start having now. How are we going to get through this? You know public health has got to stop doing contact tracing, you know It works when it's a few cases, but I'm telling you right now You could have all the public health workers in the world Working on this thing and we wouldn't have nearly enough and what we do is not do public health Just just take a step back and think about this while it's not a perfect correlation you know, we've had Almost what 2600 people die from Ebola in the DRC area in terms of of our Outbreak we've had the last several years and every resource has been so Targeted from that local area During the same time period over 7,000 kids have died from measles in that area Because we don't have the measles vaccine campaigns going out like we once did And so we have to start thinking about yes, we want to deal with the problem at hand But we also have to start dealing with the collateral damage And in some cases the collateral damage may actually be worse than the actual disease outbreak so businesses I hope we can keep them running as much as possible You know whether you're at work or you're at home the person who does remote work with their business That's great But then when they go out that night to the grocery store or the shopping center, you know What have they just done? I mean it's not going to be any different So I think this is part of what I I think about when we talk about seasonal flu When's the last time somebody basically greatly altered their work setting the business operations based on flu? This is worse. I don't disagree But somehow we've got to take lessons from that and move into normalizing our response to this or we will we will you know all You know shut up in our homes and and I'm not sure what that accomplishes Hi, I'm tying right into that. I actually have travel planned to Indonesia and the Philippines in a few weeks And so I've been closely monitoring this And I wasn't too concerned until yesterday a time article came out that said it's like statistically Impossible or almost impossible that countries like Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia don't have cases But so far they are reporting zero So is it a case of like not doing their due diligence of making tests? Or they're covering up and so I'm kind of curious if there is a way to I don't know like not hold accountable, but like how do we combat like governments? Maybe not being a transparent around what's going on in their country Well, you know, I I Thank you again under very thoughtful question. I I don't really worry about governance being transparent I I'm assuming that number one because it doesn't matter Assume it's everywhere. This is a global influenza pandemic caused by a coronavirus happening And even if governments were completely truthful in all regards I'm not sure because I mean we were we were not lying in the United States a week ago When the president got up in front of the country and laid out the number of cases we had confirmed that was true But it did reflect the reality. What was happening? Absolutely not And so I think that many countries around the world may have some of the same problems of testing and what they know So I just assume it's everywhere now given that the the question becomes you still want to do international travel Well, I think there are two things to consider there one is surely being in large numbers of people Anybody's ever been to Indonesia Jakarta, etc. You know, there's a lot of people You're going to likely increase the chances of being exposed and getting infected not depending how long you're there and Your age or underlying health status, etc. If you need hospitalization, do you want to be hospitalized in Indonesia and Then the final piece is is that you have to ask yourself, you know, what's my government going to do tomorrow? You know, I actually raised this issue the the Second day that the Italy cases started to emerge and I thought our Syrup leadership group and I actually said You know, I wonder what it'll be interesting if a week from now We put a travel alert on there and on Italy we did and so there's no rhyme the reason today necessarily when Countries will have travel alerts or quarantine issues Because many of these are being made politically not based on on what I call the best science I mean, we're still seeing the administration taking credit for having quote-unquote limited transmission in the United States With the work that was done, you know with the travel issues with China with the airport screening Which the last number I had it was well over six hundred thousand people had been screened in that one case had been detected And so I think but that made people feel good We were doing something and what I'm concerned about is being an international travel status We don't know what that's going to mean Now I would tell you if you have a chance going to cruise ship right now I'd bypass that one cruise ships have been notoriously a problem with respiratory transmitted agents because we know all the Recirculated air that occurs in the inside cabins and I would hold that long time before that the diamond princess happened So I'd say definitely stay away from that, but if you do international travel I don't think that it's putting you that much higher risk other than large crowds to getting infected But I think the idea of do I want to get hospitalized in country X and do I know that I can get back into the United States? Without a 14-day quarantine. I think our questions that make me want not to do international travel right now This is all really interesting slightly terrifying, but thank you for taking the time My question is that there's a whole lot of people in this country. We don't have paid sick time and I'm wondering What there is that we can do in the short term To encourage those people to actually not come to work or is there anything we can do I Don't know if there is really anything we can do. I think that again, it's People's comfort level, you know one of the things I talked about in my book was you know that which kills us that which hurts us That which concerns us in that which scares us sometimes are all very different and you know people are reacting to this differently Relative to what has having a seasonal flu and there may be some good reason for that relative to the increased number of deaths But again knowing that those to date at least have been largely older populations and people underlying health conditions So again, how do you keep people coming to work? You know, we've had Situations here in a very limited way, but it's more case numbers increase that will change where someone finds out a co-worker was infected and You know there is a real concern at the workplace about what does that mean and again? I think that this is where preparedness comes in every workplace setting today should be discussing this right now With their employees. This is what we know. This is what we're going to do You know if they were sitting in the desk That desk is not you know a highly radioactive viral You know cauldron right now, you know, if at the very least it can be just wiped down and it's fine And that from a respiratory standpoint, you may have been exposed What you need to do is over the next 14 days if you develop a respiratory illness This is what needs to be done How you you know don't go into your doctor's office call ahead and I think when you lay out more what will be done People are more willing to say okay. Well like this could happen whether I'm at work It could happen whether I'm at a PTA meeting or it could happen if I have to go to the grocery store I think the one thing that I do have concern about that some people are so reliant right now on Some kind of face protection and thinking that that's going to help them You know, we are urging that all in 95s be used by health care workers or critical Infrastructure workers only not for the general public. We're gonna not have enough and again I've already made the case why we should be checking our health care workers People may then rely on surgical masks, which will play little to no role in reducing transmission It can only help for those who are infected if you put one on when you cough out or you're breathing out in many cases The large droplets and to some degree even the smaller ones will basically stick to the inside of that mask and Reduce your transmission load into the environment, but not not stop it. So I think at this point To come back to the workplace setting. It's just the more information you can give You know people are gonna realize they have to move on with their lives Again if remote working as possible do it if they want to do that But at the same time then warn them at least help them understand if you do that for you know 70% of the day, but then you spend the night out, you know at a restaurant or whatever, you know You've kind of more or less in a sense Minimized all that you did during the day to protect yourself Go ahead Hi, I have a quick question about pandemic communication So I think definitely as compared to stars in 2003 and even MERS in 2012 our access to information like a 24-hour newsfeed on our phone push notifications and social media really lets everyone follow The pandemic as it evolves everything that happens is reported And I'm just wondering if you think that increased access has been a positive thing or how we really affects response to the pandemic And if after covering so many pandemics you think there are any best protocols for reporting and science communication Yeah, thank you for that. That is really a very important point First of all, I fortunately haven't a call really covered that many pandemics You know clearly the 2009 H1N1 was a pandemic and a worldwide epidemic of of a new disease But I'm clearly in the middle of this one. I think you're right about social media and also though You know in 2003 we did not rely much at all in China for many supply chains that we do today So the idea that working together With them was very different back then, you know, it was a different challenge in terms of that I think today so many people portray themselves as media Whether they're social bloggers, whatever their journalists and and they're not and I think that you know a journalist is somebody trained in the Field of communicating Reporting and how you do that and I think that that's a very important point Just as we see with our political systems today the fractionated populations we have based on this issue I mean I have dealt with on multiple occasions over the past couple weeks So many conspiracy theory issues about you know that China intentionally released this it was an accidental release from the virus center there in Wuhan that you know Just any number of different things that are just simply not true And you know, I'm not an expert in this area of Peter is actually much more expert than I am but the idea of the Russian influence on Internet we have some evidence that they were furthering this whole idea of the fact that this virus was made on the Internet and so I think that that has challenges, but I think the other part of it is is that When things get written today and we see this with vaccines, you know science literacy in general People then take it as gospel truth And if you're following a certain type of messaging you're looking at certain websites pretty soon You become convinced this is what's really happening. And so we do have challenges today with the media I have to say it's been somewhat reassuring You know the Sid rap news team here, which you know, they're a part of Sid rap, but because I'm in the news I there's a very thick editorial wall between myself and them. I read the stories the same time you do Has had a remarkable increase and we're now getting millions of readers every month because we're not kind of paywall You know the Washington Post in your times You know Wall Street Journal has done a great job covering this but they're all behind paywalls And so for many people they can't get at it. So there people are trying to get to legitimate reporting sources But nonetheless your point about what's happening on the Internet is continuing I find the challenge is also though about the misleading information that then becomes if it's reported enough times You know, there are some who said that this virus is only transmitted via the hand to the face and so forth And that's simply not true. We have compelling data on influenza transmission Which this is just like this in terms of of ongoing transmission Fine just breathing and air and so I think that that's a that's a Big issue that people don't want to believe that they believe if they just don't if they wash their hands a lot They'll be protected and frankly hand washing may play some role in this but not nearly what people think it is It's all about the air and the area you're breathing Dr. Ross and we know you're super busy So we really want to thank you very very much for taking time out of what is an insanely busy time for you to talk to us and Also want to thank the communications team here Allison and also Melissa and Joanne for putting this together So well and thank you and Peter. Thank you for your leadership and all these topics There are many of us out here in the field who count on you for getting us the information about what's really happening in the world Okay. Well, thank you Good luck. Thank you. Bye. Thank you, sir Thank you for coming


Hello everyone, welcome to yet another experience sharing sessions by violating India and this session would be on PhD and the many possibilities ahead. We have with us Ananya Mundan. Ananya is currently pursuing her PhD at Ludwig-Maxmedens University in Munich, Germany in the area of human cognitive neuroscience. She aims to better understand multi-sensory spatial attention in humans with the help of controlled experiments conducted inside virtual reality using spatial auditory and visual stimuli. Before joining her PhD, she did her master's in Neural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Hyderabad after completing a bachelor's in statistics from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. Welcome Ananya. Thanks for conducting this experience sharing session. Over to you. Hello everyone. So today as mentioned by Sukanya, I'll be talking about PhD and the many opportunities ahead. Now before going to the many opportunities, let's look at what a PhD is. So as you all know, it is a short for Doctor of Philosophy and it is the highest academic degree that one can attend. And it normally takes around three to five years of full-time scholarship and research work towards a thesis resulting in an original contribution to the subject. Now these were all very factual information that I gave you. To better understand what a PhD exactly is, I would use this very famous illustration by Professor Matt Might who like shows, like if you can see this black circle here, that's all of human knowledge. And throughout our schooling, say secondary and primary school, we gain some amount of knowledge in all fields, which becomes a bit narrower with our bachelor's and master's degree. Now with the PhD, it reaches the tip of this human knowledge and in the end creates this small dent, which is your original contribution towards the field. So if you just think about it, it's amazing that you actually pull the human knowledge to its extreme and add something to it with your PhD. So with this thought, let's move forward to looking at what it is exactly like doing a PhD. If you go through the internet and search what is it like doing a PhD, you might come across infographics like this, which very nicely shows a step-by-step progression of what a research process is. And it generally starts with defining a research problem followed by reviewing the literature to see what is done and what is left to be done in the field. And then again followed by selecting a research design and formulating a hypothesis after which carrying out the actual research, collecting data and interpreting those results. And after all these steps, you report the results and publish it in the form of research articles. Now if you think about it, it looks very simple just to follow the steps one by one and you'll be done by it. But in my personal experience and in the experience for a lot of other PhD students, research seldom is like that. And to think like to think about it, it wouldn't be as fun if it was just a straight road. It's often a very hilly terrain where you have to traverse through hilly regions and overcome a lot of failures. And that in itself is probably the essence of what a PhD is because you are searching for something which no one has ever looked for. And therefore you're bound to face failures and also overcome from those failures. Now I'd like to tell you some of the transferable skills from a PhD that you might gain. And these skills that I mentioned are universal to any PhD you do in any discipline be it an engineering PhD, computer science and neuroscience or even sociology or economics PhD. So these are the so-called soft skills which will gain and which you can actually transfer it to any other career that you carry on after your PhD. The first most important is time management. Now while doing your PhD you'll just not be conducting your research project. Along with your research project you'll also be teaching, taking courses, writing up reports, publishing, communicating your research at conferences and all these takes time. So at the end of your PhD you can really be assured that you'll become a master in time management. Next is project management. Seldom it happens that a PhD student just handles one project. It's often a lot of projects and you have to juggle through them and at the end of it you just really become good at administrative qualities project management qualities which can again be transferred to any other job just not a research job. Ability to collaborate. Yes, this is important because scientific research seldom happens in isolation. So a good scientific research happens from scientists coming from various disciplines sitting together and trying to look at a problem at different perspectives. And if you're doing a PhD you'll also find yourself in such a situation where different people from different disciplines are coming together and looking at one problem. In this way it really inculcates a team building exercise and your ability to collaborate with others and work with others increases exponentially. Leadership skills, yes. So like I mentioned before there'll be other people who will be helping you in different aspects of your PhD project, but it is your research project, right? So you are the one who should be pulling it, leading it and therefore very naturally you will adapt and inculcate these leadership skills. Next is adaptability. This is a very important skill no matter where you are. You need to adapt to this changing environment, changing research scenario, changing skill requirement. So that's again something which is again very important. Accelerated learning, right? So let's say you're doing a research project in human neuroscience. So like I do using auditory and visual stimuli. Now I don't have a lot of experience in auditory engineering, but to produce my stimuli to give the proper kind of stimuli to my human subjects. I need to have certain amounts of auditory engineering expertise. And I had to learn that in a very limited amount of time. So these kind of skills which are related to your research but you have not done before you have to learn and inculcate. You have to do it in a very small period of time. And this is also a very important skill. You have to look into, you have to pay attention to details in smallest to smallest things because a small change in your experiment can mean a huge thing for your overall theoretical perspectives. And then so eventually you just learn to pay attention to these details. Critical thinking and analysis. Well, I don't think I have to focus on this as much because when you are inquiring about something which has not been done before, you need to have this critical thinking and these data analysis skills to make sense of what your data is and where to put it in the whole overall framework. So this is again a very common exercise which busy students have to do in our daily basis. Last but not the least is writing proficiency and communication skills. Well, you've done all these research collected all these data have really nice results but now you need to communicate it to the community to the scientific community as a whole and to general humankind. So for that you need to develop writing proficiency because you ultimately need to publish papers and also go into conference and give talks.  Now these were some of the transferable skills which are the so called soft skills. There are again the hard skills like data analysis skills or say programming skills which are again very specific to the kind of study you are doing. So that again you can transfer it to your next job if you don't want to remain in academia or research setting. And these are some things which you can hope to gain while doing a PhD. One thing which a lot of people ask me who want to do a PhD is how to look for a PhD position because it can often come out to be very overwhelming. So much of information out there so much of work to do and a lot of people don't know what to look for where to look for. So for that reason I kept a very small slide with a few pointers which actually helped me to find a PhD position and I would like to share them with you. So the most important thing according to me is before searching for a PhD position is to identify what you are really interested in. Because you'll be doing this for the next three to five years and possibly even after that. And therefore it is really really important that you are you like this subject. You are interested in doing this for a extended period of time. And after you have identified that interest I would recommend you to start this PhD search really early because there are a lot of things you need to keep into consideration. First there are different procedures for different countries like in India you need to qualify in a few centralized exams conducted by UGC such as UGC net or gate etc. And only after that you can be qualified to sit for a PhD interview. Similarly in the US if you want to do a PhD in the US you need to look at different universities and different graduate schools and their criteria. You need to look at the strict application deadlines because once you fail to meet those application deadlines then you have to wait for the next year which is again not desirable and so on and so forth. Again like in Europe there are two kinds of PhD which you can do. So in Europe PhD is often seen as a full-time employment. So you can just apply as a job to a PhD with a few motivation letter or research statement, recommendation letters etc. And then there are again other types of PhDs which are graduate school like PhDs which are most common in the US. So you need to look at all these and decide where you want to apply which is the best fit for you. Third there is finding a supervisor in your preferred field. This will again take time because you need to find a person who does exactly what you want to do and who will also be a good fit for you to work with. Then there are again some PhDs which don't come with full funding. So you might need to apply for a scholarship for those kind of PhDs and those take time as well. So keeping all these things in mind you should really start your PhD search early and wait before the deadlines. Along with these search I would also recommend to talk to your professors and other current PhD students because they are really the experts in the field and they would know what to look for and where to look for. Some might even suggest you a good supervisor. So it's always a good thing to ask the experts in the field before going in the field. And last but not the least I would say be prepared for rejection because the key here is to keep applying and not get demotivated because of a few rejections. Because rejections will come because a lot of people are applying and if you just apply to one or two places the probability of you getting there will be slim. So just keep applying and have a positive outlook. Next to the career and research opportunities after PhD. Well of course you guessed it the most common is academia. So after PhD generally people go to work as a research scientist in a university or as a postdoc. Some people might also opt for teaching at an undergraduate institution and then again you can also apply for a faculty position directly which might be a bit tough to get. But it's not uncommon. Next is applying for a job in the industry. With these big companies starting research projects it's not difficult to get a post as a research scientist at one of these companies in your field of interest. You can also work as a business consultant and I know a lot of PhD students have also started their own startups and become an entrepreneur. So these are things you can do after a PhD. Next you can also apply in government sector. For example work as a research scientist in government laboratories like ISRO or DRDO or even work as an advisor to policy makers. And then there are other options like science communications and science journalism and then whatever you wish to do. It won't really close any doors for you PhD. It's just opening a lot of avenues. Now to go into a few misconceptions about PhD. The first one is PhD can only lead to a career in academia. I think this misconception probably I cleared in the previous slide and convinced you that PhD can lead to all sorts of career opportunities and not just academia and university research. Next is you should be in the lab all day and night. Yes. So this is a bad misconception that a PhD student is always in the lab doing the research has no social life and so on and so forth. That's not really true. Because you choose your time of work and often the deadlines are something which you set and you need them. So it's not really like that. Next is you must have completely new ideas to commence your research. Again, it is impossible to have completely new ideas to start a research. What you'll do is build up on previous ideas and then find your way from it and then push it a bit forward. No one's asking you in your PhD to have like phenomenal work like Nobel Prize worthy work. That's not generally the case that doesn't happen. Next is yes, this is also something which I heard a lot is that you think you're too old to start a PhD. See if someone has worked in the industry for a few years and they have interest in going into research, but they think that they are too old to start a research at this age. But that's not true. I have seen people starting their PhD at age of 40 or 50 and doing really good at it. My opinion on this is that it's never too late to start a PhD. And it's as long as you know what you are signing up for and what you are expecting from it, it's never too late. Now that I have talked about the factual details of PhD and what to expect from it and hopefully clear a few misconceptions, let's talk about a very important issue that is the gender gap in scientific career. Here we see a graph from the UNESCO for Women in Science Forum published in 2017, which shows the increasing gender gap in scientific research as with the increase in education level. So here at the high school level, we see that it's almost equal with a huge drop at the bachelor's level for scientific career. Then again for the drop of the PhD level, which keeps on dropping with only 11% of people at the top academic positions and as we all know, only 3% of scientific noble prices for women. Now I would ask you to look at this graph really closely and see the problem here at the bachelor's and PhD level. We see that women consider like consistently that the number of women to pursue a scientific career at the bachelor's and PhD level is considerably lower than their male counterparts. And this is probably one of the reasons why the number of women in tech companies are also quite low and the proper training and education is not completed here. And this can be attributed to a lot of societal and cultural stereotypes of pursuing a scientific career for women. And I think we need to change the mentality of family and society as a general and teach people as to the capabilities of women and what they can bring to the table as scientists or science educators. And I think there also needs to be a robust government initiative to encourage women to actively participate and pursue science and only then we can hope to bridge this huge gap between men and women in scientific career. With this, I come to the end of my presentation. I hope I could pick some interest in your mind about PhD and research in general. Do let me know if you have any questions and thank you. Thank you, Pycon India for having me. Thank you, Ananya for this wonderful session. We do have a few questions. I'll just be putting them up on the screen in a bit. Okay, so we have one so far. Is there any list of universities or colleges for PhD? Any ranking of colleges are subsequent questions? Yes. So there are these two famous organizations which runs universities. I think one is the Times Higher Education List and the other is the QS University Ranking List. So you can follow them and see which are the best universities around the world for the particular discipline that you would like to conduct your research in and then choose the university and the graduate school from there. But my personal opinion would be to choose a proper lab first and then go for the university ranking because that is much more important than a overall university ranking. Thanks. I think this is an interesting one. So someone has anonymously asked, can you share your PhD experience? How many did you give and what is your success rate? Right. So I was mainly applying for my PhD in Europe and mainly targeting Germany per se. So in Germany, like I mentioned, there are two types of PhD. One is the graduate school type, which are quite few. And the majority of PhDs are advertised positions like job positions. So like we need a PhD candidate and you can apply if you meet these criteria. So I was applying for both of them and the success rate actually is quite low, to be honest. There is another way of applying for PhD as well, which is directly emailing the supervisor with whom you would like to work and ask if they have a position if they would like to supervise you. So that success rate is really, really low. If you send 10 emails, you might get response from two from them. One might say, okay, let's have an interview or so. That's the success rate you should be accustomed to. So for me, I applied to this graduate school, which had a two step application procedure. First is I had to send all my documents along with a motivation letter, a cover letter, a small research statement and recommendation letters. And if they like all these documents, then I would be qualified to the interview phase. So I qualified that and the interview phase was a five part interview phase. Like I had to have interview with five professors and all of them should agree to take me to the graduate school. So that was a bit scary for me because you have to convince five people together. But overall, I think what they are looking for is how much you know from your masters or bachelors and how much are you willing to put forward to your PhD and whether you are a good fit for the lab. So just be yourself and don't try to convince them something which you are not. And I think it'll be fine. I hope I answered all your questions. Fine, Sananya, I think there's one more question which could be a follow up for this one as well. So it's like while applying for PhD, I was told it is better to initiate a conversation with the professor or mentor. If they don't reply to your emails, how many times do you really pursue? Before applying, Max? Yes, I don't think you should pursue it that much because in my experience, if a person is really having resource, because you see to give you a position, they need to have funding because you can't do a PhD without a salary, right? It's not possible. So if they have funding and if they think your profile fits with the lab, they do reply. So maybe twice or three times Max should be good to pursue. After that, you should really start applying to other places and seek other professors as mentors. Great, thanks. Yeah, the next question is how do I prepare for a PhD interview? Well, so see the interviews at different places are conducted very differently. For example, what I heard from a few of my peers who were applying in India, sometimes it is very knowledge based. Like you have to solve stuff like in front of the interviewers and from your master's level or your bachelor's level. In my experience, applying in Europe, it's mostly focused on my master's thesis, like what work I did, how I overcome any difficulties that I had in those work and if I know all the technical specifications of my work. So it's really focused on what I did and what I know rather than overall knowledge of the field, right? So preparation of an interview should be very focused on where you are sitting for the interview. That would be my suggestion. Thanks. Since you brought up PhD in India, there's one question related to that. So what is your opinion about PhDs in India? What do you mean opinion? Well, for me, I think PhDs in India sometimes might take a bit longer. But there are really good research institutes in India where really robust research takes place like ISCs, IITs and the TIFRs. So for doing PhD in India, PhD in general, you should really look at the lab, what the output of the lab is and how the research environment of the lab is. And that's all that matters to a PhD. Thanks. There's another question on, so Angad Gupta has asked, motivation and recommendation letters from industries, is it acceptable while applying for your PhD? So the motivation letter is something which you need to write. Recommendation letters, I think graduate schools have the different graduate schools have the different requirements for who can write a recommendation letter. Often it's mostly people who are in academia that recommend you, but if you are in an industry setting where you did research or research internship, then those recommendations are also valid. Thanks. Okay. We are on the top of the hour. Maybe we can take one last question and then folks, the rest of you can ask a question on the stage 5 stream, Ananya would be there hanging in. So just one last question from, what are the prerequisites to do PhD in India, I mean in terms of education? So this depends on which subject you want to do a PhD in. For example, if you want to do a PhD in engineering, then a bachelor's degree with a good gate score is often a bachelor's degree with, I think, seven GPA or something. It varies from institution to institution, but just about as in a BTEC plus a gate score is good enough to qualify for a PhD. Of course, you need to crack the interview as well. For other subjects say like neuroscience or economics, those subjects. I think a master's degree plus a UGC net qualification is important because gate or UGC net, these are the agencies which would be providing your PhD funding. So you need to qualify that to get a monthly stipend for your PhD. Thanks. Before we close the session, so a word of appreciation from Harbinder Singh. He says thanks, Ananya, I really appreciate that. Thanks Harbinder Singh. So thank you all for joining the session.


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