“Scientific Battles”: Young Scientists Tell about Their Projects

On May 10th a second round of Scientific Battles intellectual contest completed, where young scientists received an opportunity to tell about their research to big audience and to test themselves in a scientific competition. Each speaker presented his/her discovery in an unusual form, the main condition for the participants was the ban on electronic presentation of their inventions. The uniqueness of the project is that its participants have to not only deliver their presentation to the audience, but excite the interest of every member of the audience by choosing an original form of presenting information for it.

For instance, Sofya Suleimanova, graduate of the SUSU’s Historical Faculty, is studying burial complexes by searching for artifacts and phenomena which are associated to an individual of a certain sex, and which become gender-differentiating markers. So that all the members of the audience could understand the essence and goals of her research, Sofya and her assistants prepared a theatrical performance in which the main female protagonist was playing the role of a buried person, on her own example demonstrated how it is possible to determine professional occupation and gender of a person who had died 20 thousand years ago.

“For me the Scientific Battles became a wonderful opportunity to take a look at my subject at a different angle, a simpler one. In the process of studying you dig yourself in terms, statistics, facts, but having put myself in the shoes of the subject of my research, I could see those possibilities and hypotheses which didn’t understand before,” shares Sofya.

Scientific Battles is a project for South Ural State University, which was created at the support from the SUSU’s Department for Research and Innovations. The first round of the contest was held on February 8th within the frameworks of the Days of Science. The contest organizers note that holding such events is necessary since it allows young scientists to come into the spotlight, share on their research, grow in the professional field, and acquire more and more new knowledge.

As a result of the audience’s voting, a graduate of the Philological Faculty Aleksandra Kozlova became the winner. Aleksandra told the audience about a technique of writing a literary work on an example of baking a pie, she compared choosing the proportions of ingredients for cooking the pie filler to choosing the verse meters when writing poems, and explained why we like some authors and do not understand others by comparing our literary tastes to gastronomic ones. During this presentation the audience had a chance to taste the works of gastronomic art, as well as enjoy classical poetry recited by Aleksandra, who read poems and treated everyone to delicious props.