It is my great pleasure to start 2022 with the warmest greetings from STEMM Global Scientific Society. I wish you all a very productive new year full of outstanding discoveries. The Society kindly entrusted me with the position of President last December and it is an honour for me to extend a sincere welcome to our Members.
It is fitting that I salute you all from the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, from the very rooms where Michael Faraday once lived and worked. Since 1799, the Royal Institution has been an epicentre for fundamental scientific discoveries. Furthermore, its parallel mission for science communication and the weekly gatherings of kindred spirits set the precedent and the gold standard for what we today call “outreach” and “interdisciplinarity”.
The role of interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in modern science is increasingly becoming not merely fashionable, but absolutely essential. In a sense, science has almost always been without the delineation of subjects throughout human history; the 20th century could be seen as a rare, brief moment when narrow specialisation was forced onto the scientist by the explosion of information. Luckily, with the computing power of the current century and into the foreseeable future — which can efficiently process vast amounts of information and data — humanity can once more return to how science had always been done: transcending discipline and specialisation.
Despite the pandemic, 2021 was a productive year for STEMM Global. Exciting activities included professional events such as SNAIA and POEM which help to develop the whole ecosystem for interdisciplinary interaction. Moreover, we also launched a range of services to help empower researchers to collaborate, including our: networking platform, travel grants for young researchers, HR platform, event organisation service, special outreach programmes for children and teenagers, and the inSTEMM journal (an open access journal for interdisciplinary science that is free for both authors and readers).
In 2022, STEMM Global will expand to even broader horizons for interdisciplinary collaborations. We look forward to you joining us on this adventurous journey.
Prof Yang-Hui He
President of STEMM Global Scientific Society