Teaching and Academic Research in Milan
This balance and the constant sound of the ambulance sirens is weighing heavily on our minds when thinking about keeping doing science. At the University of Milan, where I work, since the 24th of February we have been caught up in a crescendo of restrictive measures, at first stopping on-site lectures and then locking research laboratories 2 weeks later. Even professors and assistant professors have been discouraged from accessing the site for preparing or carrying out online teaching: please do it from home. Only essential in-person activities, such as refills of cryogenic gases to NMR instruments, are currently authorized in our department.
Chemistry courses are more effectively taught in the classroom, where the classical chalk and blackboard approach is paired with a direct interaction with the students. The many teaching laboratories we usually implement consolidate, hands-on, the knowledge acquired. This winning combination has been cut by the impending safety requirements, shifting to e-learning alone. This resulted in many colleagues being elbows-deep in the last minute preparation of online versions of their courses. On the other hand, for the few fortunate enough to have completed their teaching duties the past semester, this might be a good time to write those papers that were laying unfinished on our desks, or to finally catch up with the recent literature.
From a research point of view, while computational studies can continue from home, even if with a few mishaps here and there in remote access to servers or software licenses, all wet-lab experiments are on hold, and presumably will be for (at least) one (or more) months. This of course leads to personal concerns about being able to fulfill the commitment made upon receiving both national and European funding. Not less worrying is that the must of social distancing, if long lasting, would negatively impinge on the intrinsically collective nature of research groups. Returning to business as usual might not be as straightforward as one might think. As a society, especially for the younger generations, a useful lesson would be realizing that social media cannot fully substitute human contact and face-to-face talking.