Reinforcing Inclusiveness & diverSity and Empowering (RISE) MICCAI in Low-to-Middle Income Countries (RISE) is a group at MICCAI looking to promote research across the entire world.
RISE-MICCAI will be hosting a lunch event today featuring Professor Nassir Navab speaking on the topic "Towards the Democratization of Healthcare: the scientific path of an ‘illegal' immigrant. It will take place today at noon in the Oliveraire Room.
We spoke with Islem Rekik, the RISE President about her experience.
On top of your active research, you've been the organiser of multiple workshops, a former president of Women in MICCAI, and currently the president of RISE-MICCAI. How do you manage to be so deeply involved in so much?
I would summarise that in three words: passion, imagination, and good intention. So, for me, in 2018, I proposed the PRIME workshop and that was my first time trying to organise an event at MICCAI. So, I put the proposal together, and then I remember I had a chat with my previous supervisor, Professor Dinggang Shen, and I told him I'm bidding for half a day. And he told me, go for a day, a full day. And that got me motivated; it gave me confidence. So, starting from PRIME, I wanted to come up with a lot of initiatives wherever I saw something missing in our community. It makes me so happy to start new initiatives. You feel that you're promoting good change, that you're advancing science, but also building capacity, inspiring young researchers, and empowering people to do great research.
RISE-MICCAI has so many initiatives like journal clubs and networking sessions but which initiatives are you personally the most proud of?
So, honestly, it's the summer and winter schools. We organised the first one in 2022 and, at the time, we didn't have experience. So organising the whole thing was a lot of work but I found it very empowering and inspirational because you connect with people from all over the world. We have people from all the way from Nepal to Guatemala, Chile to Africa. It was so nice to see so many people connecting, interacting and learning.
This year, we have seven papers from Africa at MICCAI. This is more than previous years but only about 1% of MICCAI. How do you feel about MICCAI's progress so far?
I'm very happy about it! At MICCAI 2018 in Granada, I had a conversation with Julia Schnabel, current general co-chair of MICCAI 2024, where I mentioned to her that I find it heart-breaking to not see Africa on the stats. You know when they show the accepted papers and they display them by continent, right? Africa wasn't there. So, after that, in 2020, MICCAI had two papers accepted from the whole continent, and these two papers were from the two PhD students I was co-supervising in Tunisia. When I saw "Africa: less than 1%" appear on the graph, if I recall well, I was like, oh, these are our papers. So, I think jumping from two papers to seven this year is an achievement that we need to celebrate. It's a leap, and we'll get more leaps in the future. Change takes time.
What is on the horizon for RISE this year?
I'm actually stepping down. I know, I know, (laughs) It's time to hand the torch over. We're going to have our new board announced, including a new president, during this MICCAI conference. They're very excited about RISE and I believe that they will come up with fantastic initiatives and really take it to the next level.