I have initiated and now I’ve been spinning off the Incubator of Scientific Discoveries, the multi-institutional environment to cultivate the enthusiasm for science of young fellows. While preparing for the CREDO kick off I was spreading the word about CREDO goals around, also to young colleagues, e.g. summer practice students at INP PAS. I was happy to see how enthusiastic they were about the physics challenges ahead of CREDO and how readily they undertook an effort. The science motivation was clear to them and if the work was done in a partnership with professional scientists. As the time of summer practices ended, my students asked me to continue with CREDO, moreover – they already invited more colleagues. Since the capacity of my office is limited the situation required an action, I did not want to waste the rare treasure: the enthusiasm for science of the young fellows. This brought me to organize the missing organizational structure: the Incubator of Scientific Discoveries – now a distributed (4 institutions so far, more to join) environment enabling a real scientific work and development of own ideas in basic sciences for undergraduate students under the supervision and with help of senior scientists. Apart from the opportunities to learning science by doing it, the young participants receive self-development training: dedicated lectures (e.g. “Discovery Thinking”) or practical workshops (e.g. “Self-Presentation”). The students work together with the experienced colleagues in a number of group projects – each project is expected to report a status during the weekly meetings. If the work done matches the work plan of a large projects (e.g. CREDO) then mini-contracts for the young collaborators are organized. The first seven mini-contracts were signed in January 2017.
An example of a high potential project developed mainly by the students of the Incubator in the cooperation with the ASTERICS consortium is the web application Dark Universe Welcome, presently pending beta tests (40,000 testers) and hopefully accepetd as alpha version afterwards, to become a complete citizen science application, sitting on Zooniverse.org together with the giants like Planet Hunters or Higgs Hunters. The Incubator of Scientific Discoveries is already now a significant support for CREDO and it evolves towards being a universal scientific think tank, driven mainly by young enthusiasts of science. Since the term “citizen science” denotes real science with the real need of the participation of non-professionals, the Incubator of Scientific Discoveries and Dark Universe Welcome can be considered “hard” scientific achievements.