SOFIA: MOLECULAR BIOLOGIST

Sofia was born in Madrid but – deciding to make the most of her European citizenship – now lives in Germany, where she has been pursuing her molecular biology studies at the Ruhr University of Bochum. Already a valued member of the global scientific community, she now plans to continue her studies with a master’s degree and join the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

HOW DOES SOFIA BENEFIT FROM GÉANT?

On her first day, she received an eduroam account provided by her university and quickly installed this on her mobile devices. Now she was securely online and able to seamlessly connect to eduroam WiFi hotspots in thousands of locations worldwide, including when she visited the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, when passing through Oslo airport, and even at the University of Las Vegas!

Easily accessing thousands of digital objects including scientific publications, journals, and datasets is essential for Sofia’s studies. Because her university is connected to over 8,000 trusted identity and service providers via eduGAIN, she can use her institution login to access all the online services she needs along with 27,000,000 other students, researchers, and educators.

When she needs a break from the lab and to be among crowds, Sofia heads to the local coffee shop where she can still enjoy secure and privacy-preserving access via the public network thanks to eduVPN, which provides secure gateways to trusted networks – meaning her caffeine fix on public WiFi comes with zero security risk.

COVID-19 CHANGED STUDENT LIFE DRAMATICALLY

However, with low-latency and secure videoconferencing tools such as eduMEET, cloud storage services, and shared repositories of data all supported by seamless and secure access via her university and thousands of universities connected by GÉANT and the NRENs, Sofia had the priceless ability to collaborate securely not just with other students and her professors, but with her research collaborators around the world – whether she was in the socially-distanced laboratory or at home.

Sofia is used to discounts via her student ID but was always wary of sharing her details online with retailers and using multiple logins. Now, InAcademia provides retailers with real-time, secure validation of student affiliation, so they can offer discounts to over 17m students while preserving user privacy. Sofia benefits from the great discounts, and the retailers and institutions benefit from an easy-touch authentication technology of eduGAIN.

ACCESS TO REPOSITORIES, LAB RESULTS, NOTEBOOKS

When Sofia wrote her thesis, she joined a virtual group involving scientists and staff from various German and European institutions, all active in life-sciences. Her work was supported by EOSC Life, one of the EOSC Cluster projects, and she was included into the research team through FENIX, the identity management system for the life sciences community, based on the GÉANT Core AAI platform – the latest example of GÉANT’s 20 years of leadership in federated identity management. Via FENIX she was given access to the joint environment shared by that virtual group, including access to repositories, lab results, notebooks, even high-performance computing. It was all at her fingertips, ready to be used – ready for her to be a full part of the team.

Although she doesn’t know it, Sofia’s university life – and her future scientific career – relies heavily on GÉANT: by nature, invisible.