A conference is built around the research its participants bring with them. But a keynote lecture has a different role: it creates a moment to look beyond an individual study, connect disciplines, challenge established ways of thinking, and ask where research is taking us next.

At MCYR 2026, we are delighted to welcome two distinguished keynote speakers whose work approaches this conversation from very different, but complementary, perspectives: Prof. Dr. Hassan El Bari from Ibn Tofail University, Morocco, and Dr. Inge Stegeman from University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands.

One asks how science and technology can help us transform waste into resources and move towards a more circular and sustainable society. The other asks how we can make the scientific process itself more open, transparent, reproducible, and ultimately more trustworthy.

Together, their keynote lectures bring two important questions to MCYR 2026: How can research contribute to a more sustainable future, and how can we ensure that the science behind that future is robust, open, and reliable?

Keynote lecture: The Role of Bioenergy in Achieving a Circular Economy: Toward a Sustainable Society

For more than three decades, Prof. Dr. Hassan El Bari has worked at the intersection of waste management, biomass valorisation, renewable energy, and circular economy.

A Professor at Ibn Tofail University in Morocco, his research demonstrates what circularity can mean in practice: organic materials traditionally treated as waste can instead become sources of renewable energy, useful products, and new value. His work has included the development of technologies for converting organic waste and biomass into renewable energy and biofertilisers, as well as international research addressing biogas production and sustainable waste management. His projects connect laboratory research with pilot-scale solutions and wider environmental challenges, including greenhouse gas emissions, resource use, and pollution.

Prof. El Bari also brings extensive experience in international scientific cooperation. He serves as President of the Moroccan Association of Solid Waste and Associate Editor of Cleaner Waste Systems, and has coordinated and participated in numerous international research initiatives.

At MCYR 2026, his keynote will invite participants to look at bioenergy not simply as an energy technology, but as part of a much larger transition: from linear consumption and waste generation towards systems in which resources remain in use and waste itself becomes an opportunity.

If Prof. El Bari's keynote asks what science can help us transform, Dr. Inge Stegeman's lecture turns the lens back onto science itself.

An Associate Professor at University Medical Center Utrecht, Dr. Stegeman works at the intersection of clinical and methodological research. Her research focuses on research quality and reproducibility and on understanding whether Open Science practices actually improve the way biomedical science is conducted. Alongside this methodological work, her clinical research includes hearing disorders and tinnitus. This makes her perspective particularly relevant to young researchers. Open Science is increasingly part of everyday research, from sharing data and code to transparency, reproducibility, collaboration, and public engagement. But adopting an Open Science practice is not enough simply because it is labelled “open”: we also need evidence that these interventions achieve what we expect them to achieve. Dr. Stegeman's work directly investigates this question.

As coordinator of the OSIRIS consortium, she contributes to an international effort examining and testing interventions intended to improve reproducibility in science.

Her keynote, Making Open Science Work, will therefore move the discussion beyond Open Science as an aspiration and towards its implementation: What actually works? How do we know? And how can openness become part of rigorous, responsible, and trustworthy research practice?

MCYR is, at its heart, a conference for young researchers. Participants come to present their own findings, discuss their work, receive feedback, meet researchers from other disciplines, and build new scientific connections.

Keynote lectures add another dimension.

They give us an opportunity to hear from researchers who have built extensive experience around questions that extend beyond a single experiment, paper, or project. They can connect individual research topics with wider scientific and societal challenges and, importantly, create conversations across disciplines.

For an interdisciplinary conference such as MCYR, that matters.

You may work in agriculture, environmental science, medicine, biotechnology, economics, social sciences, engineering, or another field entirely. Yet questions of sustainability, research quality, societal impact, collaboration, and trust in science reach across disciplinary boundaries.

Our 2026 keynote speakers embody that breadth.

Prof. El Bari invites us to consider how scientific innovation can contribute to circularity and a more sustainable use of resources. Dr. Stegeman invites us to consider how the way we conduct and share science determines its reliability and impact.

Different fields. Different questions. But a shared message particularly relevant to the next generation of researchers: good science is not only about what we discover, it is also about how we conduct research and what we enable those discoveries to change.

MCYR 2026 will take place on 8–9 October 2026 at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, bringing together young researchers and established experts for two days of scientific exchange, discussion, networking, and interdisciplinary learning.

We look forward to welcoming Prof. Dr. Hassan El Bari and Dr. Inge Stegeman to MCYR 2026, and to the conversations their keynote lectures will inspire.