Wartime Ukraine shows why education must count as scientific infrastructure

War destroys laboratories and instruments, but its most lasting damage is often invisible. Beyond the shattered buildings and the ruined equipment lies a quieter casualty: the human network through which science reproduces itself. Mentorship relationships collapse, collaborations are severed, and the informal ties that slowly turn students into researchers are broken before they can form. When a generation of young scientists loses contact with working researchers, the loss compounds year after year, long after the guns fall silent. A new Comment published in Nature Genetics argues that this is precisely why education and training must be treated as critical infrastructure during wartime, rather than as a series of one-off events that can be paused and resumed when circumstances allow.

The international team behind the Comment includes Roderic Guigó, a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, and draws directly on the lived experience of running the Ukrainian Biological Data Science Summer School, known as UBDS3 or BDS³. The school has been held in person at Uzhhorod National University in western Ukraine every summer since 2023, and it is in session again this month, running from 11 to 25 July 2026. What began as a two-week pilot that drew more than a hundred students to Uzhhorod, Ukraine’s westernmost city, has grown into an annual institution, offered free of charge with travel, room and board fully covered for participants.

The choice to keep the school inside Ukraine is not a sentimental one; it is a structural necessity. Under martial law, most male students and early-career researchers are prevented from leaving the country. Any educational model that depends on travelling abroad therefore excludes them entirely, no matter how generous the scholarships or prestigious the host institutions. BDS³ inverts the usual logic of international training. Instead of moving students out of the country, it brings world-class researchers into Ukraine, giving participants a direct point of contact with the international scientific community that they would otherwise have no realistic way to reach. Faculty from leading research institutions across Europe, North America and Asia, including the CRG, travel to Uzhhorod to teach, and instruction is delivered bilingually in Ukrainian and English.

The school’s scientific leadership includes Fyodor Kondrashov, a CRG alumnus and former group leader who now directs the School of Molecular and Theoretical Biology at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Working with Taras Oleksyk, and supported by the Zimin Foundation and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), he has helped establish the school. Guigó has also contributed to its organization and has taught at past editions in person. “Biological data science did not exist as an organised field in Ukraine before this initiative. My objective is to bring as much expertise to Uzhhorod as I can in whatever time I have left and turn it into the Cambridge of Ukraine,” says Oleksyk, the corresponding author, from Uzhhorod National University and Oakland University in the United States, and one of the main instigators of the school.

The technical focus of the school is deliberate. Biological data science, the discipline that applies computational and statistical methods to genomic and molecular datasets, requires little physical apparatus beyond laptops and internet connectivity, yet it underpins much of modern biomedical research. This makes it unusually well suited to a wartime setting, where laboratories and instruments are vulnerable but computational skills can be taught and practised almost anywhere. The school is also one half of a larger effort centred on Uzhhorod: a new genomics research facility at the city’s university has already begun to deliver clinical dividends, including corrected diagnoses for patients with a rare, treatable form of diabetes. That outcome is a pointed reminder that research capacity depends entirely on the trained people that the school exists to produce.

From this experience, the authors distil three design principles for building resilient scientific capacity under systemic stress. The first is decentralised, cloud-based computing that does not depend on any single physical facility. Research institutes in wartime face infrastructure damage, energy instability and repeated power cuts, and a monolithic computing centre can be knocked offline by a single strike or grid failure. Decentralised cloud workflows, by contrast, can keep running even when local conditions are disrupted by events such as air raids, because the data and the analysis pipelines are not tied to one building or one power supply. The same logic that protects data protects the educational activity built around it.

The second principle is a train-the-trainer structure in which former students return as instructors. Alumni of the school now regularly come back to teach the next cohort, creating a self-renewing pipeline that has transformed what could have been a series of disconnected courses into lasting institutional memory. This model addresses the deepest wartime risk, the severing of mentorship chains, by making the students themselves the carriers of expertise forward. Each cohort that passes through Uzhhorod multiplies the number of people capable of teaching the next one, so the knowledge base grows rather than merely surviving. “It is an irreplaceable experience for the trainers. It is a sobering reminder of both how privileged we are and how fragile the stability of the world we live in is,” says Guigó.

The third principle is perhaps the most pointed: a non-extractive form of international collaboration. The authors call for partnerships in which foreign institutions contribute expertise and access without permanently recruiting participants away from their home country. Traditional internationalisation in science often operates as a one-way flow, drawing talented researchers from less stable or less well-funded systems into wealthier ones. In wartime, that flow becomes a haemorrhage. The model championed in the Comment instead ensures that international engagement strengthens local science rather than draining it, so that the country retains the trained people it will need to rebuild. The school’s free-of-charge design, with all costs covered, reinforces this by removing economic barriers that might otherwise push students abroad.

The lesson, the authors argue, extends far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Climate disasters, energy failures, cyberattacks and funding shocks increasingly disrupt research systems everywhere, and the same distributed, people-centred model applies wherever infrastructure or mobility cannot be taken for granted. A hurricane that closes a coastal institute, a ransomware attack that locks a university’s servers, or a political crisis that suspends student visas all produce the same underlying problem: the continuity of training is broken. Treating education as infrastructure, with the redundancy, decentralisation and long-term commitment that the term implies, offers a general blueprint for keeping science alive through disruption.

This year’s edition also illustrates the school’s growing international reach. Five early-career researchers from Barcelona’s scientific community took part, all connected through the CRG’s networks: Julia Rühle and Iseult Leahy, both at the CRG; Max Ticó, of the University of Barcelona; Guillem Guigó-Corominas, of the University of Girona and the University of Vic; and Helena Crowell, of CNAG. Many other CRG researchers have participated in previous editions, deepening the ties between Uzhhorod and the wider European research landscape. For a field that did not formally exist in Ukraine before 2023, biological data science in the country now has a summer institution, a genomics facility delivering clinical results, and a pipeline of alumni-turned-teachers. The Comment’s central message is that none of this happened by accident; it happened because its architects treated the education of people, not the construction of buildings, as the infrastructure that matters most when everything else is under attack.

Subject of Research: Resilient science education and training infrastructure in wartime Ukraine

Article Title: Treat education as infrastructure during wartime, say researchers in Ukraine

Article References: Treat education as infrastructure during wartime, say researchers in Ukraine. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Ukraine, science education, wartime research, biological data science, genomics, Uzhhorod National University, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Nature Genetics, cloud computing, train-the-trainer, international collaboration, research infrastructure