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From gender equality and domestic violence advocates, to medical frontliners, to a quantum physicist and a marine archaeologist – this year, Newspoint has been privileged to meet many people who are in the middle of it all.

Below are the top quotes on Newspoint of 2020:

• “Gender equality is not just a women’s issue. Everyone stands to gain from changing the status quo” – Prof. Brenda Murphy, Associate Professor at the Faculty for Social Wellbeing

• “Banks must continue to play a very important role with tailor-made schemes aimed to help nurture start-ups; I feel they must seek to facilitate the on-boarding and financing of new ventures despite the onerous banking regulations they must uphold” – Prof. Juanito Camilleri

• “Misbehaviour [in students] should be seen as a cry for help, rather than a fault to be corrected and punished. Dealing with this misbehaviour could potentially lead to a drop in the number of early school-leavers” – Ms Audrey Friggieri

• “As the Infection Prevention and Control Unit, we always have to be one step ahead, so we saw the increasing workload way before hospital started receiving COVID-19 positive patients. But this gave us time to prepare ourselves well” – Infection control nurses Noel Abela, Rebecca Cachia Fearne, Claire Farrugia and Deborah Xuereb

• “It is not the case that quantum internet ever meant to replace present-day internet. Quantum internet would supplement our current networks and provide us with new capabilities” – Prof. André Xuereb

• “I am unashamedly proud of the sites we have in Malta and truly believe that we have a unique concentration of shipwrecks around our islands” – Prof. Timmy Gambin

• “People who don’t usually think about this research get to hear about it first-hand, as the soapbox becomes a literal platform for the outstanding work of the researchers, trading their lab coats for a more casual look, and the moment the soapbox touches the ground, the area is transformed into a place where everybody can get inspired and debate freely.” – Mr David Mizzi

• “Many of us speak in terms of making the earth a better place to live in – green infrastructure is a step forward that actually will get us closer to achieving that” – Mr Antoine Gatt

• “COVID-19 has led to a significant growth of international demand for digital translation. This fitted well in the increasingly globalised world that is facing a pandemic because the necessity to communicate effectively and to overcome language barriers became even more pronounced. The question poised at this stage is: could this experience stamp out the need for human translators?” – Prof. Charles Briffa

• “Tourism is not going to magically make a surge forward just as vaccines start coming out and being administered. That’s why we really need to start planning an integrated approach to the industry. It will get back slowly if all of us get our brains together” – Dr Julian Zarb