Exchanging Expertise: Networking Works

I have been to many workshops, but this is the most useful and fantastic thing that I have done. Real things can come out of it, commented Spiros, a Greek physicist participating in the training workshop, “Building a Successful International Research Career”, which took place in Lisbon between 2 and 4 December 2008.

This workshop was delivered in partnership with CRAC, the Career Development Organisation, which manages Vitae. Vitae (incorporating the UK GRAD Programme) is a highly - acclaimed national programme funded by Research Councils UK, with a remit to support the development of researchers and the transition into their future careers.

This second workshop was designed to assist early career researchers with their career planning, and followed the first one, held in Paris in February 2008. The aim was to bring together a small interdisciplinary group of early stage researchers, interested in building an international career. All participants had recently participated in bilateral partnership programmes in the following countries:  France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Serbia and the UK. These bilateral programmes are managed by the British Council under the umbrella of Research Networks and receive matched funding from their partner organisations in their country.

Diverse Disciplines

Participants were chosen to ensure that a wide variety of academic disciplines were represented and included management, art conservation, prostate cancer research and nanophysics. The workshop provided a unique occasion for the researchers to meet and exchange their professional knowledge with other researchers and to learn the skills necessary for them to pursue an internationally mobile career.

Focus of the Workshop

The 3-day Workshop was led by tutors from CRAC. It was very interactive and mainly consisted of practical networking, collaborative problem-solving, informal discussions and opportunities to share expertise. Themes discussed were developing and maintaining international networks, communicating effectively with the general public and the media, exploring routes to and successfully applying for international funding and working with cross cultural teams.

Common ground

All the exercises in the workshop were challenging and exciting, but one of the most challenging was for participants to communicate their research to their peers all with different fields of expertise. This was harder than expected. As Calvin Rans, a Canadian aerospace engineer based in the Netherlands, pointed out; ‘The problem of being a scientist is that you want to tell all the details. That is why this exercise is such a challenge’.

Having successfully explained what they were researching, each group had to come up with a joint proposal for a new realistic collaboration, combining the expertise of everyone in their group, and then present to a panel. As group members’ expertise was often so far apart it was challenging to find the common ground, but all the groups succeeded in coming up with a proposal within the time allowed. After everyone’s presentation it was announced that a small amount of funding was available to fund a real research proposal.  This triggered some of the delegates to think of ways in which they could actually make their international collaboration happen. Three teams made up of participants at the workshop have been awarded special post-workshop funding to implement new research initiatives: Intersections and Impacts - Exploring the Value and Diversity of the Social Sciences (Chan, Maciocha, Smoczynski and Fronia); Evaluation of dirhodium complexes as prostate anti-tumor agents (Gois and Salagierski); Low-pressure gas discharges (Kitsinelis and Maric).

As Spiros mentions says above, real things can come out of it - and hopefully will.