European Crucible 2022


The 2022 European Crucible was held in partnership with CentraleSupélec, France, and supported by the Scottish Government via the Scottish Funding Council. Due to the complications around international travel with the ongoing pandemic, this year’s European Crucible once again ran as a virtual programme. The selected participants spanned the life, physical, mathematical, computational, environmental and social sciences as well as engineering, arts and humanities.

The Scottish cohort are located in 12 Scottish Universities and research institutes: Universities of Aberdeen, Abertay, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh Napier, St Andrews, Stirling, Strathclyde, Queen Margaret’s and The Scotland’s Rural College.

The European cohort are employees of research organisations in 13 countries: France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine.

Interactive crucible ‘labs’ included inspirational presentations from leaders in academia, business, research funders and funding support organisations in Scotland, UK and Europe.

Knowledge about each other’s research specialisations and interests were built up over four Labs, culminating in the creation of multi-disciplinary research teams and pitching of ideas to an expert panel to create new collaborative research projects incorporating their breadth of knowledge and expertise.

Following the final Lab, participants were invited to bid for ‘seed funding’ for multidisciplinary, multi-institution, multi-country research projects to be undertaken over the next 12 months.

We are delighted to share that following European Crucible 2022, researchers from 7 Scottish Universities and 11 other European countries, will collaboratively undertake pilot research projects over the next year addressing a range of scientific, technological, environmental, cultural and societal challenges. To read more about this, click here.

For any further queries, please contact us at the Research Futures Academy: EuropeanCrucible@hw.ac.uk