By European Crucible 2021
Creating a New Scottish-European
Network of Research Leaders
This first European Crucible was organised online in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg, and brought together 25 high potential early / mid-career researchers working in Scottish universities and research institutes with 25 equivalents from across Europe. 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 Abertay, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Edinburgh Napier, St Andrews, Stirling, Strathclyde, Open University and at the Research Institutes of James Hutton, SAMS and NHS Tayside.
The European cohort are employees of research organisations in 12 countries:
Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland.
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 six 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 15 months.
Seven projects selected for seed funding include medical, health, environment, social, legal and technology topics. These allow teams to conduct initial investigations and experiments ahead of developing larger applications for funding. The expectation is that the creation of this network will lead to further ideas for collaborative research on longer timescales.
For any queries, please contact us at: EuropeanCrucible@hw.ac.uk