The 4TU.DeSIRE programme is winding down before its formal end on June 9 2023. However, its legacy will continue within the Resilience Engineering community. Not only yielded the programme an impressive amount of scientific work, the attention that went into capacity-building of early-career researchers laid the foundation of a flourishing academic community.
DeSIRE has proved to benefit academic careers of early career researchers. We were able to celebrate successes such as promotions, permanent positions, awards and public recognition for a number of our researchers.
Of key importance for these successes were the vision of doing multidisciplinary research in the field of resilience engineering as promoted since the start of the 4TU.DeSIRE programme, the connection with societal challenges and facilitating encounters. The meetings that 4TU.DeSIRE organized initiated collaborations that in many cases have led to joint writing of research proposals, papers and projects being awarded.
Throughout the programme, tenure trackers and senior academics exchanged experiences about the tenure track assessment process, focusing on the 2019 Recognition & Reward (R&R) policy. Also, two members of De Jonge Akademie gave keynotes on their experiences and vision on R&R at our semi-annual conference in June 2020. This was followed up by the discussion on the academic assessments across various groups within 4TU. Besides some shared understanding, the participants also outlined possibilities for further development of the assessment criteria for each university.
4TU.DeSIRE played an important role in raising awareness of a tenure tracker about the scope of the academic field and what that means for an individual scientist to be recognized and rewarded given the R&R values: team science; open science; science communication; societal relevance.
The 4TU.Centre for Resilience Engineering will continue
The 4TU.Centre for Resilience Engineering will continue its work with research, education and community building activities. This year, we are one of the founding and organizing parties of the recurring International Conference on Resilient Systems. This conference will be a platform for researchers across the world to gather and share expertise in the design, analysis and governance of resilient interconnected social-technical-environment (STE) systems. The conference takes place 28 to 30 June, 2023 in Mexico City.
Read more about the successes of the 4TU.DeSIRE programme
Read more about the experiences of tenure-tracker Joanne Vinke-de Kruijf
Robbin Jan van Duijneās success story: Robbin Jan was appointed as a DeSIRE postdoc in 2021/2022 for 14 months. In this short time he received two important grants: a NWO Embassy Science Fellowship (ESF), which he spent working at the Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi for three months, and a NWO Rubicon. The latter to be spent at Columbia University in New York City, starting in January 2023.
This article was published at 4TU.Resilience Engineering on 16 March 2023.