Earlier this month, Carlo Pietrobelli (Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and holder of our UNESCO Chair on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development for Latin America) gave a keynote speech at the Fourth Meeting of the Conference on Science, Innovation and Information and Communications Technologies. The Conference is a subsidiary body of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); it serves as a permanent forum for policy and technical...
By Josh Tendai, Alumni Officer at UNU-MERIT Last Friday (12 April), we held the ‘Careers Beyond Borders’ hybrid career event at UNU-MERIT in collaboration with the United Nations Student Association (UNSA) Maastricht. Aimed at students aspiring to make a difference in the world, this event illuminated the pathways to fulfilling careers within international organizations. The event drew strong interest, with over 50 students attending in person – including participants from our MSc in Public Pol...
By Ari Perdana, dual career PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT In March this year, the 2022 cohort of UNU-MERIT’s dual career (DC) PhD fellows celebrated the second anniversary of the start of their PhDs. Two weeks ago, over dinner in a noodle restaurant near Maastricht’s Jekerkwartier, Adam Adou, Rodrigo López Barreda, Karin Schmidt Martinez, Giovanna Mazzeo Ortolani, Abdinassir Sagar and I came together to mark the occasion and to look back on our journeys so far. March and September are the two moments ...
Each year in March, UNU-MERIT’s PhD Office organizes a week-long event known as Research Week, offering a dedicated time for PhD fellows to focus on their research and connect with peers. But what exactly does the Research Week entail, and how does it benefit the institute as a whole? Basking in the afterglow of this year’s edition (18 – 22 March), our PhD Office team – comprised of Micheline Goedhuys, Hampton Wong, Julia Walczyk and Soha Youssef – share their thoughts on what ...
By Victor Osei Kwadwo (researcher and lecturer, UNU-MERIT) and Rose Camille Vincent (Assistant Professor, Utrecht University) Education drives economic growth and individual well-being. Secondary education, in particular, plays a crucial role. In recent decades, this recognition has encouraged several African countries to make secondary education free. One example is Ghana’s Free Public Senior High School (FreeSHS) policy, initiated in 2017. The policy aimed to remove cost barriers to secondary ...
By Nanditha Mathew and Bernardo Caldarola (UNU-MERIT researchers and co-organisers of our Economic Fitness and Complexity Summer School) The science of complex systems can play an important role in understanding social and economic dynamics but its application to economics has not yet been fully explored. The most pressing challenges in science and society are frequently too complex for any single discipline to tackle alone, necessitating a problem-solving approach that transcends traditional d...
5 days, state-of-the-art research, top experts In June 2023, UNU-MERIT co-organised a summer school on economic fitness and complexity (EFC) together with the Enrico Fermi Research Centre in Rome (CREF). The five-day event brought together 26 speakers – from as far afield as Peking University in China and Waseda Business School in Japan – and was a great success, attracting 43 participants and more than 100 applications from around the world. Now, we’re pleased to share that the seco...
On 19-20 February 2024, UNU-MERIT hosted the final symposium of CatChain (‘Catching–up along the global value chain: models, determinants and policy implications in the era of the fourth industrial revolution’), a major four-year EU-funded research project. Led by Bocconi University, it involved UNU-MERIT and 11 other international partners based in Europe and beyond (India, Brazil, Costa Rica, Malaysia, South Africa and the Republic of Korea). The project aimed to advance res...
Michelle González Amador – who is currently completing her full-time PhD at UNU-MERIT – has been involved with the multi-institutional initiative Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) for several years and was previously the organiser of the Latin America and Caribbean Working Group. One of the projects that emerged from this working group was a Summer of Science Program, the goal of which is to support female students from Indigenous communities in Mexico as they design and execu...
By Victor Osei Kwadwo, researcher and lecturer at UNU-MERIT In March 2023, three friends and I – all of us graduates of UNU-MERIT’s PhD programme – were thrilled when we stumbled upon a research fellowship opportunity in Africa, our home continent. Unfortunately, it turned out that the call was for individual three-month research stays. Our lives (some of us being parents) and newly launched careers simply wouldn’t bend that far. But, as any good scholar knows, constraints breed creativity...