In this month’s episode:
– The upcoming launch of the UNU Climate Resilience Initiative, set for 8 February 2022 with three directors and three policymakers
– The UNU-MERIT May event series: 15-year anniversary, Charles Cooper innovation lecture, and UNU Conference of Directors
– PhD programme applications reminder: Deadline is 28 February 2022
Listen to the audio above or see below for the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
…
HH: Hello, and welcome to the UNU-MERIT Director’s Corner podcast for January 2022. I’m Howard Hudson (HH), still your Head of Communications. And I’m here with Bartel Van de Walle, our Professor, Doctor and Director at UNU-MERIT. He’s joining me over Zoom today, so the audio hopefully will be just as good as usual. So, Bartel what do we have on the agenda today?
BVW: Good morning, Howard. Good to do this via Zoom. The circumstances are still what they are: a lot of colleagues have either had COVID or are still suffereing from it. So the institute is still mostly closed down, there are not many people around, so maybe it’s good that we try to take cover for the next few weeks.
Nonetheless, despite the usual COVID restrictions, we have been able to move on with the Strategic Plan and its implementation. We’ve made several steps in the past month and actually created an Implementation Timeline page on our website, where we show the progress of the different steps month by month. So I would just say for December 2021, we finalised the PhD team, so we now have Teresa Farinha as the Vice-Director for the PhD programme together with Micheline Goedhuys, so that team is complete. We also have a complete team for the leadership of the Capacity Development Office, that is Nava Hinrichs and Christina Mancigotti joined Mindel in leading and organising the activities there. And then in January of course, we have continued the Management Team meetings and Director’s Office meetings so we’re getting into a rhythm for the structures that we’re setting up.
Looking ahead, on Tuesday 8 February we will have the virtual online launch of the UNU Climate Resilience Initiative. That’s an initiative that we took with three institutes joining forces, ourselves here at UNU-MERIT in Maastricht, UNU-CRIS in Bruges and UNU-EHS in Bonn. Not coincidentally, of course, three institutes in three countries that were affected by the floods last summer when Maastricht barely escaped a very bad scenario. But remember, in Belgium, and in Germany, it was a considerably worse and very bad situation, that actually Germany being very badly affected, and many people actually died because of the floods. So we decided at that time, to see if we could join forces as three institutes in the three affected countries, to see if we could set up an agenda to ask: What does it mean now? This is a clear sign that climate is impacting us. Can we together shape an agenda around the resilience that is required to deal with these natural disasters? (I will come back to the point in a second). And can we develop an agenda for common and joint research? We have done that over the past months and we are now ready to launch that initiative on 8 February 2022 – and you’re very welcome to join in. The link has been shared internally and we will send out a reminder. We have as speakers the three directors who want to say something about how they look at it from their institutional perspective, and also three policymakers, one each from each country. So it’s a brief launch programme, just a 45-minute session. So please join in and listen to the stories that are shared on 8 February.
Coming back on the aspect of natural disaster, you know that this is my specialty. I have done a lot of work in disaster response and coordination. The term natural disaster is actually not very appropriate. A disaster is a natural phenomenon, that is what happened such as massive rainfall. But the disaster is caused by the fact that the human infrastructure to deal with this is not there. So we need to get better at responding to such disasters, being prepared for disaster, reduce the risks and become more resilient. So that is the story behind the launch on 8 February.
A bit further in the future, we have a huge week of events that we’re planning for the week of 16 – 20 May. We are really talking to a lot of people within the institute, so everybody can suggest things to do. We’re looking at policy action labs, we’re looking at seminars, we’re looking at master classes. We’re looking at a lot of events in that week, plus two very special events. One is the Charles Cooper innovation lecture, which was an annual tradition at UNU-MERIT, and which has been on hold because of COVID, but we want to relaunch that. We’re looking for a very interesting speaker, a special speaker, but I will not tell you yet who it is because it has not been finally confirmed. The other key event will be an academic session, which will be organised on 20 May in the afternoon, where we really will proudly show what we have achieved as UNU-MERIT over the past 15 years. So highlights, remarkable things we organised and did, the impact we have achieved in the work we’ve done. So that will be a very nice, high-level event where we can show off who we are and what we’ve been doing. So I’m very much looking forward to that. It will be a full week with a lot of fun activities, and so I hope everybody here will be able to join.
HH: And there will also be the meeting of UNU directors, which I think is being hosted in Maastricht for the first time.
BVW: What we have decided is indeed to have the UNU Conference of Directors, CONDIR for short, which is the meeting of all the directors once per year, a face-to-face meeting. I succeeded in getting them to visit Maastricht, also in the framework of the 15 years anniversary that we are celebrating. So they will come here, so all the directors of the other UNU institutes will stay with us for two or three days. We have of course an official programme, but as part of the programme I want this academic high-level event to be part of it. So they get to see us, get to know what we’re doing, and probably hopefully are coming at the best moment ever.
HH: And finally, let’s give everyone a reminder that the application window for our PhD programme, the full-time PhD programme on Innovation, Economics and Governance for Development is closing at the end of February. So please help us to promote that application window. Do you have anything else to say in that regard, Bartel?
BVW: Yeah a couple of things. So please do spread those in your networks. It’s crucial that we keep promoting our programme because it is a really good programme. And we love to do it. And we have great PhD fellows coming in every year. I’ve been working with Micheline and I want to thank Micheline especially here today because she has put a lot of effort in getting the new call out. It came a little bit later than usual because we were really thinking about the attractiveness of the call, how it fits with the Strategic Plan. So we’ve modified a couple of things I want to highlight two things here. One is that in the application, the candidates have to be much more explicit about what they would like to do here. And they have to be explicit in terms of their research. So they have to be explicit in explaining and linking their research idea to three big themes, which coincide with the research unit topics. So for instance, you have to explain as a candidate why what you do is linked to either Economics of Innovation or to Public Policy and Governance. And a small third theme that has been introduced is Societal Transformation, because that links best to the overall agenda of UNU-MERIT. We want to engage in, stimulate, enable, provide research for enabling transformation in society, towards dealing with climate change, towards the energy transition – so that is a core element of our agenda. So students have to explain it in more depth than before. So that’s a change. So we will have a better idea of what prospective students want to do here. And we can also better then find a counterpart at the institute, i.e. who might help you supervise you or be your promoter. So we want to tie that up a little bit better. So the topic is has to be much more elaborate, has to be more clearly linked to one of our bigger agendas. I’m hoping that we get a lot of candidates from developing countries, that is our focus, so we would love to see people from the Global South apply here. If you know of any suitable candidates, please tell them. So I’m looking forward to receiving a lot of applications by the end of the month. I can tell you already that it’s already going quite well. The mailbox is already filling very fast with applications. So keep them coming!
HH: Are there any other changes in conditions for the PhDs that we that we can announce or is that still being decided?
BVW: That’s under development and I would like to devote a special Town Hall meeting on how we know are looking at the PhD programme, and its funding which is essential if you have 10 new PhD fellows every year. That means that at any given year you have at least 40 PhD fellows in the institute. You need to secure funding for that and that has to be discussed how we continue to do that. We have been very successful in the past. But we are looking for additional funding opportunities, and what we would really like to engage in is partnerships with other organisations, UN agencies, universities so that we can have co-funding for our PhD programme. That already works in a couple of cases, but we can do much better and I hope to stimulate that further. Other things relate to the PhD fellows and their activities with an institute. We would like to offer them a spectrum of activities. So we would like them to engage in a bit of teaching, a bit of project work, and would like to make that as attractive as possible. And we are already reshaping the training offering that we do, the educational programme, which traditionally used to be in the first six months, first semester of the first year. We are broadening that up and making it for the first two years with targeted or individualised offerings. So if you need a course or a training on a certain topic, then we will look to provide that. We are introducing a methodology training, which is essential for everyone so that will be one of the courses that we highly recommend or even make obligatory. So we want to diversify the portfolio of courses, trainings that PhD fellows can follow at the institute. I think we can maintain the quality of the programme and fine-tune some aspects to be improved. But overall, we’re looking forward to receiving a nice batch of new students in September.
HH: Great and the deadline is 28 February, so just a month to get your papers in order, but we’re looking forward to them. Okay, thanks very much Bartel. We’ll see you again next month.
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