Eurodoc’s Sebastian Dahle (Vice President) participated in the Sustainable Careers for Researcher Empowerment (SECURE) project’s Kick-Off meeting, coordinated and hosted by PLOCAN, the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands. The meeting took place on January 26–27, 2023, at PLOCAN premises in Telde, Gran Canaria, Spain. SECURE officially started on January 1, and it is the first event to bring together all the project partners.
In the next two years, the SECURE consortium will work on approaches to empower researchers to pursue sustainable careers both inside and outside academia. This includes assuring the right employment conditions and plannability through tenure track-like models, but it also requires a proper framework at the research organisation, which will be implemented as a research career framework.
Dario Capezzuto, Policy Officer for R&I actors and research careers at the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission, participated at the meeting on site and gave insights into ongoing activities at the Commission to sustainably support and reshape researchers' careers at the European level. Mihaela Costache, the Project Adviser at the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency, joined the Kick-Off meeting online, presented expectations of the project from their perspectives, and provided valuable inputs on successful project implementation.
Following that, project partners discussed all the work packages and the related implementation plans. Representatives of ICoRSA led the discussions on reviewing the State-of-the-Art on research careers in Work Package 1. Technopolis Group’s Gareth O'Neill and CRAC-Vitae’s Emma Day led the brainstorming on Work Package 2: Development of the Research Career Framework and Work Package 3: Development of Tenure Track-Like Models, respectively. Representatives of PLOCAN, EuroScience, and the Center for the Promotion of Science presented the details for the Pilot Implementation of the Research Career Framework (Work Package 4), for Mainstreaming the Research Career Framework (Work Package 5), for the Project Coordination and Data Management (Work Package 6), and the Dissemination, Communication, and Exploitation (Work Package 7).
Oleksandr Berezko, Eurodoc President: “We have recently welcomed and participated in many activities to advance fair and sustainable research culture where Early-Career Researchers are treated with respect and have access to long-term and stable career pathways, which is the Eurodoc vision. The SECURE project is another vital step in this direction.”
Sebastian Dahle, Vice President of Eurodoc: “The SECURE project joins European activities for researcher careers with specifics of intra-organizational implementation and explores new approaches to reduce precarity. Despite the limitations of a 2-year project, this will prove a cornerstone of advancing the European Research Area and improving the situation of Early-Career Researchers.”
Eurodoc thanks Dr. Gordon Dalton, the project coordinator, for the perfectly organized event and looks forward to further collaborating on this exciting project.