CORDIS Archive

WHAT ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT
Reports of EuroConferences, Summer Schools and Practical Training Courses

These events are focused scientific meetings or training at the cutting edge of research:-

• The SUMMER SCHOOLS are obviously focused on specific training with defined syllabuses
• The PRACTICAL TRAINING COURSES are similar but also involve hands-on laboratory or field experience)
• The EUROCONFERENCES have a training function too because of the special features of all these events:
  • participation has to include young researchers who get help with costs of attendance,
  • the policy promotes women researchers and researchers from Less Favoured Regions of the EU,
  • high quality events are favoured by limited participant numbers (usually less than a hundred per event) and usually a closed environment allowing continuous opportunities of contact between young and senior researchers; and they are all European-level events with a spread of nationalities

Money for this comes from the Commission's Training and Mobility of Researchers Programme (and the preceding Human Capital and Mobility Programme).

In the linked pages, you will find extracts from selected reports delivered by organisers. From these reports:

A general public can see what these activities do and catch interesting snapshots of the cutting edge of scientific research.

As the events often bring together a substantial fraction of European experts in a given field, "Consumers of expertise" - policy-makers and administrators (the Commission itself is a major 'consumer') and journalists - could find in them a starting point to track down expertises, studies and ideas in given fields. Event organisers may find creative organisational or didactic ideas to profit from.

The reports have been selected from among the several hundred such with a bias for relevance to European problems (e.g. social or environmental issues) comprehensibility and clarity. Some reports of a more technical nature are included, but generally ones where the general drift and import could be grasped even by non-technical readers (even in the mathematical sciences, where contractors rarely produced material understandable by the ordinary reader; yet those reproduced here show that it can be done). The Training and Mobility of Researchers Programme, and its predecessor the Human Capital and Mobility Programme are open to all scientific disciplines. Almost all are represented here.

TMR contractors have to present: regular Periodic or Final Reports as part of their contract. They are invited to present also "Reports of New Departures" - essentially newsflashes - whenever they feel an event has produced something particularly novel or interesting. We encourage more contractors to contact us with material of this kind.

We make no apology for some of the events reported on here having taken place a few years ago - the material will be novel to most readers, and relevant to the above targets.

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