The STEP project aims to drive excellence and enhance the research capacity and reputation of Instituto Politecnico de Braganca (IPB) in the widening country of Portugal, by excelling in the domain of STEM and EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) values through cross-fertilisation. This is a topic of the utmost importance for the academic environment, as it can contribute substantially towards ensuring quality of research approaches within every institution and enhance cross-fertilisation between fields.
EDI represents a wider concept to be related to areas such as gender, disability, ethnicity/race, identity, diversity, sexual orientation, and their intersections. EDI importance for the academic sector is now widely recognised. It also goes without saying that every person working and studying in a university should promote fairness and support equality, ensuring with their daily work that individuals (or groups of individuals) are not treated less favourably or do not access the same opportunities as their peers, only because of one or more protected characteristics. This implies that, at any stage of their career, researchers should be aware of the importance of considering not only gender and intersectionality, but also EDI-related concepts in their research path, in particular in those domains where the consideration of EDI values can be observed as rarer, such it can happen in the STEM domains.
It is clear that only by exploiting the entire range of workforce and talent will Portugal be able to contribute to the diversity, excellence and quality of results, the competitiveness of ERA, the economic growth and new job creation. So STEP project will: 1) integrating EDI in research performing organisations spreads research performance, creativity, innovation and excellence in research and 2) EDI is essential to further development in research attracting talents, securing funding, improving research quality and the validity of its potential applications; 3) to attract students and talents in the STEM domain, EDI values should be embedded.
In light of this, the STEP Overall Objective is to foster and sustain excellent research in the STEM/EDI research domain so as to make their principles and approaches a pervasively integral part of academic life. This will help boost the IPB research capacity, reputation and internationalisation, already before the end of the project, generating strategic multipliers effects on the whole country, proposing the outcomes of STEP as a model to be replicated in other Higher Education institutions and Research centres in Portugal.
