Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TALENT (TALENT Doctoral Fellowship Programme)
Reporting period: 2020-08-01 to 2024-07-31
The TALENT Doctoral Programme aimed to leverage the intersectoral and international opportunities offered by SCIENCE to create a cohort of graduates with the skills and expertise needed to meet the growing demand for highly educated human resources within the natural and technical sciences in Europe. This way, SCIENCE has been underpinning the formation of a workforce that can contribute to handle the industrial and societal challenges of our times. As such, the TALENT programme has equipped its fellows with sought after skills by providing 1) access to world leading research environments at SCIENCE, 2) interaction with industry (incl. possible secondments), 3) access to research facilities and 4) international exposure through stays abroad and collaborations with partners through networks. TALENT was a bottom-up programme and offered the applicants to draw up their own project description within 16 areas.
The objective of the programme was to recruit 74 exceptional PhD students and provide a training programme aligned with the European principles of Innovative Doctoral training and the concept of the three Os, i.e. Open Innovation, Open Science and Open to the World. TALENT ensured excellent opportunities for the PhD students to enter interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international collaborations.
The selection process consisted of four steps: 1) eligibility and admissibility checks, 2) review at department level, 3) expert/international evaluation and 4) final selection of candidates by SCIENCE’s Research Committee. The selection process also included gender blinding to strengthen a merit-based, impartial and equitable selection procedure. The selected 74 PhD students consisted of 37 females and 37 males, coming from 24 different countries.
The programme has been committed to support the recruited fellows’ implementation of their individual PhD projects. A range of specialized and generic PhD courses were offered by the SCIENCE PhD School for the students to gain the ECTS credits relevant to their research and future goals.
The fellows’ research projects have been consistently monitored and supervised by their principal supervisor who is responsible for the planning of the PhD programme in consultation with the student. A substantial part of the supervisor’s tasks is also to teach the student the practical implementation of responsible research paradigms that are specific to their field of study. To support this, the University of Copenhagen also provides a wide range of relevant courses and workshops that support practical implementation of the University’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Research.
The research conducted by the fellows has resulted in 134 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals, and has furthermore led to various dissemination activities such as organizing conferences (7), engaging on social media (9), and participating in events (20) like Copenhagen Culture Night and the Digital Tech Summit in Copenhagen. The total number of dissemination activities amounts to 141 items.
With the outbreak of COVID-19, the programme was extended with one year and it was assessed whether the PhD projects were or would be directly challenged by the consequences of COVID-19, e.g. by limited access to labs, archive studies, data collection, fieldwork, and intersectoral and international secondments. Some of the focal points of the assessment was to ensure that the studies lived up to the quality requirements for obtaining a PhD and that the PhD students were able to complete their studies – and within reasonable time. Where relevant, the fellows’ employment contracts were extended. Thus, the number of peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and the number of dissemination activities should be seen this light.
Given the breadth of research fields covered by the programme, the project outcomes have been highly diverse – and many have had a clear importance for society at large. They have included breakthroughs of significance in a sustainability context such as new tools and solutions controlling yeast spoilage and thus extending shelf-life of dairy products which in turn reduce product waste as well as work that has addressed some of the other most pressing issues of our time such as how machine learning models can be both explainable and verifiable when it comes to online fact checking. At the same time, projects of a more fundamental research nature have also been a success with results pertaining to, e.g. subradiant dynamics between distant optical quantum emitters published in very high-impact publications such as Science. As such, TALENT fellows have been able to produce research results with both a societal relevance and a high scientific quality.
The SCIENCE PhD School organised a three-day career lab workshop for the TALENT fellows which provided them with an overview of their career possibilities in both the academic and non-academic world. The workshop included training in writing proposals for postdoc funding as well as exercises for identifying the student’s transferrable skills and how to translate their academic skills to other industrial or business contexts.
This approach and focus on different sectors have given the fellows a better understanding of and concrete tools to pursue career opportunities both in and outside academia. The impact of this is documented by the fact that some fellows are now employed as postdocs at prestigious universities in the US (e.g. the University of California and Harvard Medical School) and Canada (e.g. the University of Waterloo and McGill University), or as researchers in private companies such as Novo Nordisk and Novonesis. In continuation of this, it should be highlighted that TALENT fellows have been awarded international postdoctoral fellowships by EMBO, Carlsberg and Villum. The fellowships from the two Danish foundations, Carlsberg and Villum are highly prestigious and only awarded to 5-10 researchers each year. All of this is not only to the benefit of the fellows but for the greater good of the European Research Area and European collaborations with the rest of the world.