During the first two years of the TALENT Doctoral Programme, four application rounds were implemented. Of the 2,084 applications received by the TALENT secretariat, 74 fellows were selected. The four application rounds were advertised through different channels, such as EURAXESS, Net4Mobility+, Nature Careers, Science Careers as well as on career fairs, e.g. the MIT European Career Fair, the Nature Careers Live.
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.
