In RP1, major efforts have been put into ERA Chair’s selection. The hiring process was realized according to international standards of recruitment of senior scientific leaders and with respect to The Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers.
The ERA Chair became the leader of the research programe Environmental Health and the head of the research group Environmental Epidemiology, in which we started to hire new members. The process was supported by HR department and the ERA Chair personally guaranteed the definition of positions to be hired and participated on the hiring process. So far, almost ten researchers were hired into the team, mostly at the level of the postdocs and PhD students.
The members of the ERA Chair team participated on teaching and development of relevant courses for RECETOX students and have already participated on the development of various research grants, both national and international. The ERA Chair team has contributed to new partnerships and actions, such as the participation of RECETOX on the realization of already running HAPIEE cohort.
In the second and third reporting period, the research group has been stabilized and lot of efforts has been put into the development of internal and external research cooperations. Internally, the cooperation run smoothly especially in the Research programme of Environmental Health and also with the research infrastructure of Population studies, which highly benefits from the presence of ERA Chairs research group. The external cooperation has been developed both nationally and internationally. Nationally, there is close cooperation with the Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute, Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic, Charles University, National Institute of Public Health and many others. Internationally, the cooperation is being developed within joint research projects, e.g. with Utrecht University, IS Global in Spain, UCL, and many others.
All the project objectives have been fulfilled:
- The ERA Chair and the team members were hired
- The ERA Chair group has been established, became operational and reached sustainability through participation in RECETOX environment, internal and external collaborations and their success in competitive research funding,
- The ERA Chairs contributed to many research projects – development and implementation and introduced important partnerships and collaborations both thanks to their previous experiences and professional links, but also thanks to developed expertise at RECETOX,
- Contributed to the visibility of both RECETOX and the actual research and educational topic of environmental health and environmental epidemiology, which was for long time underrepresented and not well developed in the whole region,
- Contributed to increase of international and national research funding and to the development of new study programmes.
