International, interdisciplinary, intensiveStarting Your Researcher Career with Doctoral Networks

“To me it’s all about bringing the international research community together”

Prof. Dr. Celine Hadziioannou

Professor of seismology and coordinator of the Innovative Training Network SPIN-ITN: Seismological Parameters and Instrumentation at the University of Hamburg

I first came into contact with a Doctoral Network or International Training Network (ITN)—so named during the funding program Horizon 2020—as an early career researcher: In 2011, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the ITN QUEST that focused on method development in seismology.

As representative of the funded scientists in QUEST, I had the opportunity to participate in management meetings and learned on the inside how these consortia work. Furthermore, the work on QUEST largely included the Europe-based seismological community and beyond cooperating day to day within the network. This open spirit is something I took to heart for the ITN I am coordinating now.

I started planning SPIN in 2017, when I joined the University of Hamburg as a junior professor. Thanks to the guidance and support from colleagues with sound experience in coordinating large networks and writing competitive research proposals, I could secure funding for SPIN.

ITN are clearly a springboard to successful academic careers: more than half of the early career researchers I met through these projects now hold permanent researcher positions or professorships, while others pursue successful careers in industry.

To me it’s all about bringing the international research community together—beyond the groups defined for the project. In SPIN, we essentially “adopted” about a dozen additional early career researchers who were not directly funded by the project, but benefited from the training offered within SPIN. They all became part of our supportive academic family. In my experience, this usually has a “multiplier effect” by motivating additional people to work on the networks’ scientific topics and cultivating vibrant collaborations.

Since SPIN was kicked off during the pandemic, we had to improvise quite a bit, for example, when a lockdown was announced 2 weeks before our first in-person workshop. We had to quickly reinvent the workshop format to make it work online and reorganize everything. Throughout the project, I sought to adapt the training format and content to meet the diverse needs of our early career researchers. This is something I want to improve in future Doctoral Networks.

SPIN was the first ITN I coordinated and hopefully not the last. Despite the workload, it was an incredibly rewarding experience. It was amazing to see early career researchers grow and thrive within SPIN over the past 4 years. Also, these Networks help strengthen the University’s international profile.

SPIN will conclude this August, and I am already preparing a proposal for my next Doctoral Network. In April, part of the SPIN consortium along with a few new partners met for a proposal retreat to develop the scientific concept for the project. I am excited about what we came up with, and look forward to leading another interdisciplinary, international project on this topic.

“International research training groups are demanding and time-intensive, but you get so much in return.”

Dr. Sebastian Neumann-Böhme

Doing a doctorate within the Innovative Training Network Improving Quality of Care in Europe (IQCE), which was coordinated from 2017–2021 at the Hamburg Center for Health Economics (HCHE).

After finishing my master’s degree in business administration, which I had completed in Hamburg and London, I started out working as a healthcare consultant—if it weren’t for IQCE I would probably still be doing that. But in 2016, I received an email from the HCHE, informing me about a newly acquired research training group that included 6 European universities and a practitioner as partner, 15 doctoral students with the aim to develop solutions for improving the quality and performance of European health systems. I found the offer so exciting that I returned to academia after one year.

Thanks to the international training approach I got to explore the partner universities shortly after the start in 2017. As all institutions contributed special expertise, courses were taught in Portugal, the Netherlands; Italy, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, among others. The content was tailored to the participants’ needs, including topics such as experimental design. Internationality had been a decisive factor in approving locations for the doctorate. You could only apply for a doctoral project in a country you had previously not lived in for longer. I thus chose Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, travel and on-site personal exchange ended in 2020 and I started to work remotely from Hamburg. I had originally planned to focus my research on reference point formation, meaning who or what aids us in making health decisions. When the pandemic broke out, I joined up with other IQCE researchers to start a survey of how people in Europe felt about COVID-19 and the related risks and prevention measures. Our network allowed us to run 11 survey waves within the European Covid Survey, including over 7,000 people in several European countries. The development and programming of questions, the coordination of the project, the evaluation of results, and, ultimately, the publication hence became key to my doctoral project.

But international research training groups are demanding and time-intensive even without the specific challenges of a pandemic. You must be willing to adapt to another country, local conditions for doctoral studies, and to navigate a range of additional organizational challenges. Also, you must do a lot of traveling and cooperate with people from various cultures and work environments. However, you receive a lot in return: a sound and comprehensive training, great insights into cutting-edge European research, and an international network with, in my case, tremendous benefit to date.

The ITN not only helped me discover that I want to continue working in academia, it also offered an ensuing career option: After completing my doctorate, I started working as a postdoctoral researcher at the HCHE.

“Again and again, the aim is to balance support and challenges . . .”

Prof. Dr. Gertraud Koch

Professor of empirical cultural studies and coordinator of Participatory Memory Practice. Concepts, strategies and media infrastructures for envisioning socially inclusive potential futures of European Societies through culture“ (POEM, 2018–2022)

Doctoral Networks is special, for it not only offers a mix of intensive international research cooperation among various universities and nonuniversity institutions and practitioners; it also focuses strongly on establishing how academic work impacts society and has committed to initiate change in Europe. In a nutshell, it is basic research outside the ivory tower. The POEM project, for example, was all about devising concepts for pluralistic participation in culture and exploring their limits and the question of where and how the ongoing digitalization can be geared toward greater efficiency.

As a coordinator I had the overall responsibility for the project’s content and organization. I engaged in intensive exchange and agreed a program with the other 7 other supervisors before applying for the project. “Our main task was to ensure that all early stage researchers, as defined by the EU, could develop a professional profile and future prospects during their work in the ITN. “Again and again, the aim is to balance support and challenges as well as individual and societal developments.” Successfully combining a broad range of people, topics, and demands can be quite challenging next to the usual formal project requirements.

In POEM this worked out really well, as all participants showed an incredible commitment. But top-level work and fast-paced qualifications are very demanding and proved to be an ambivalent experience for some. Feedback from doctoral researchers attests to this. Intensive, structured support combined with a comprehensive, thematically and individually tailored qualification program allows for highly concentrated, focused doctoral studies and for shaping a researcher profile early on. Moreover, there is constant exchange within a strong peer group and close cooperation in professional areas: Altogether, 15 partner institutions in Europe, the USA, and Africa took part. The ITN provides a unique international research environment to orientate yourself and plan your academic career.

Some of our doctoral researchers directly moved on to positions at participating institutions, implementing the concepts developed within the project, or collaborating on new research proposals. I am always delighted to meet up with them and see how these highly qualified and focused young researchers use their broad skill sets to benefit academia.

“It is amazing how quickly science can progress within a committed network”

Marco Dominguez Bureos

Doctoral researcher in the SPIN-ITN: Seismological Parameters and Instrumentation that has been coordinated at the University of Hamburg since 2021.

When I began searching doctoral programs and worldwide funding opportunities on the web, I found the ITN option very promising.

I got my master’s degree in geosciences with a focus on seismology at the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada in my native country Mexico and it has been exiting to come to Hamburg for my doctoral studies. This enabled me to explore different research environments all over the world. As part of the ITN, I attended training courses in France, Scotland, and Switzerland and traveled to Austria, Belgium, and Czechia to present my research.

My research focuses on the use of vibrations to detect small flaws in the concrete of buildings or bridges, aiming to prevent large-scale cracking and structural failure. This is an excellent match for the ITN that focuses on the seismic wavefield and the alterations it leaves in different materials when the waves travel through them. One of SPIN’s many benefits is the opportunity to cooperate with experienced researchers from various areas who can offer a different perspective on my results and the topic in general. This exchange promotes scientific scrutiny, which helps develop better research methods and critical thinking.

In contrast to other doctoral programs you become part of an international research network right at the start of the ITN, which is a great advantage. My project is interdisciplinary and, among others, involves experts in nondestructive material testing based in Berlin, as well as experts in wave propagation in complex media in Potsdam. Gaining access to and training with sophisticated technologies in this area are also convincing benefits of the network. This allowed me to hone my theoretical and technical skills as well as my soft skills, which will be just as helpful in academia as in industry and in research communication.

The training and input my ITN supervisors provided to my research had a profound influence on my doctoral experience. This also applies to what I call ‘academic friendships’ that I built with fellow ITN-funded early career researchers scientists and others. It is amazing how quickly science can progress within a committed network, and how a fast pace helps connect academics and practitioners to solve highly relevant social problems.