We were excited to hold the Adapting Together symposium here at Lancaster University in conjunction with Future Observatory, however, we were also conscious that we did not want this to be an event where there was no follow up, where nothing happened because of it.
To facilitate this, we invited Expressions of Interests from early career researchers throughout the UK for them to attend a workshop in the afternoon after they had attended the symposium in the morning. The aim of the workshop was to bring together cross-disciplinary researchers to start conversations about how they could work together to create a research project to tackle some of the challenges arising from the morning symposium.
There are many funding opportunities on the horizon, and often when they arrive, they arrive with short deadlines. By encouraging this fledgling network to connect and grow, we hope that they will be better positioned to answer those funding calls constructively and effectively as and when they arise.
Designing the workshop to be an opportunity for open discussion, we challenged the researchers to not only ‘think outside the box’ but also imagine there was no ‘box’. We encouraged them to see the synergies between their disparate areas of research and how by working together they could create relevant, exciting, and fundable research projects.
Lisa Thomas
Sharon Summers