New interdisciplinary PhD programme supported by 6.6 million EURO Marie S. Curie grant
BRIC joins forces with physical science and engineering environments at University of Copenhagen and the Technical University of Denmark in establishing a new interdisciplinary PhD training programme, INTERACT. The PhDs will work on ‘convergence’ research projects bridging from biology to physics, chemistry, or engineering, to fight cancer and neurological diseases.
Excellence in training and research are at the core, when University of Copenhagen, UCPH, and The Technical University of Denmark, DTU, welcome 66 new PhD-fellows who will receive training on convergence science. The vision behind INTERACT is to cultivate agile and responsible researchers capable of applying an interdisciplinary approach to answering fundamental questions within human health.
“To make groundbreaking findings relevant for human health, we must seek new paths in science. One approach could be better integration across scientific disciplines. INTERACT will provide future researchers with training, knowledge and experience to bridge disciplines,” says Katrine Sonne-Hansen from BRIC, who will lead INTERACT.
The partners in INTERACT are Biotech Research and Innovation Center (BRIC), the Niels Bohr-institute, and the Departments of Chemistry and Science Education from UCPH, and the Departments of Chemistry, Biotechnology and Biomedicine (Bioengineering), and Health Technology from DTU.
Capacity building in future research
The Marie S. Curie, MSCA, supports long term investments in excellent researchers in Europe. BRIC has a long-standing tradition in training young researchers in PhD and Postdoc training programmes.
“We are contributing actively to build scientific capacity in future research by developing cutting-edge training programmes for our fellows. We are enthusiastic about the new collaboration across UCPH and DTU environments and we are looking forward to developing a training programme built upon an ambition to ensure convergence in science,” says Director at BRIC Professor Anders H. Lund.
Lead to new knowledge
Apart from training the fellows, INTERACT is also an opportunity to extend the existing knowledge on training in academia. As part of the programme, a PhD-fellow based at the Department of Science Education (DSE), will continuously study the project.
“In many research collaborations, a few methodologies or limited knowledge from other fields may be used, but the research questions asked are often mono-disciplinary. We will study INTERACT to learn more about how we can nurture truly convergence science with multiple disciplines included and how to supervise fellows working in such projects” says assistant professor Katrine Ellemose Lindvig, who will supervise the fellow at DSE.
INTERACT opens for fellowship applications on December 20, 2024. Read more about the programme here.