Mobility Programmes: Bridging the Gap in Talent Acquisition
Talent acquisition is one of the most pressing concerns for the global research ecosystem today. As countries and institutions vie for skilled researchers, scientists, and innovators, the competition has become fiercer, and the brain drain phenomenon is growing.

Talent Development and Training Gaps: The Missing Link
While mobility programmes play a crucial role in talent redistribution, they cannot fully address the root causes of the talent gap in many countries. In many parts of the world, education systems and training infrastructures are struggling to keep pace with the demands of a rapidly evolving research landscape.

Funding Crises and Political Unrest: Eroding the Research Foundation
In addition to talent gaps, the global research ecosystem is facing severe funding crises that disproportionately affect early-career researchers and research in underfunded regions. Research budgets have stagnated in many countries, and in some, they are being slashed due to economic downturns, shifting political priorities, or austerity measures.

Frontier Science
The project on “The Role of Mobility Programmes in Shaping the Future of the Research Ecosystem Amidst Talent Acquisition Challenges and Global Crises” qualifies as frontier research for several reasons. This research pushes the boundaries of global scientific collaboration, policy innovation, and sustainable talent development in response to the rapidly changing dynamics of the global research environment. Here’s why this project is considered frontier research:
1. Addressing Global Talent Shortages and Disruptions
2. Innovating Global Research Collaboration Frameworks
3. Interdisciplinary Integration of Policy, Technology, and Education
4. Reimagining the Future of Research Ecosystems
5. Developing New Models for Talent Development in Crisis Situations
6. Expanding Access to Research Opportunities in Under-Resourced Regions
7. Long-Term Implications for Science Diplomacy and Global Knowledge Sharing
8. Leveraging Technology to Overcome Mobility Barriers

This project qualifies as frontier research because it addresses some of the most critical and urgent challenges facing the global research ecosystem today. It is exploring new models of research collaboration, talent development, and global mobility that are not just innovative but essential for the future of science. The interdisciplinary nature of the project, its focus on resilience, and its exploration of technology-driven solutions to address talent shortages, political instability, and economic crises position it at the cutting edge of global research. It has the potential to reshape how we think about global collaboration, equity, and innovation in the research ecosystem in the years to come.

Climate-resilient agriculture and sustainable crop production: From viticulture and horticulture to ornamental plant cultivation, we explore innovative and resource-efficient farming systems. Our work includes plant breeding, smart irrigation and the use of sensor technologies to optimize inputs and reduce environmental impact.
Bioeconomy and food innovation: We investigate how plant-based products can be processed sustainably and marketed successfully, focusing on food safety and fresh produce logistics. Topics include extraction and formulation of functional ingredients from harvest products and their health effects, circular production systems and consumer behaviour and preferences.
Urban green spaces and cultural landscapes:Our interdisciplinary research focuses on developing and assessing nature-based solutions and climate adaptation strategies for urban and rural landscapes—with particular attention to traditional winegrowing regions. We investigate how green infrastructure can contribute to ecological resilience and environmental quality in cities and cultural landscapes under climate stress. We actively contribute to regional transformation processes, including close cooperation with the Rheingau region within a living lab and the Federal Garden Exhibition (BUGA) 2029.
Climate change adaptation and mitigation: We assess risks and develop strategies to ensure food security, protect biodiversity, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Current projects range from water management, use of biochar and pest control to agroforestry and agro-PV.
Digital transformation in agriculture and landscape planning: We implement and evaluate digital tools—from drone technology and sensor-based diagnostics to AI-driven modelling and precision agriculture —for improved decision-making in production, processing, and spatial planning.
These research fields offer rich storytelling opportunities for science journalists. Our unique infrastructure provide direct access to field trials, labs, greenhouses, and real-world innovation environments. Our 50 professors along with researchers from all over the world use this unique research setup as part of our ca. 180 international cooperations with universities, institutions and companies.

Frontier Research

Geisenheim University conducts research that breaks new ground at the intersection of plant science, climate adaptation, food systems, and landscape transformation. Our distinctive focus on special crops—such as grapes, fruits, and vegetables—provides a highly specific yet globally relevant research area, in which we explore urgent questions about the sustainability and resilience of our food systems in the face of climate change and biodiversity losses.
Geisenheim University’s work is frontier research because we tackle complex, system-level questions: How can vineyards and horticultural systems adapt to increasing heat and drought? How can cultural landscapes be reimagined as multifunctional, biodiversity-supporting, and socially inclusive spaces? How can digital tools—from virtual vineyards to AI-driven pest forecasting—support sustainable agriculture in real time?
Our university plays a key role in real-world transformation processes. Through experimental settings such as the Living Lab Rheingau and contributions to the implementation of the Federal Garden Exhibition (BUGA) 2029 in the Middle Rhine Valley, we co-create knowledge with stakeholders and test new solutions under real conditions. This collaborative and innovative approach expands classical research formats and bridges the gap between science, policy, and practice.
Furthermore, we also maintain close cooperation with companies—ranging from local producers to international partners—ensuring that our research remains relevant, applicable, and forward-looking. We actively support innovation and entrepreneurship by encouraging new ideas and start-up initiatives developed by our students and academic staff.
Through the combination of methodological innovation, transdisciplinary ambition, and real-world relevance, our research not only generates new knowledge—it challenges and reshapes existing paradigms in agriculture, climate science, and landscape planning.
Furthermore, our focus on special crops – a largely underrepresented field in mainstream agricultural research – opens up new scientific terrain, particularly in relation to climate adaptation, soil health and the sustainable processing of plant-based foods.
With its interdisciplinary setup, experimental openness and transfer orientation, our research not only explores future scenarios—it helps shape them.
A key success factor for this is a close collaboration with all involved parties, be it authorities, industry partner or the general public. Thus, getting support and partnership for the Geisenheim research areas from the Frontiers network would significantly contribute to the success of the transformation of the agriculture as such.

Therefore, the frontier of research relies not only on what we research -i.e., social-ecological systems -, but also on how we do research – i.e., weaving diverse scientific disciplines, knowledge systems, and communication tools, including arts.

Frontier research

To understand how to foster transformations for sustainable and fair futures is a research endeavour that is placed in the frontier of (1) disciplines, considering interdisciplinary topics such as biodiversity conservation, biocultural diversity, governance, nature’s contributions to people, or environmental justice; and (2) knowledge systems, integrating practices and knowledge from Western science and Indingenous and Local Knowledge systems.

Research activities in UCD Conway Institute are aligned under three overarching umbrella themes that enables the delivery of strategic goals and objectives:

Personalised & Translational Medicine
Using information about a person’s genes, proteins or environment to develop more precise medical models to identify, prevent or treat disease.

One Health
Exploring the complex interplay between the health of animals, humans and the environment to improve the condition of each.

Discovery Research
Creating new knowledge by studying the
fundamental processes in cells and living organisms to better understand health and disease.

We have an established structure to manage suites of core technologies with the ability to integrate emerging technologies and provide a comprehensive service offering to researchers. We have expertise that can contribute to the solution of major societal challenges.

This is underpinned by an record in active engagement and co-creation with cohorts
of the Irish public including secondary school teachers, pupils, patients and their families to ensure our research has tangible societal impact for future generations.

Frontier research

In addition to facilitating team-based science, the Institute is a home for individually excellent scientists, particularly in respect of ‘blue skies’ research, and welcomes and fosters multidisciplinary. Enabling scientists to pursue blue-skies, hypothesis-based research that will ultimately drive discovery is crucial. We encourage researchers to pursue their own ideas driven solely by the criterion of excellence. We encourage a culture that enables play as an integral part of the design thinking process.

Today, 160 Conway Fellows lead teams in research areas including cancer, infection, diabetes, obesity, neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, arthritis & rheumatoid disease. Exploring mechanisms of health and disease so as to develop strategies that maintain good health, diagnose disease early and find new and effective treatments.

Since its establishment in 2006, the ES Department has become a reference in climate- and air quality-related research in Europe and beyond, as well as in health and other societal impacts of climate change.

The Global Health Resilience (GHR) group, within which the candidate would work, works on co-designing policy-relevant decision-support tools to enhance surveillance, preparedness, and response to global health challenges. The GHR group applies cutting-edge approaches to understand the links between climate change, socio-economic inequalities, and infectious disease emergence and spread, from local to global scales. It contributes to international initiatives to ensure these digital tools have a downstream impact to strengthen global health resilience to emerging threats.

Frontier Research
Climate change, environmental degradation, and socio-economic inequalities can increase the risk of infectious disease outbreaks and lead to excess mortality and morbidity. The goal of the Global Health Resilience (GHR) group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is to co-design decision-support tools to enhance surveillance, preparedness, and response to global health challenges, including climate-sensitive infectious diseases.

At the GHR group, the researchers apply a transdisciplinary approach, co-developing solutions at the interface of epidemiology, climate science, planetary health, biology, statistical modelling, machine learning, and data science.

Their cutting-edge methodological research aims to understand the links between environmental change, socio-economic inequalities, and infectious disease emergence and spread from global to local scales.

Through a co-creation process, they develop indicators, impact-based forecasting models and early warning systems at sub-seasonal to decadal time scales, which help to anticipate future risk in collaboration with public health, disaster risk management, and humanitarian agencies all over the globe.

Moreover, the group works closely with climate scientists, software engineers and knowledge integration experts from across the Earth Sciences Department, as well as researchers specialising in disease intelligence data generation.

These collaborations ensure integration with the latest technology and novel data streams to strengthen decision-support tools for public health decision-makers that ultimately build resilience to emerging health threats and protect the most at-risk communities.

The research of the GHR group contributes to global initiatives to ensure digital tools have a downstream policy impact to strengthen global health resilience to emerging health threats.

PROGRESS: Reading provenance from ubiquitous quartz: understanding the changes occurring in its lattice defects in its journey in time and space by physical methods .
ERC-funded project developing a new, beyond state of the art, provenance and multi-scale time analysis method for rock samples, based on analyzing quartz – an abundant mineral, whose structure and defects can record time as they trap charge during interaction with natural radioactivity.

Institute of Interdisciplinary Research in Bio-Nano-Sciences.
The main BBU facility for experimental interdisciplinary research, with a focus on bio-, nano-sciences, and on the interface of biosystems with artificially or naturally nanostructured systems. Transferring the experimental results into industry is also one of the institute’s main goals.

Strengthening the Research Capacities for Extreme Weather Events in Romania – SCEWERO.
Horizon-funded project aiming at developing AI-enhanced abilities to forecast extreme heat and precipitation events using emerging technologies. The goal is to redesign the thresholds for early warnings in Romania for heat events, currently undervalued, and to increase the communities’ resilience when facing such extreme events.

The PsyTech-MATRIX PLATFORM – Platform for Robotics/Robotherapy and Virtual Reality Enhanced Therapy.
Platform hosting laboratories and technologies underlying the integration of psychology and technology as means of evidence-based mental health services. It focuses on stress control, enhanced cognitive-behavioral therapies for children, adolescents and parents, and makes use of digital affective technologies and therapeutic robots.

RESTORY – Recovering Past Stories for the Future: A Synergistic Approach to Textual and Oral Heritage of Small Communities.
Horizon-funded project focused on the challenges faced by small and middle-sized communities of past and present in sustainably managing and reusing a limited amount of human and material resources, with the aim of helping citizens and researchers understand the drives behind (re)use and (re)adaptations.

NOTA – Note-taking and Notebooks as Channels of Medieval Academic Dissemination across Europe.
ERC-funded project studying medieval university learning by delving into deep creative reflections on the motivation and technical aspects involved in producing notebooks of the 14th and 15th centuries, when paper entered universities, aiming to elucidate their role in knowledge transfer.

Some research areas to highlight:

Cutting edge quantum research
Chalmers is building Sweden’s first quantum computer and developing quantum algorithms for application in massive simulations in the research centre WACQT. Also being studied are new quantum materials for quantum technologies, quantum sensing and quantum optics.

Materials research for green transition
At Chalmers, there is experimental and theoretical research in the field of energy. This includes the conversion of solar energy and energy storage in novel batteries to large-scale transport of energy, with significant breakthroughs in structural batteries and floating solar energy. The research is conducted on renewable raw materials, lightweight materials and reduced environmental impact of materials.

Optimisation of human health
Chalmers has a field of research that focuses on optimisation of human health. This includes cutting edge research in the development of improved diagnostics, prevention of resistant bacterial infections, including through the development of materials such as graphene and gels, new methods for drug delivery and precision nutrition.

Microwave and antenna technology
At Chalmers, there are close collaborations with industry leaders for certain research, including improvement of hardware, such as transmitters and receivers for 6G, integration of gallium nitride technology and space components required to perform in extreme conditions. Researchers are developing the wireless systems of the future for everything from cancer treatment to self-driving cars, fast mobile networks and space antennas. Chalmers’ cleanroom and Gigahertz lab are world-class research environments.

Sustainable energy systems
At Chalmers, there is research on electric power generation and distribution to increase renewable and variable electricity in the power system, as well as research into materials and diagnostics for high-voltage networks. Within energy, road transport is the dominant field of research, but there are also studies looking into hydrogen, electric and hybrid vehicles, how a vehicle’s energy impacts design and environmental impact, as well as industrial combustion and gasification processes, carbon capture and energy systems analysis.

About the city of Gothenburg
Gothenburg is an open and welcoming city on the west coast, with a buzzing city centre, a picturesque archipelago and great travel connections to all the capital cities nearby. The city is leading the way in technology and logistics, being the hub for Northern Europe’s automotive industry and the main port for northern Europe. It also boasts thriving industry clusters and two highly ranking universities.

At Kavli INsD, our exceptional team of 38 faculty members and over 450 researchers represents diverse backgrounds in structural biology, biochemistry, pathology, chemistry, physics, physiology, and engineering. United by our shared focus on the nanoscale—the scale of proteins, viruses, and DNA—we are at the forefront of unravelling the mysteries of the most fundamental unit of life: the cell.
Together, we are shaping the future of nanoscience, fostering an inclusive and collaborative working culture, and driving breakthrough discoveries that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the world around us.
Because our institute covers two very important and highly topical subjects – research culture and interdisciplinarity we believe press coverage would be highly beneficial to publicize these messages.

Our institute also includes four current ERC Advanced, Starter and grantees (Professors Dame Carol Robinson and Molly Stevens, Professors Philipp Kukura and Andrew Baldwin. Importantly our research is also translational with both Refeyn and OMass therapeutics forming on the back of ERC Proof of concept funding.

For details please explore https://kavlinano.ox.ac.uk/research-themes.

Research Themes
1. Understanding biological function and regulation requires characterising biomolecules, and their structures and interactions. Developing new ways to study biomolecules is a major focus of our research, and the tools we develop underpin much of our work (e.g mass spectrometry, next-generation imaging, novel bioanalytic technologies, and biosensors and probes)

2. Advanced diagnostics & personalised medicine – our long-term goal is to democratise and personalise healthcare with ultrasensitive, cost-effective, user-friendly and mobile-connected diagnostic technologies.
Engineering & exploring the bio-material interface – we design biomaterials that influence the behaviour of cells at the interface of living and non-living matter by tweaking the surface chemistry and texture.
Bioelectronics & regenerative engineering – we have a growing portfolio of cutting-edge biomaterials designed to repair tissues, enhance regeneration and deliver drugs to targeted areas of the body.
Digital medicine & big data – we are harnessing the computational power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance understanding of molecules, materials, and processes.

3. Infectious disease poses a huge unmet global medical need leading to ‘spillover’ events – where pathogens move from wildlife or livestock to people – become more common, increasing the frequency of pandemics. We therefore urgently need to strengthen our pandemic preparedness. We are working on SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, Dengue, Zika, Malaria, Hepatitis B & C

3. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global health threat. In AMR, microbes such as bacteria develop the ability to survive exposure to the antibiotic drugs that are used to treat and prevent infections. Through the rise of resistance, medical procedures become riskier and common infections untreatable. It has become clear that tackling AMR requires a diverse range of actions, which include developing new antibiotics as well as rapid diagnostics that require understanding the modes of action of existing antibiotics and the mechanisms that fuel resistance, to identify new targets for novel antibiotics and to devise ways to rapidly detect the presence of drug resistance.

4. Neurodegenerative diseases and motor neuron disease, represent an increasing healthcare burden for an ageing global population. Largely untreatable, these diseases are already a leading cause of disability and their prevalence is rising. Our research aims to understand the fundamental biological processes that underlie normal brain development and are responsible for neurodegeneration, and to inform the development of treatments.

5. Amidst a persistent lack of direct evidence linking biological mechanisms to depression symptoms we are charting differences at the molecular level of receptors and transporters at the blood-brain barrier, to also develop effective biomarkers for anhedonic depression to better inform therapeutic intervention.