Faces of Our CommUNAty: “We need to tackle big challenges in bold ways.”

Katja: Our role is to support the Self-Steering Committees [the alliance’s academic bodies aligned to our six Focus Areas] in building research hubs that bring researchers together to collaborate with each other. We are specialists in research funding who support the building of Una Europa into a research community.

Laura: The RCC is a good platform for us as research managers to broaden our expertise and learn from each other, so there’s a benefit for professional services staff too. For example, for the last few years, it was really valuable for those of us in Zürich to be in close contact with colleagues in EU countries as we did not have equal access to the information coming from Brussels. During that phase of Swiss non-association [with the Horizon Europe programme], we felt a lot of solidarity in the RCC and Una Europa in general that did not mirror what was going on at the political level.

Katja: We developed the concept for researcher matchmaking workshops and piloted it under the Una.Resin project [Una Europa’s inaugural Horizon 2020 project]. The idea is to help researchers to build networks, to find collaborators for Horizon Europe Pillar II proposals. [Pillar II: Global challenges and European industrial competitiveness requires a high degree of interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle issues such as Health; Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society; and Climate, Energy and Mobility.]

Researchers often have networks in their own field or neighbouring fields. But it's harder to find collaborators from vastly different fields, especially across the SSH-STEM divide. The idea is to help researchers to find collaborators across fields they wouldn't necessarily work with otherwise. For example, our recent Europe and the World matchmaking event welcomed researchers from legal studies, languages, history, and religious studies.

Laura: If it wasn’t for Una Europa, we probably wouldn’t organise matchmarking workshops with colleagues from other universities for researchers at our university. This illustrates very nicely the alliance’s added value for research – it enables us to free up resources within our institution to actually make this happen.

Katja: One of my highlights was the first Una Europa General Assembly that I attended, in Paris. It was around COVID time. We were all working remotely and I hadn't met any of the people that I was working with in the RCC in person since I joined. It was so exciting to actually get to know one another. It really took our collaboration to different level.

The best moments have been the ones when we've been gathered with RCC members, maybe sitting together over dinner, imagining what Una Europa could be as a research community. It has been really enriching for me professionally.

One thing I'm personally really excited about is Una Europa’s joint institute of advanced studies. Of course, it's just at the stage of a feasibility study at the moment – there's no guarantee it will happen or what it might look like. But it’s a really exciting opportunity to imagine what we could we build together.

Laura: In these times that are sometimes very depressing, it helps to have this feeling of a community that transcends borders and languages. I think this is a very nice thing to have.

My highlight was welcoming the whole community to Universität Zürich during the Una Europa General Assembly [in June 2024]. I enjoyed showing my colleagues at the university what Una Europa is and the spirit that happens when everyone comes together to collaborate. It's quite a special thing to experience.

Katja: Research management is a growing profession, and nowadays it has a distinct professional identity. For example, there’s a big European conference for research managers, the EARMA General Assembly, that’s taking place at the beginning of May – I'm looking forward to seeing some of my RCC colleagues there.

Many alliance activities have been geared towards education, so it’s taken a while to start building Una Europe as a true research community. Our role is vital in helping to build a research community and also supporting the SSCs to turn into interdisciplinary hubs. It’s crucial is to start engaging the research communities at each partner university around the Focus Areas beyond the SSCs, and help researchers to see what Una Europa can offer them.

I was really delighted to be in Kraków in January for the Symposium on Future Materials and Technologies and the StartScience event. You could hear researchers at the coffee breaks saying, “Oh, this was really interesting””, “We should definitely collaborate”, “Can we do this together?”. It was brilliant to see that it was really starting to happen, this feeling of becoming an alliance-wide research community.

Laura: The University of the Future needs to tackle big challenges in bold ways when it comes to research. The questions that we deal with as societies are becoming very complex. Not only do we need interdisciplinary researchers, but we need researchers with very different backgrounds and expertise, as well infrastructure that not all universities have.

One thing that’s challenging is the absence of an instrument at the EU level for the research dimension of European Universities alliances. This became very clear after the end of Una.Resin: we sometimes struggle with working in the education-focused logic of Erasmus+ while having to get stuff done in the research dimension. This is a challenge, but we are creative with solutions.

As research managers, we do our best to facilitate academics in doing the best research possible to tackle societal challenges. The challenges we are dealing with in the world today are so complex that we can't do it alone. We really need to work together, across disciplines, but also across different universities and countries. Una Europe has a really important role to play, and the RCC plays an important role in supporting that.