Promoting early career researchers

The still relatively new Graduate Center Plus (GC Plus) can already look back on a number of successes: In 2019, there were developments for staff in terms of the promotion of women. Looking across all disciplinary borders, women and men up to doctorate level are on average represented in approximately equal numbers in science and research. In the postdoc phase, however, this changes rapidly to the disadvantage of women. To counteract this, the GC Plus has included a broad range of offers in its portfolio specifically designed to promote and develop the careers of women early career researchers.

In the Research Academy Ruhr (RAR) as a cross-university platform of the UA Ruhr network, the GC Plus decisively promotes our young researchers in terms of careers in science, business and society.

For RAR, 2019 was a year of further development of its offers. Its varied programme is now even more closely tailored to the different needs of doctoral students, postdocs and scientists on their way towards professorships and other career paths. As can already be seen in this foreword, but also in the entire report, the promotion and success of early career researchers is an interdisciplinary topic that cuts across many of the areas touched upon here. The ongoing, approved and extended graduate and doctoral programmes, for example, as well as the increasing numbers of individual DFG funding grants as a first step towards a successful scientific career not to mention the award of lucrative prizes to our young researchers, all clearly indicate the direction of travel.