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Central tasks and outreach

Oliver Krüger

Central management

The central management will continue to provide the services for the scientific and administrative management of the CRC. They will support the spokesperson and the PIs in all organisational matters. Main tasks of the coordinators will be to keep up the high level of communication between the participants and between the respective administrations at their home universities and to support the spokesperson and the PIs in all organisational matters. They will continue to support our intense scientific exchange by scheduling, organising and implementing workshops both in person and online, the general assemblies and meetings for different interest groups and will invite the seminar speakers.

Outreach

The coordinators will also extend the promotion of the activities of the CRC to the general public. The topic of our CRC has proven to be of high interest to the public. The organismal approach in our research makes it highly accessible, as illustrated by our exhibition at the LWL Museum in Münster on the CRC’s research. As this exhibition will travel to at least two more museums (in Bielefeld and Paderborn), the coordinators will organise talks, interactive science presentations and ama (“ask me anything”)-sessions to accompany the exhibition. Again, focus will be on both the scientific results and the scientific method in order to increase public appreciation which answers science can or cannot provide. In order to build a lasting legacy, we plan to convert the exhibition into an online version which will then be accessible to an even wider audience well beyond its duration in the museums. The coordinators will continue to involve young scientists in these measures. The exhibition will thus serve as a means to train the additional cohort from the second funding phase in practical science communication.

Coordination will also capitalise on the public’s enormous interest in animal and ecological research and continue to reach out to the public via lay summaries of CRC research on our webpage, seminars that are open to the public and our highly successful “e-vite a Prof” programme. As planned in the first phase, we have started offering this via online streaming. As this has become far more accessible over the past year, our coordinators plan to develop this programme further in a potential second funding phase. This would involve identifying and reaching out to schools and communities which do not usually have easy access to universities. This is planned both locally and internationally. In addition to establishing contact with schools and other organisations, the coordinators will also support CRC scientists to adapt their talks to the target audience.   

As more and more results from CRC research have emerged, the coordinators also support researchers in reaching out to the press office and the media, and they will continue to do so. Dr Herde and Dr Pauli are excellently qualified for this task, as their background is in Behavioural Ecology, and both have extensive experience in science communication. Hence, they will continue to manage the CRC’s webpage, the coordination of the public seminars and the liaison between schools and PIs as part of the “e-vite a Prof” programme.

Young researchers, family friendliness, animal welfare, data management and sustainability

In cooperation with the PIs, the coordinators will also continue to manage and oversee all issues concerning early career support in the CRC as well as the recruitment and selection procedure, in particular preparing and structuring the application documents for the decision process. They will support the young researchers in fully exploiting the various offered qualification measures. This will be especially important for international members of the CRC, as the universities’ offers are sometimes held in German. The coordinators have established links to the qualification programmes at both universities and to others DFG-funded initiatives and will continue to collaborate with them for offering workshops in English.

The coordinators will also support CRC members with families by working closely with the representatives for gender equality and family friendliness, and be responsible for the management of the family offices they established together in the first phase. They will build on this experience to also support the newly created positions of representatives for sustainability, animal welfare and data management. The coordinators will be involved in creating and disseminating guidelines on these topics to all CRC members, help implement them, organise training sessions and workshops and communicate the importance of these topics for science to the general public.