SKILLS for cutting-edge Social Sciences and Humanities

Skills for cutting-edge Social Sciences and Humanities (SKILLS) is a series of strictly practical seminars where top researchers share their success stories and actively guide others to reach similar accomplishments. Within the IMSErt center and collaborating groups we have enormous potential: our researchers are among the 2% most cited scholars, have published in Nature, have received top European grants, have overseen European grant programmes as vice-chairs, have launched international programmes of studies, have pioneered new statistical models in linguistics, or have successfully ported LLM-based techniques between fields. This is huge intellectual capital that has however largely remained fragmented and locked within individual research groups. Let us now unlock it – with the SKILLS seminar we put these brains together and make them trade the practical knowledge and experience that got them best results.

This seminar focuses on skills and practical knowledge essential for building a high-quality research ecosystem that tend to be universal across research topics. As high-gain research increasingly transcends individual disciplines, groups in diverse fields often use similar methods, tools and software solutions, or face similar challenges or recurring problems in their daily practice. Some of the main areas we target are:

• publishing in top interdisciplinary journals,
• an inside view on application and review in top-level grant programmes (ERC, COST, MSCA, etc.),
• implementing pioneering international actions (new networks, consortia, MA study programmes),
• latest AI-based tools for productivity in research,
• successful collaboration with non-academic stakeholders (business, policymakers, local government and administration, activists, students, special needs groups, etc.)
• mapping out key assets available across IMSErt and beyond, for example 
  • equipment and facilities (e.g. VR, eyetracking, motion capture, computational clusters)
  • expertise and experience
  • local and international networks of contacts and collaborators
• identifying and dealing with major issues and stumbling blocks to progress
  • inviting external experts for advice,
  • assigning working groups,
  • developing sets of recommendations to implement at the level of our center, faculties, whole university, or even scientific policy of the state.

Meetings

20 February 2025, 16:00 CET, room 307 Collegium Maius NCU Toruń
Adam Izdebski
Boundaries and dialogue. Takeaways from a lived interdisciplinarity between history and ecology

Adam Izdebski is an interdisciplinary historian and ecologist, a graduate of Warsaw and Oxford Universities. He leads an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. He is also a full professor of environmental history at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His research interests cover climate change, pandemics, biodiversity, and the interaction of economic development and ecological dynamics in the Late Holocene. In 2024, he was awarded an ERC Synergy Grant EUROpest. He has been involved in several science for policy initiatives and advised the European Commission as well as the European Parliament.

SKILLS practical field workshop

25 – 28 June 2025, at the Bachotek resort