Talent plan

The QSC will implement a targeted talent plan that includes hiring seven young researchers on tenure track positions. Furthermore, the talent plan aims at attracting and further developing talented PhD students and high-potential MSc students.

 

Recruitment

The QSC has an extended network within the scientific community and will conduct a worldwide search for new hires. The search committees for the positions will include members from the partners (Amsterdam, Leiden, Delft), at least one member of the Executive Board, and a representative of the Gender & Diversity Council. The EB member will ensure that the hiring decisions are taken from the perspective of the integral strength of the QSC, while the representative of the Gender & Diversity Council will guard the implementation of the QSC’s policies in this area .

 

Developing scientific skills

The QSC will make sure that PhD students working within the QSC bear the fruits of the synergy among the three cities compared to PhD projects in more isolated groups.

• First, the QSC will stipulate that the majority of the QSC PhD students have two supervisors located at different partners within the consortium.
• Next, the QSC will arrange that world-leading experts visiting one of the partners will share their knowledge with junior researchers, for example by giving a lectures or a mini-course on their field of expertise. 

• As for the QSC postdocs, we will arrange exchanges among PhD students working in the various QSC research themes.

 

Developing personal skills

An excellent scientist needs to be more than an expert in her or his field of science. She or he needs to be able to connect to different branches of science, but also outside science. The QSC will implement policies that go beyond the usual standards of ‘soft skills’ training for PhD students. Focus will be on training skills such as teaching, writing, and reaching out to laymen. The QSC will require each PhD student in the QSC to take part in committees that take responsibility for outreach, organizing seminars, workshops or conferences, creating teaching materials for lecture series and events within the consortium.