Bridging science to practice

Academic education is meant to build knowledge, insight and skills in students. Subsequently, transferring what you have learned to different contexts, in teams with diverse backgrounds or when variables in the situation do not meet all the criteria of your theory, is a complicated next step. Let alone, when the context is a crisis, the team is interdisciplinary and information on the situation is incomplete or not verified.

Research consortium Adapt! is working on enhancing knowledge to support societies in preparing for crises and will keep working on this for the next 9 years. A crucial element in this process is involving societal stakeholders, e.g. by bridging the insights gained to professionals making strategic decisions in crises. Simultaneously, we are inviting them to generate knowledge on these situations specifically: we challenge them with a fictive, though realistic, crisis and observe how they make decisions. The goal is to exchange insights, discover practical limitations of knowledge and develop an understanding of the dynamics at play.

We are currently developing the first version of such a crisis challenge for teams and hope to conduct a pilot test, e.g. with students, testing some of the mechanisms implemented in the full version. Importantly, this internship is not research-focused, but requires an educational view, developing, e.g. materials with regard to crisis-simulation and group decision making. That will be further specified at the start of your internship. The internship requires flexibility, since this design process is iterative and not set in stone: we only cover part of the full systematic development.

Education, crisis response, decision making

Adapt! is a research consortium, including researchers from 7 Dutch universities and a variety of disciplines, ranging from history and philosophy to public administration and (social) psychology. Our goal is to build knowledge and expertise to help prepare societies for future crises. We will work on this for the next 9 years, funded through a gravitation grand of NWO. You can read more about the research, projects and updates at https://adapt-academy.nl/en/

Available in block 2B. This internship is open to 2 students.

Please contact the PCRS internship coordinator Miriam Oostinga (m.s.d.oostinga@utwente.nl).