The University of Twente is committed to creating an inspiring environment for young scientists, who are at the beginning of a promising academic career and offering them the opportunity to reach their full potential by actively shaping the UT. For this purpose, the Young Academy Twente (YAT) was established in 2011, following the example of the Young Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences.
OUR mission
Our mission is to build a community of early career academics, facilitate a learning platform for academic leadership, and strengthen the societal impact of our university.
As an advocate for the interests of early career academics, we:
- Support. We help to shape the future of our university, by supporting early career academics in their development as educators, scientists, leaders and entrepreneurs within and beyond their own fields.
- Advise. We provide solicited and unsolicited advice to the UT community (including the Executive Board and Strategic Board of the UT) along the lines of our university core tasks research, education, and innovation.
- Connect. We go beyond our daily business taking a radiating role in various ecosystems for the UT, connecting science and society, by expressing our passion to reach and inspire others.
To this end, our activities for 2024-2025 are centred around four themes:
- Team science: this working group aims to make the UT a better platform for interdisciplinary projects to take off, especially for early-career researchers, who are still building up their network. We aim to organise funding workshops and matchmaking meetings for early career academics and create a platform to stimulate interfaculty research and make it easier for early-career researchers to apply for interdisciplinary grants.
- Talent recognition and development: the focus points will still be an extension of the ius promovendi and the development and implementation of recognition and rewards (for example in designing the Career tracks).
- Education: the Education working group is there to have an education community in which they learn from each other’s good practices and challenges, while advocating for the appropriate recognition and reward of education
- Reducing Administrative Burden: sees themselves as a think-tank to discuss which bureaucracy is needed, where it may be reduced and how it could potentially be replaced in the interest of UT researchers