On 22 September, rather late in the afternoon, we received an email with the subject line EURAXESS – HRS4R GAP Analysis, OTM-R and Action EC Consensus Outcome.
Honestly, would you have interpreted this as:
“Congratulations Lund University! You have been granted the prestigious certification HR Excellence in Research Award by the EU Commission. Your application was good, complete and contained everything we wanted and more, so no additions are needed. Good job.”
No? Well, that was, in other words, exactly the message we received. YES – we have got it! The HR Excellence in Research Award is ours!
We have wallowed in the reviewers’ praise for the application in parallel with updating web pages, formulating news items and emailing all the researchers to tell them the news (it is after all these interviewees who provided us with the substance of this application) … And now I can also at last proclaim our gratifying news here, on our project blog, which, moreover, the reviewers highlighted as “best practice” for how higher education institutions can communicate their work on HR strategies for researchers. Not bad!
So, what happens now? I knew you were going to ask.
The steering group recently approved the project plan for the next project, one that will ensure we actually do what we say we will do in our action plan and submit a good self-assessment to the EU Commission in two years. I will talk more about this in upcoming blog posts, because the blog will live on. I have written the blog so far, and I will also be taking over as project manager after Gunilla Thylander, who has so admirably coordinated the work up to now. You can reach me through comments on this blog or via email at: Asa.Thormahlen@hr.lu.se.
Updated web pages, including logo etc., are here (Swedish) and here (English).
The logo will soon also be available under “documents” for you to download and include in applications for external funding.