Incorporation of Early Career Researchers within multidisciplinary research at academic institutions

Abstract

Multidisciplinary research is becoming an increasingly popular approach by many international, national, and institutional organisations to address global grand challenges and provide innovative solutions. However, within an academic setting, Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are underutilised in this field. This underutilisation can come from many factors, arising from current performance metrics, fixed-term contracts, lack of opportunities, and institutional strategies. To address these issues and to aid the process of retaining talented ECRs, an initiative was launched to incorporate ECRs and to support the existing multidisciplinary strategies. This article describes and shows some initial results of these new contributions to inform other academic institutions developing policies that incorporate ECRs within their multidisciplinary networks. The initiative represents one approach to educate and provide guidance to ECRs on the benefits and issues associated with multidisciplinary research.