Agile Initiative’s first interdisciplinary researcher lunch 

Lunch laid out with a presentation ongoing behind
The inaugural session will be held 1-2pm, Tuesday 6 December 2022 in Seminar Room 2 at the Oxford Martin School. 

All early- and mid-career researchers working on an Agile Sprint are being encouraged to network and exchange knowledge from their work on interdisciplinary Agile Sprints at regular ‘lunch and learn’ sessions. We provide the venue, facilitators, sandwiches, and tea and coffee, and ask researchers to bring their experience, learnings, and a willingness to share. The inaugural session will be held 1-2pm, Tuesday 6 December 2022 in Seminar Room 2 at the Oxford Martin School. 

What’s the idea? 

As part of its commitment to capacity building and training, the Agile Initiative is setting up facilitated monthly lunchtime meetings for the early- and mid-career researchers in the University working on Agile Sprints. These meetings will allow researchers from different Sprints to network, exchange knowledge on interdisciplinary research and gain more support from being part of the Agile programme and its broad network of researchers.  

In the inaugural session Professor Aidong Yang will give a brief overview of Agile’s goals, mission, vision, and the current Sprints. This will be followed by speed networking to allow everyone to introduce themselves, say which Sprints they are working on and to get a sense of the range of disciplines in the room. Dr Mark Hirons will then facilitate a discussion on what you want these sessions to cover relating to interdisciplinarity in the context of Agile’s policy relevant, environmental research. 

Who is it for? 

All early- and mid-career researchers in the University working on Agile Sprints are encouraged to join, make connections, and actively participate by contributing to discussions around their discipline, methodologies, and Sprint research. 

How will the sessions be organised? 

These hourly sessions will run at lunchtime, once per month, throughout the academic year. Sandwiches, tea, and coffee will be provided, and sessions will be facilitated by other researchers and/or trainers within the University.  

Why are we doing this? 

One of Agile’s goals is to create a critical mass of interdisciplinary researchers. This involves supporting the training needs and career development of those working on the programme and creating a community of interdisciplinary researchers.  

Our aim is to enable communication between disciplines, and explore interdisciplinary research and collaboration informed by perspectives from your career stages, Sprint research, disciplines, and methodologies. Insights generated can also be fed back into the Agile programme and inform other training activities.  

We will bring in senior academic researchers from Agile and other research programmes to participate in future sessions to talk about their lived experience of interdisciplinary research to help kickstart discussions, but the series will be guided by and co-created with you, our Agile researcher network. 

When and where? 

The first session will be held on 6th December 2022, 1-2pm, in Seminar Room 2 on the ground floor of the Oxford Martin School. Dates and venues for Hilary term 2023 will be circulated after the first session. Please RSVP to lucy.rodwell@oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk