Next-Gen Strategy
Next-Generation Initiative Strategy
CIFAR’s Strategy positions the organization as a forward-thinking leader supporting highly interdisciplinary scholarship across career stages. In developing the next generation of research leaders, CIFAR supports and draws extensively on the ideas, passion and forward-looking orientation of junior scholars. These researchers are an exceptional source of insight into potential futures, and we will leverage their expertise while helping them assume an active leadership role in scoping and articulating new ideas, insights and knowledge across disciplines and geographies.
The strategy calls for expanded opportunities for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) to lead collaborations with scholars across career stages and give them the freedom to follow their instincts. CIFAR’s Next-Generation Initiative (Next-Gen) mobilizes and propels early career researchers across disciplines to advance knowledge, become interdisciplinary leaders, and position themselves at the forefront of discovery.
CIFAR’s Next-Generation Initiative supports an expanding complement of opportunities for early career researchers through the following two goals.
- Grow CIFAR’s Next-Gen scale and impact.
- Diversify CIFAR’s talent pipeline by developing the next generation of high-impact research leaders.
Interdisciplinarity is increasingly considered an essential and effective means of addressing many of society’s most pressing problems. Consequently, many funders are interested in supporting teams of researchers from diverse disciplines to address complex, multidimensional challenges. CIFAR has built its 40+ year track record by creating environments where interdisciplinary teams can develop and succeed.
Counter to this momentum, there are difficulties inherent in interdisciplinary research that are particularly acute for ECRs. They often face heightened competition for permanent positions and rigid academic promotional systems, which undervalue work published in interdisciplinary journals and entrench discipline-specific expectations. There are scant opportunities for truly interdisciplinary research for junior scholars. These compounded pressures explain why most early- and mid-career researchers pursue more mainstream topics where tangible results demonstrate deep subject-matter expertise and shy away from questions that may be seen as pushing the boundaries of their expertise.
CIFAR’s Next-Generation Initiative aims to support and incentivize early-career researchers to pursue interdisciplinary research beyond established academic norms. We believe it is always the right time to pursue novel ideas that may lead to transformative new knowledge in service of addressing humanity’s biggest challenges, regardless of career stage.
Next-Gen programming occurs independent of, and within, CIFAR Research Programs. Our programming is designed to nurture and develop peer networks and communities, to gain exposure to global talent, and to extend new opportunities in partnership with like-minded organizations globally.
Grow CIFAR’s Next-Gen Scale and Impact
Leveraging our convening power, CIFAR’s Next-Generation Initiative will bring together organizations committed to supporting ECRs to explore how best to co-develop innovative approaches to support junior scholars and mitigate the risks posed not only from overly rigid environments but also from more acute disruptions to the research funding ecosystem imposed by political shifts globally. Our goal is to develop new opportunities for collaboration, create a trusted community, and think creatively about ways to incentivize systems change that will enable rather than constrain transformative new knowledge development.
Through the Early Career Researcher Convenor Initiative, we will confront barriers to growth and leadership for interdisciplinary researchers and, by extension, barriers to transformative knowledge creation. We will galvanize support for early-career researchers to rethink how they are supported and enabled to do high-risk, high-reward interdisciplinary research. Leveraging the strengths of our partner organizations, we will continue to scout additional institutions and organizations to join us on our journey toward a research ecosystem willing to encourage risk-taking in early career.
By cultivating a network of partners and supporters, we can help broaden the opportunities and resources available to future research leaders. These initiatives aim to spark cultural and attitudinal shifts across the wider research ecosystem, fostering an environment where bold ideas and interdisciplinary discovery can thrive.
Diversify CIFAR’s talent pipeline by developing the next generation of high-impact research leaders
While recognizing that, historically, there has been asymmetric representation in high-prestige global research networks (whether geographic, race-based, or constrained by perceptions of institutional status), the Next-Generation Initiative seeks to create new opportunities for a greater diversity of junior scholars to gain exposure to world-leading networks. In doing so, the Next-Generation Initiative will expand the pathways through which diverse early-career scholars can engage with and contribute to global research networks. Initial efforts will focus on strategic geographies: Switzerland, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Singapore and France, creating new avenues for collaboration that broaden opportunities for early-career researchers worldwide.
The Next-Generation Initiative provides leadership development opportunities that are often lacking in academic settings with the aim of encouraging ambitious junior scholars to chart their own course, influencing and inspiring others along the way.
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CIFAR Fellowship Programs (e.g., Global Scholars and Jacobs CIFAR Research Fellows) foster the development of junior scholars at a pivotal time in their careers and position them as tomorrow’s leaders. To achieve this, the Global Scholars Program identifies promising early-career researchers across a wide range of disciplines and countries. Pursuing the most exciting and important research questions requires scholars who can take a fresh look at problems by expanding their focus and integrating ideas and approaches from different fields into their own areas of expertise. They are good collaborators outside their own disciplinary boundaries. All awardees demonstrate exceptional research promise, clear leadership potential and a drive to make an impact on the world through their research.
Horizon Networks will form a broad array of interdisciplinary initiatives that build on the strengths, training, and foresight of its members to outline a roadmap for the future of research in an emergent research area. This opportunity builds on the proven strengths of CIFAR’s Fellowship Programs, further positioning Next Generation Leaders as they build influence, form, and lead new extended communities of early-career researchers to push the boundaries of their fields. Horizon Network leaders will be uniquely poised to identify new interdisciplinary research directions and set new agendas for impact. The networks’ activities will culminate in high-impact and influential publications (e.g., horizon-scanning documents that chart the research agenda for a new field) or larger initiatives, positioning the members as thought leaders and building new partnerships with civil society organizations, industry, or government. This new initiative extends the benefits and rewards of the Fellowship Programs to other like-minded junior scholars, amplifying the programs’ reach and impact and building a larger community of international, interdisciplinary big-picture thinkers.
Women in Research Leadership Development Symposia aim to seed and strengthen mutually beneficial relationships, research collaborations, and leadership development. This series seeks to expand future career advancement opportunities for emerging women leaders. Participants are drawn from strategically identified geographies to broaden and diversify the global research community, fostering new collaborations and networks that support the growth of emerging women leaders worldwide.
Radical Interdisciplinarity aims to engage exceptional junior faculty and postdoctoral scholars from across selected jurisdictions to identify frontier topics in research and provide opportunities for them to take risks in working across the academy. Symposia topics and individual sessions are designed to provoke discussion and to bring out-of-the-box ideas to the table, thus building bridges across disciplines. Through the integration of foresight-driven methods and frames, participants will think beyond the horizon to inspire new collaborations and research opportunities.
Pathways Program will aim to foster connections between early-career Indigenous scholars globally and ensure that Indigenous Knowledge Holders and scholarship guide the program’s development. A goal of the program will be to establish research trajectories that benefit Indigenous communities globally and respect Indigenous sovereignty, while also bringing important issues from Indigenous scholarship to bear on interdisciplinary research networks.
CIFAR Schools & Trainee Engagements bring together senior graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to build leadership, foster appreciation for interdisciplinary approaches and provide networking opportunities. Participants gain early exposure to world-renowned researchers across multiple disciplines, engage in professional development activities such as leadership training and science communication, and collaborate with peers from diverse institutions around the globe, strengthening the next generation of research leaders and advancing a more connected, interdisciplinary research community.
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Together, these activities will help to develop future cohorts of research leaders who are actively engaged in radically interdisciplinary research. Working in partnership with other funders, academic institutions, and researchers across our broader community, CIFAR is working to open up new opportunities for junior scholars to work on highly interdisciplinary topics despite the existing academic-professional limitations in the research ecosystem.
The CIFAR Logic model illustrates the pathways through which our Next-Generation Initiative activities support our pinnacle aspiration to facilitate the development of transformative knowledge and solving humanity’s biggest problems, together.