Equal Opportunities & Early Career Support

CRC 1411 aims to provide an excellent and inclusive research environment. We pursue this on two fronts: supporting researchers at every stage of their career, and ensuring equal opportunities for everyone who contributes to the CRC – regardless of gender, background or family situation. This section describes both and explains whom to contact.

Early career support

Support for early career researchers begins at school and continues through to scientific independence. The CRC works with regional schools (school lectures, school seminars and public outreach events), brings its research into the curricula at FAU, and offers student projects, theses, paid research-assistant positions and CRC awards for outstanding bachelor’s and master’s theses. Doctoral researchers are members of the integrated Research Training Group iRTG-ParSciTech, with dual supervision, mentoring, regular seminars, elected representatives and travel stipends. Postdoctoral researchers and early career PIs benefit from mentoring, networking events, teaching opportunities, dual-career support and FAU’s qualification programmes. Details are given under Early Career Support.

Equal opportunities and diversity

The Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg identifies itself as an innovative, diverse and passionate institution that is proud of its diverse team of students, employees and researchers. The key strategy of the university is to establish an excellent and inclusive working environment through progressive gender equality, diversity and family-friendly policies. The goal is to provide equal opportunities for all students and employees, regardless of their gender, age, sexual orientation, nationality/cultural heritage, religion, social status or disability. Despite ongoing efforts and positive trends, the natural and engineering sciences still face a gender imbalance. Moreover, the under-representation of female researchers decreases substantially with increasing seniority, culminating in dramatically low quota of female professors. This “leaky pipeline” is the result of an apparent glass ceiling for female researchers attempting to reach full seniority.

Gender equality and the support of female students and researchers is a central aim of the CRC. We believe that equal opportunities are best achieved by a combined range of measures, including:

• Attracting, motivating and supporting young researchers throughout their academic career
• Creating a family-friendly and attractive research environment
• Encouraging female researchers by targeted support measures
• Raising awareness on implicit gender biases for all involved researchers

See Gender Equality for the measures in detail.

Family, advice and contact

The CRC promotes a family-friendly environment, with flexible working hours, home-office places and part-time options where necessary (see Work and Family). The representatives for gender, family and early career researchers coordinate the measures and the equality budget, and act as contact persons and ombudspersons for questions on gender, diversity and family (see Early Career Support and Gender Equality Team). Advice for conflict situations is available to all members via StudOn (see Conflict Resolution).