Services

  • Researcher development

Promoting the personal and professional development of researchers

I provide in-house training at research institutions, as well as career and executive coaching. My target groups range from late-stage doctoral candidates and postdocs to group leaders and newly appointed professors.

Training

My workshops address key issues relating to research leadership, research funding and career management. They run for up to two days and may be delivered on-site and online. Participants are also offered the opportunity to engage in short follow-up consulting sessions with me to explore specific personal issues in more detail.

The workshops cater for an international audience and are usually presented in English. They are highly interactive and employ a combination of pre-workshop activities, theoretical input, plenary discussions, practice scenarios, individual and small group work, experience sharing, coaching elements and expert advice.

Career and executive coaching

Career coaching caters for postdoctoral researchers to help them assess their current position, reflect on their medium- to long-term career goals and develop a road map to achieve these in their individual settings. It covers both continuing career advancement in research as well as new career perspectives outside research.

Executive coaching primarily responds to the needs of group leaders and newly appointed professors who are taking on leadership responsibility for the first time. Key issues typically address the clarification and consolidation of the leadership role, team leadership in change processes, strategies for increasing team performance and self-management.

  • Funding strategies

Designing effective research and research funding strategies to build research capacity

In addition to dedicated workshops on research funding, I provide tailored support for research groups, departments and institutes, as well as collaborative research initiatives for designing effective research and research funding strategies. This includes the facilitation of strategy workshops and retreats, expert advice on selecting and prioritising specific funding programmes, and may be extended to the preparation of grant applications to funding bodies. Previous consulting areas have also included support for the Cluster of Excellence (DFG) and Clusters4Future (BMBF) initiatives.

Support for grant applications to the European Research Council

For individual researchers, my support focuses on grant applications to the European Research Council (ERC), i.e., ERC Starting Grants (StG) and Consolidator Grants (CoG). This includes personal consulting sessions to reflect on the competitiveness of the researcher’s individual track record, the feasibility of the project with respect to ERC evaluation criteria, matching track record and project, selecting the appropriate evaluation panel, as well as filling in templates and structuring the different parts of the proposal. More in-depth support also covers written feedback and follow-up consulting sessions on draft versions of the proposal, as well as interview training.

  • Organisational change

Facilitating organisational change to promote institutional excellence

Depending on the nature and the scope of the project, I provide short-term guidance to longer-term support to develop and implement both research-based institutional strategies and related functional strategies, e.g., for researcher development, knowledge transfer and research support services. I employ a combination of expert consulting and facilitation techniques based on agile tools and approaches in organisational development and change management.

In previous consulting projects, I have also supported the development of institutional and functional strategies to compete in high-profile national funding schemes. These include:

  • Excellence Strategy by the German federal and state governments, funding line University of Excellence (EXU)
  • Tenure track programme (BMBF) to advance transparency in the career systems of universities
  • EXIST-Potentials (BMWi) to foster university-based start-up ecosystems

In my work, I give special attention to the particularities of research and higher education to produce resourceful and sustainable solutions for my clients. Moreover, as my client, you will benefit from my systems competence and many years of professional experience, both as a researcher and research manager.