Amid Brexit chaos and uncertainty, the University of Bristol was on a mission in Brussels to reaffirm its commitment to build the European Research Area and provide its expertise on the future Horizon Europe programme. On the 2nd of October, a delegation from the University, supported by the Bristol & Bath Brussels Office, organised an event headlined “Combining R&I capabilities in Europe to meet the world’s challenges” and NOWMORE was selected to facilitate the conference and moderate the panel session.

The panellists included Professor Guy Orpen, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol, Vinciane Gaillard, Deputy Director for R&I at the European University Association, Simon Pickard, Network Director at Science|Business, Lisa Almesjö, Senior Policy Officer at VINNOVA, and Karen Slavin from the European Commission.

 

The event was an opportunity to address the challenges of cross-disciplinary work and how to best align different research fields with regional, national and international priorities and ambitions to meet the demands of government, business and society. The University of Bristol’s model of Specialist Research Institutes was then showcased through a series of speed networking sessions.