Future ORiEnted Skills, Innovation for Governance for Health, Technology, EneRgy, citieS and creativity

The increasingly complex, unpredictable and volatile nature of major social challenge highlight the need for new ways of anticipating, conceptualizing and managing the future. This applies to every economic sector, field of public policy, academic discipline and area of human endeavour. This also calls for new approaches to knowledge generation that require new skills and more integrated, inter-disciplinary methods for problem solving. The proposed FORESIGHTERS programme of internationally-leading research and training at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) will confront such challenges by building on the University’s strong record of inter-disciplinary research, culture of recognizing diversity and institutional commitment to sustainability. FORESIGHTERS will recruit 20 international Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs) on 42-month contracts to work collaboratively with a wide range on non-academic partners to address a wide range of pressing social, environmental, cultural and economic challenges. Working across research themes of Health, Technology, Energy, Future Cities, and Creativity, the ESRs will be provided with an innovative training programme which will nurture skills for (a) understanding the future (including foresight, systems thinking, citizen engagement, innovation management, among others), (b) practices of sustainable research, (c) respecting equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and (d) high level research capabilities. Working with inter-disciplinary supervisory teams on research projects co-designed with inter-sectoral research partners and with opportunities for research-related secondment, FORESIGHTERS will deliver high impact research and ESRs well placed to become future research leaders. Through its adoption of innovative approaches to research training, knowledge exchange and embedding of sustainability and EDI in recruitment and training processes, it will also improve future institutional performance.