Interdisciplinary Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action for Health

The last decades are characterised by great breakthroughs in the understanding, diagnosing, and treating of many diseases. As fields advance, researchers are increasingly challenged to merge domains in order to tackle complex health-related societal issues. Thus, the next generation of researchers require strong collaboration skills and abilities to integrate knowledge from other disciplines into their research efforts. Despite this, formalised interdisciplinary research training falls short. INTERACT is an interdisciplinary doctoral programme with the goal of inspiring and enabling fellows working seamless across STEM disciplines to advance health solutions in the fields of cancer and neurological diseases. Fellows will work on original PhD projects bridging across biology/biomedicine to chemistry, physics or engineering. We will also include science didactic research on interdisciplinary education at graduate level. INTERACT’s main goals are: 1) to create a model for structured ‘convergence science’ training in Denmark, 2) to discover methodologies and approaches supporting interdisciplinary STEM research, and 3) to nurture fellows’ entrepreneurial and transversal skills, important for their future intersectoral career options.We will recruit 66 international fellows over three cohorts at two implementing partner organizations, the University of Copenhagen and the Technical University of Denmark, ensuring fellow diversity through unbiased, transparent and merit-based selection. Selected fellows will be jointly supervised by an Interdisciplinary Supervisor Team, will undertake international secondments, obtain transferable skills training and career activities provided by other-sector partners. INTERACT will be one of the first European doctoral programmes on ‘convergence science’, strengthening Europe’s role at the forefront of interdisciplinary and intersectoral research training, with potential to solve complex unmet health needs.