Could you tell us a little bit about your background?
I’m trained as a philosopher, political scientist as well as sociologist. During my Master studies I focused on scientific theory. It’s also important to know that I work for a large part of my time in applied research at the Fraunhofer IMW in Leipzig. This also heavily influences my thinking and research interests.
What is the focus of your Ph.D. project?
For my Ph.D. I try to understand and describe how researchers in larger, publicly funded research projects in Germany design and instantiate knowledge transfer activities in their projects and what keeps them from doing so. More precisely, I want to understand and describe that process of setting up transfer activities.
How does your project relate to the research done in OSIRIS?
There are obviously a lot of activities here at the Center that in some way tackle the issue of what makes science work and how processes of fruitful dissemination can look like. So, I’m here to learn from other perspectives and surely can challenge my way of theorizing and analyzing.
Are there any initial findings from your research that you would like to share with us?
Researchers in my sample tended in some cases to be overextended by that question of what the knowledge transfer in their projects is all about. Maybe it’s due to bad questioning but I think that specific term causes sometimes irritation in another way. One idea here is that knowledge transfer despite being heavily addressed in tenders, has become somehow an alienated concept, when it comes to describing the outcome of a project. So maybe we have a lack of concepts here to talk about this properly. But of course, and as always – I have to take a deeper look into that.