Background

Researchers and scientists coming to Germany as refugees have limited opportunities to deal with research topics or none at all. Besides the individual difficulties caused by such situation, it is also a loss of research capacity for the respective scientific field. The online platform www.chance-for-science.de aims at facilitating the access to German universities and colleagues of the same research field for scientists who fled to Germany.

Academics in professional life and students will lose their knowledge if it can no longer be applied. Through networking with expert colleagues and fellow students in Germany an opportunity should be offered to counteract this loss of knowledge.

The Platform

By creating an online account and providing information on previous research work and research interests, scientists of German research institutions and scientists who fled to Germany can use the platform to match research interests and communicate with each other. Recently we extended the platform for fled academics/students and academics/students living in Germany, who want to have an exchange about their subject/field of activity.

Objective

Scientists of German research institutions support fled scientist to continue their research while they also benefit from the exchange of knowledge. This could be for instance:

• providing access to literature/to libraries
• offering invitations to events of the research institutions
• offering invitations to guest lectures at universities
• conducting joint publications
• offering scientific exchange via occasional skype-appointments
• …

 Academics in professional life and students may exchange their expertise by networking.

To download the information-flyer please click the links below:

Information-flyer: German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Greek.

Press

Chance for Science featured by NPR radio on "[how] to keep intellectual capital — and human capital — from going to waste".

Source: http://npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/02/09/513700808/while-others-saw-refugees-this-german-professor-saw-human-potential