Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the necessity of international research collaboration to address complex global challenges. With travel halted across the globe during this time, the debate around the need for international travel to foster global research links is bubbling. Many researchers now favor the various forms of remote and digital collaboration that successfully sustained joint research efforts during COVID-19. While such practices can reduce discretionary international travel, the need to travel for extended periods remains, to access unique research infrastructure and deep expertise. This presentation will outline why the University of Melbourne continues to invest in joint PhD “cohorts” to support the development of international research partnerships. This long-term and project-driven approach to global research training and collaboration remains highly applicable, attractive and sustainable even in a post-pandemic, climate-challenged world.

Sitting at the heart of Australia’s largest research and medical precinct, the University of Melbourne has historically relied on the richness of its location and a comprehensive spread of disciplines to attract top international talent, including graduate researchers. Even with the impact of the pandemic on mobility, today’s graduates remain attracted to the prospect of a global research career, continuing to seek out internationally-facing programs. This is why Melbourne began supporting the development of International Research Training Groups (IRTGs): to attract and develop global research talent. These IRTGs require groups of supervisors from Melbourne and a partner institution to co-design projects with high complementarity that demonstrate the benefits and impacts of candidates spending at least one year at each institution. Under this model, both institutions contribute resources equally to enable reciprocal and meaningful research placements to occur, at a scale that cannot be easily achieved through ad-hoc travel or short-term exchanges and video-conferencing.

Melbourne’s first IRTG was established in 2015 with the University of Bonn, co-funded by Bonn and the German Research Foundation. Since then, cohorts of varying scale and breadth have been developed with partners in Germany, the UK, France, India, Israel, Belgium, China, and Canada, navigating jurisdictional and institutional differences in PhD systems.

Demand for such programs has seen the University’s numbers of jointly enrolled PhD candidates grow, from less than 20 in 2014 to more than 200 in 2022. Even with the short-term challenges posed by the pandemic in 2020/21, joint PhD enrolments are anticipated to exceed 400 by the end of 2023.

With application rates to IRTG projects high, international PhD candidates are attracted to the opportunity to undertake research in different countries, research systems, and supervisory teams. Graduating with PhD certificates from two outstanding universities, and with access to two high-quality research environments, they build a larger network of peers, colleagues and mentors that can assist their development long into their research careers.

Facing increasing scrutiny on the need for international travel to facilitate research and knowledge exchange, Melbourne will continue to support more high-quality global research partnerships using the IRTG model. The authors will discuss the processes, pitfalls and possibilities of successful IRTG programs, future-proofing international research collaboration in a post-pandemic world.