Biological magnets as a unifying link to multidisciplinary research excellence

Latvia, one of the widening countries, has defined research excellence as an important aim for its higher education and research system.

In the BioMagnetLink project, we will focus on biological magnets as a unifying link to multidisciplinary research excellence building upon the expertise of the ERA Chair.

The ERA Chair has indeed an already proven track-record of high-level publications, an ability to attract, train and lead talents, to foster the mobility of researchers and the interdisciplinarity of research, and finally to coordinate international projects in the most ambitious research level.

Forming the ERA Chair team at the University of Latvia to tackle a groundbreaking research related to microswimmer and magnetotactic bacteria to progress towards future personnalized medicine approaches.

In addition, building on its experience, the ERA Chair will formulate precise and detailed recommendations on talent attraction, project preparation and execution, result dissemination, doctoral education and others, adapted to the institutional and national research environment, making them easy to implement.

The support and interest from the university senior management will allow to materialize changes for the whole university.

This will be of a great value due to multiple reforms currently taking place for the higher education level at the University of Latvia itself, but also more generally in Latvia.

To maximize the impact on the institutional environment, the ERA Chair will form a training group for local principal investigators, to help developing their leadership and writing skills.

The positive effects on the largest research university in Latvia at the research, the training, and the structural level as shown by leading by example will promote systemic changes for the benefit of the whole country, thereby progressing towards closing the still existing gap towards other European countries.