Bringing Excellence to Transformative Socially Engaged Research in Life Sciences through Integrated Digital Centers

The project “Bringing Excellence to Transformative Engaged Research in Life Sciences through Integrated Digital Centres - BETTER Life” will establish a European Digital Centre of Excellence for fostering Socially Engaged Research (SER) in Life Sciences, as well as seven regional centres operating in their surrounding ecosystems. This inter-institutional support structure addresses the lack of collaboration between early career researchers and the non-academic sectors by designing tools, standards, and framework conditions under the umbrella of the EU centre and implementing these solutions in the regional ecosystems. The project aims to support the development of inter-institutional capacities by establishing an EU BETTER Life coordination centre that will generate transferable tools and standards. At an intra-institutional level, the project creates local centres guided by a framework to follow the regional customization implementation. At an individual level, the regional centres develop capacities by training early career researchers and establishing a community of practice in each surrounding ecosystem. For that purpose, the centre is based on the quadruple helix model of innovation, where the interaction of academic, research, industry, government, and society generate mutually beneficial partnerships.The most outstanding outcomes of the project will be:•200+ early career researchers trained•14+ engagement managers trained•At least 10 standards for SER in Life Sciences•14+ consultation events with local stakeholders•40+ open source documents•6 open science publications•1 digital self-assessment tool for researchers•15+ training eventsIn a long term, the project will generate scientific impacts by designing transferable policies and tools, economic impacts by effectively attracting funding, and societal impacts by embedding local ecosystem needs and enhancing the real-life impact of academic institutions.