One of RDGMC’s research initiative is to support informal mentoring of young researchers was starting a series of “Research clinic” on-line seminars by RDGMC under the project ARCADE. These seminars were a global platform of capacity building, offering the opportunity for students to present their papers, protocols or other in-progress work, to be given feedback by international experts.
The projects had a strong focus on mentoring students across institutions and across country borders. This was intended to support a “pipeline” of researcher at different stages of their careers, from masters training to post doctoral work, through inter-researcher discussions, joint research groups and programmes on research aimed at various problems and conditions.
In these research clinic a student, postdoc or junior faculty presented their work, and an expert identified from the 13 partners working in the ARCADE projects commented on the work. The audience were invited for the seminars using various social media, posters at universities and personal communication. The experts usually had an opportunity to read the work in more detail; while the audience could comment on the presentation given. From 2013 to 2015 5 research clinics across the consortium were conducted. At the end of the process, instead of a single person using headphones and their computer to give a presentation or participate, whole rooms of researchers and students were connected using video cameras an computers.
