Draft themes for strategic research emphasise equal opportunities

The Strategic Research Council (SRC) will present two draft theme proposals in an online public consultation on Thursday 20 May at 13.00–14.15 (see registration link below):

• Children and young people – healthy, thriving and capable makers of the future
• Security and trust in the age of algorithms
  
  
• Cross-cutting priority: Equality

The Strategic Research Council (SRC) funds high-quality research that has great societal impact and that seeks solutions to major societal challenges. The SRC’s funding programmes are based on changing themes. A key task of the SRC is to annually prepare a proposal for the Finnish Government on the next strategic research themes. The themes for the 2022 SRC programmes are now being prepared.

Theme preparation requires foresight and vision

An essential part of the preparation of themes is to identify topical societal challenges that are not only significant in scale but also of such quality that their resolution requires a multidisciplinary and interactive approach to research and a long time span enabled by six-year programmes. In this task, the SRC is supported by an interactive preparation process, which offers a wide range of perspectives from different disciplines and from society to be included in the formulation of themes.

SRC Chair, Professor Kimmo Nuotio says that the multi-stage preparation process has proved to be an effective method in the preparation of themes. The preparations and foresighting involve collecting a wide range of ideas on possible themes. The SRC then produces a shortlist of potential themes. During this round, the draft themes were further refined in joint stakeholder workshops and consultations between universities, research institutes and ministries in February, after which the SRC selected two themes for further preparation.

Register for public consultation

The draft themes will be presented at a public consultation on Thursday 20 May at 13.00, where it will be possible to comment on the drafts before the SRC finalises them and submits them to the Government in June.

Kimmo Nuotio said: “We’ve received tremendous support from various parties in identifying and formulating good theme proposals. I look forward with great interest to hearing what kind of reception they will receive at the consultation. These theme proposals are the last ones for this Council, so we went all in. I hope it comes across that way.”

At the online public consultation, members of the scientific community, research knowledge users and other interested parties can discuss the proposed themes with representatives of the SRC. Register for the consultation here. More details on the event and the instructions for participation will be published on the SRC website before the event and sent to registered participants.