ARISE

Board of Directors
The Board of Directors is composed by the coordinators of the 5 R&D Units associated in the ARISE AL– CDRSP, CEMMPRE, ISISE, ISR-C, SYSTEC – whose activity is coordinated by its president, elected among its members.

Advisory Board
Advisory Board formed by well-known experts in the areas of intervention of the AL and that will include members of the Advisory Boards of the R&D Units. The Advisory Board will follow, review, and provide recommendations to the policies, processes, activities, and resources deployment of the ARISE AL.

Scientific Board
The Scientific Board of the ARISE AL is composed by the Thematic Lines Committee comprising the coordinators of the Thematic Lines, the Thematic Lines Committee and the Research Groups Committee.

Scientific Council
The Scientific Council is formed by 35 ARISE integrated researchers elected yearly basis. It appreciates the annual workplan and budget with the possibility of proposing and voting amendments. It also participates actively on the annual workshop of the ARISE AL to present and discuss projects, activities, brainstorm on disruptive ideas, and design proposals for the strategic R&D roadmaps.

Governance model of the Associated Laboratory
The activity of the ARISE AL relies on the strong collaboration among its R&D units supplying the wide array of expertise underlying its domains of intervention, organized in research groups, hosting researchers to enable the efficient execution of their specialized activities and to provide the necessary knowledge and experience to promote the scientific program and its projection in society with emphasis on the support and follow-up of public policies, on the promotion of highly qualified employment, and in the attraction of talents and funds for worldwide competitive research and innovation, along its ​/thematic-lines​​​.

ARISE will be an AL focused on the development of people, valuing their achievements, and integrating them as agents of the society development and the ARISE itself. This means creating conditions for the opening of career competitions, in a dynamic organization that value and recognize the work of different members, maintaining an attitude of permanent evaluation of results and performance. Ultimately, the success of a strategy for human capital career development in a research institution relies on its prestige, on the presence of, and on networking with top researchers, as well as, in the funding sustainability brought about by a high competitiveness for funding programs, and technology transfer opportunities. The R&D Units associated in the ARISE have long recognized this fact as the following indicators attest:
Funding sustainability through “excellence” in research, involvement with high profile achievements, successful technology transfer to companies, IP returns by supporting start-up companies through partnerships in R&D projects, integration of researchers in companies, international networking, etc. (agreements with UPTEC, Instituto Pedro Nunes), Internationalization of research activities, consultancy.
The emergence of the ARISE LA will leverage these past successes by putting in place a program with a much more ambitious human capital agenda.    
One of the objectives in the human capital agenda is to bring together top-level researchers and to provide them with the physical, psychological, communication and technological environments required for development of the necessary      R&D activities.
ARISE follows an integrated approach to innovation and regional growth, understanding that the level of impact in the territory and the international consolidation as a leading research institution depends on the combination of knowledge, technology and application, along with the adequate deployment of public policies.
The all-inclusive objective of the Human Capital Agenda is to provide the centre with the adequate human resources (recruitment) and to guarantee adequate conditions and career development to a new generation of researchers. Through an inter-sectoral (academia-industry) and multi-disciplinary (materials, processes, intelligence ... ) approach, the researchers will receive:

• research training,
• work experience, and
• hands-on training in real situations in industrial settings.

The human capital agenda will be intertwined with the research and innovation agendas and will both consider the attraction of established and young researchers and engineers.
The agenda proposes a new approach to PhD training and education: the network-based PhD training. Traditional PhD studies give emphasis on research focus, which frequently leads to an inward-based study pattern, and long hours of isolation in the lab. In contrast, we propose an innovative network-based approach to training which gives rise to an outward-based study pattern. This network-based approach helps students visualize their problem from several different viewpoints (scientific, technological, commercial, etc.), which will help them focus on important problems; problems that matter to them; problems that matter to their colleagues; and problems that are crucial to society. Each researcher, in collaboration with the “one-stop shop for researchers”, will draft a Career Development Plan. The plan will outline the research, the goals for this training activity, a list of courses the researcher is expected to take, the secondments/internships, training seminars, dissemination/communication activities, scientific conferences, summer schools, and in general the research, and education activities the researcher is expected to participate in. We expect to review each Career Development Plan on a regular basis (every six months ) and update it accordingly.

The ARISE AL will actively make use of the national strategy for the integration of highly qualified and internationally competitive scientists (e.g., FCT direct funding of employment of researchers with a PhD), as well as use the new legal framework (Decree 57/2016) to support hiring researchers. The ARISE AL will apply to FCT’s institutional funding programme and will also promote the hosting of researchers securing individual applications, and, complementary, it will create a program for attracting young researchers, both for research activities as well as for development and innovation.
Moreover, through its various research activities, the ARISE AL will contribute to the employment of highly qualified staff in research and innovation organizations by generating the opportunities and encouraging the interactions between scientists and engineers in a business context. In particular, within its Mobility pillar, the AL will actively pursuit enlarged and permanent mobility and international exchange practice for researchers and staff, and to attract to ARISE activities some of the best national and European researchers within the concerned fields. The centre will establish cooperation agreements with International organizations for research cooperation, including exchange of secondments and joint post-graduation programmes, as well as to develop doctoral programmes with industry and academia with promoted international mobility.
The human capital agenda will be intertwined with the research and innovation agendas and will both consider the attraction of established and young researchers. For the former, the centre will actively make use of the national strategy for the integration of highly qualified and internationally competitive scientists. In fact, Portugal has recently changed the governing law (Decree 57/2016), promoting more stable contracts for the employment of researchers with a PhD, to stimulate the creation of jobs in science and technology.
Linked to this strategy FCT created a new program for direct funding of employment of researchers with a PhD, with the goal to fund 3000 researchers. This program started in 2017, with two different actions: one targeting individual application of researchers and a second action to fund R&D institutions hiring programmes.
Complementing this, ARISE AL will create a program for attracting young researchers, both for research activities but with a strong focus on advanced training. Young researchers involved in the ARISE AL strategic research projects will be trained not only in the research skills but will also be encouraged to develop their soft skills in many diverse areas like communication, entrepreneurship, and management. Each researcher of the ARISE AL will have a personal career development plan which, for early stage researchers, will include the possibility to obtain a PhD in an associated academic institution.

We expect that some of these objectives will be acquired through local training, including:

• taking courses at the universities in network with ARISE AL,
• serving as teaching assistants and
• collaborating in research as research assistants, and some through network-wide training, including secondments, summer schools, conferences, workshops, etc.

To support this agenda, ARISE AL will make use of the existing links of its R&D Units in this proposal with currently active doctoral programs. In particular, the activities of the AL will make use of the existent collaboration within the Doctoral Programs.
Thus, this human capital agenda pushes ARISE AL to become a hub of synergies between these institutions, and the industry in the Norte and Centro regions, by promoting the creation of an Innovative Training Network, in the area of advanced production and intelligent systems, as a pillar to reinforce the interdisciplinary and international nature of the PhD activities in the AL. A special focus will be given to balancing between traditional research-oriented PhD studies, as well as to professional doctorates, in collaboration with industry, which intend to create knowledge and innovation in industrial practice. This is fundamental to allow further intake of PhDs into industry, increasing the low current percentage of the Norte and Centre regions.

Human capital is the cornerstone of any Associated Laboratory, being directly linked to the absorptive capacity and productivity. In order to reach excellence, ARISE AL must recruit human capital to accumulate competencies and increase its learning ability.
Complementarily, but with greater relevance given the positioning as an integrator of competencies based heavily on aggregating competencies and resources through international networking, this pillar will also emphasize mobility at both EU and international levels.

Actions:

• Establishment of cooperation agreements with European and International organizations for research cooperation, including exchange of secondments and joint post-graduation programmes.
• Promote doctoral programmes with industry and academia with intersectoral and international mobility.
• Active use of European Commission’s mobility programmes, including Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions, and partnership with the Marie Curie Alumni Association, the world’s largest researchers’ association with over 15,000 members and growing every day.
• Support services for incoming researchers in the region, with help in questions regarding working permit, retting a flat, etc.

Ultimately, ARISE will strive for recruitment and career progression of researchers who differ by the quality of science activities and the transfer of knowledge and technology. Opening research careers opportunities that can give some stability to the researchers’ activity, seeking to finance these careers with the financial results obtained by the R&D activity. This means designing a programme for hiring researchers, strongly based on results (to assure finance sustainability), which allows attracting competitive researchers, creating an environment conducive to productivity, and guaranteeing the necessary work conditions for researchers, and therefore increasing the ability to attract and hire talent.