The research assessment carried out by the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) last December resulted in an excellent evaluation. “The way in which we structure and conduct our research is deemed comparable to global research programs at the highest level,” says dean Philip de Goey. “Because the department has many top-level researchers as well as strong contacts with stakeholders in external research projects, the audit committee can see that our research is of a very high quality and is highly socially relevant. The audit committee is also satisfied as far as our future development is concerned: there is an upward trend with regard to improvement of quality and quantity of research.”

The question arises how the department is going to maintain this high level in the coming period, during which a major renovation of Gemini is set to take place and the corona crisis will continue to hold sway. An important step, the dean says, will be to extend the scientific staff. “We will appoint thirty new assistant professors, associate professors and full professors. When set against a number of approximately sixty current staff members, that’s a significant increase.”

These new staff members won’t be found overnight. “The application procedures will certainly be more difficult in these times of corona. But we had already started and I’m pleased to say that we’ve already appointed fourteen new staff members,” De Goey says. “Almost half of them are women. That’s one step in the right direction towards more diversity. We look for women in particular, but it isn’t realistic to completely limit ourselves to that. In addition, we are also still in the midst of procedures that were set up before the Irène Curie Fellowship came into effect (July 2019, ed); we don’t just want to say goodbye to those men. Our selection committees will assess a male and a female candidate each time.”

The department would like to appoint women exclusively, but it is still “rather complicated,” according to the dean. “We also failed to appoint a woman a few times because we weren’t able to offer her partner a suitable position.”

Extending the staff with fifty percent; this requires special attention to integration and group formation. It has to stay a team, De Goey says. “We will ensure that people feel at home at Mechanical Engineering. We need to organize the upcoming renovation in such a way that people will still end up in the right places and, above all, that they stay together. It’s a complicated jigsaw puzzle, but we try to keep the community intact.”

The renovation could very well be delayed as a result of the corona crisis, De Goey thinks, but he has other concerns at the moment. “We are currently discussing in what way we will gradually resume our research, which has come to a complete standstill, once some of the restrictions are lifted. That’s our priority now.”