Working together

For foundations, universities and research agencies that want to try new ways of funding and organising research.

The research system is in an unusual moment. Public funding is under political pressure, artificial intelligence is changing how research is done, and a growing body of evidence shows how current incentives distort it. At the same time, the international metascience field is producing real knowledge about what works, and new funding mechanisms and research organisations are starting to show results.

I help organisations translate these developments into their own context, with a particular focus on Denmark and the Nordics.

I have a PhD on systems change and mission-oriented sector development and have since completed a postdoc. I maintain a mapping of the international metascience field, write primers and publish a monthly newsletter, Metascience.

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A whole-system approach

Experiments with new funding formats and new institutions are useful, and I follow them closely. The problems that shape researchers’ lives most are structural, though: why women lose career steps when they have children, why power is so unequally distributed, why almost all funding is tied to projects. They come from how funding, careers, power and assessment work together, and they persist because the parts hold each other in place.

I work from a whole-system view. That means naming these problems, understanding what keeps them in place, and helping funders, universities and policymakers act on them together, with experiments, new institutions and reform of established ones as complementary parts of the same effort.

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Get in touch

If you are working on how research is funded, organised or evaluated and think I could be useful, I would be glad to hear from you. It could be a talk, a workshop, an analysis, help designing something new, or something else entirely. A conversation is a good place to start.