Working across disciplines is notoriously difficult in ordinary circumstances. Currently, we don’t have those opportunities for fortuitous encounters that happen in the coffee break – the kind of conversations that can, just sometimes, lead to something really interesting.

Research Innovation Scotland (a collaborative initiative from the Scottish research pools) is pleased to announce the launch of The Coffee Break @ RIS, to facilitate short online calls between researchers in different fields from across the disciplines represented within RIS. We don’t place any expectations on the conversations. Our aim is to make taking the opportunity to talk as straightforward and painless as possible. To minimise the impact on time, each one-to-one meet up lasts just 15 minutes – no longer than it would take to queue to use the coffee machine. The RIS team will coordinate the matching of participants from across disciplines and scheduling of meeting time and online meeting room.

The initiative is open to any researcher (academic, postdoc, PhD student) from any of the RIS research pools. To participate, just fill out the very short application form here: https://tinyurl.com/f3gjr3le