Mobility

To favour the creation of a common knowledge base, the NoE promotes the mobility of professors, lecturers and students.

A key objective is to stimulate the regular, long term exchange of senior people between partners to foster the coordination of the research, promote joint research projects and publications and improve higher education at the partners' sites. One of the primary aims of the exchanges of senior researchers is to provide better guidance of graduate and PhD students. An interesting opportunity is given by the joint advising of PhD theses by professors of different universities. A shortcoming of especially the graduate training at many universities is indeed that programs may be excessively defined by the specialisation of the local teaching staff. In many cases a broader and more complete curriculum could be offered if external lecturers with complementary specialisation were used. The mobility of senior researchers and teachers aims at addressing this problem. This scheme will also imply that the students (doctoral in particular) will gain access to the infrastructure and equipment of all promoting institutions.

Therefore e-Photon/ONe⁺ favours also the mobility of students at the PhD or graduate level, offering the possibility for doctoral students to spend a long period (ranging from e.g. 2 weeks to 6 months) at another location. Mobility could be used to learn and do some complementary experiments, or experiments that involve high-end equipment, to get involved in field trials etc.

The NoE directly will fund the mobility of researchers and students but, most important, help in the creation of long lasting collaboration between partners that will be the base for accessing funding from other general purpose programs (Erasmus/Socrates, Marie Curie actions). This will give all the partners the opportunity to finalise the use of this general purpose funding to favour integration in the area of optical networking.