Expression of Interest

The International Collaboration on Mycorrhizal Ecological Traits (i-COMET) is no longer seeking expressions of interest from early career ecologists who have an interest in fungal traits related to soil health.

The deadline has now passed - thank you for your interest. Applicants will hear from the i-COMET team soon.

i-COMET is a unique, NERC-funded, international research collaboration, bringing together multi-disciplinary skills and datasets to create a new way of analysing and predicting microbial community function. The investigators are running a week-long workshop from 15th - 21st March 2020, in York, UK, with participants from around the globe, with an explicit goal to achieve a standard operating procedure to for identifying mycorrhizal traits. Very few data sets achieve this reach: this will result in a data set with global relevance to soil health and with high impact.

A key objective is to bring together a group of people diverse in gender, race, culture, career stage and geography, and facilitate networking, team building and understanding of collaboration tool to build continuity and sustainability in the collaboration. Importantly, we will evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention, through survey and social network analysis, and disseminate what we learn from this to the wider STEM community, so that any group seeking to develop effective communication within diverse groups can use our findings and tools to foster sustainable communications.

Travel and accommodation costs for the workshop will be covered, and we encourage applications from potential participants from all countries. Workshop participants and a second group of non-workshop participants will be provided with access to a peer mentoring and knowledge sharing network. We will also be asking a third group of non-workshop participants to complete quarterly surveys as a control group for the study.