By Simon Hettrick.

On Monday, we launched the Fellowship programme at Digital Research 2012. We met 40 excellent candidates and would like to say thank you for making the day such a success.

The Fellowship programme helps us learn about and understand the latest news from the research community. We pay Fellows up to £3000 a year in exchange for their intelligence and help. If you would like to know more about the Fellowship programme, visit the Fellowship page. The deadline for applications is 20 September 2012 at 17.00.

The day kicked off with talks about the Institute from Neil Chue Hong, Steve Crouch, Simon Hettrick and Shoaib Sufi. Two of our Agents, Simon Choppin and Kristy Revell, talked about their experience of the Agents network, which was the precursor to the Fellowship. A big thank you to them for their glowing reviews!

We were joined by two more of our Agents, Aleksandra Pawlik and Elisa Reyes, during a Q&A panel, which allowed the attendees to grill us on issues about the Fellowship and the Institute in general.

The afternoon was dedicated to communication. The attendees were asked to come up with ideas to a question: “Software enhanced research: the good, the bad and the ugly”. A purposefully vague question, because we were interested not only in the answers, but also in how people interpreted the question. Following this, we ran an exhausting half-hour speed dating session where the attendees had to introduce themselves and describe the impact of their research in only 90 seconds.

All slides from the launch are available on the Fellowship page, and the results from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” session will be available there soon. Videos of the day will soon be available on the Digital Research website.

Thank you to everyone who helped make the launch of the Fellowship programme such a great success.