Organization
The AptWind management structure involves all participants, as well as the DCs. This structure ensures effective management of the DC’s training, and it also entails that the DCs participate actively in order to develop their skills of future team leaders.
The General Assembly (GA), chaired by Prof. Jakob Mann, is the the top decision-making body of AptWind and it specifies and oversees effective strategies for communication, risk management, and contingency planning, monitoring, and decision making. When not meeting in person roughly every half year, the GA and Supervisory Board (SB) will meet online monthly.
The supervisory board (SB): AptWind will constitute a Supervisory Board, SB as the main scientific and training forum for the network and it will support a decision-making process that embraces gender, cultural, personality, and other diversity dimensions with the purpose of avoiding groupthink and unconscious bias.
All beneficiaries and supervisors will be permanently represented ensuring a broad diversity plus 3 DC representatives elected by the DCs for 4-month periods except for the first period when they are elected for 3, 4, and 5 months respectively for guaranteed continuity.
SB meetings will be held online once per month and physically back-to-back with General Assembly meetings and training events twice per year. The main activities of the SB will be strategic coordination, prioritizing, and decision making as well as project progress monitoring and planning.
The Coordinator (Prof Jakob Mann) acts as intermediary between the partners and the European Commission. He reviews reports to verify consistency with the project tasks and deliverables before submitting them to the EC. His tasks include: ensuring cooperation between partners; reviewing project progress and workflow scheduling; assembling and processing input from the DC Training Manager (DTM); guaranteeing the involvement of the DCs in the decision-making process; ensuring that the project is on track in accordance with both training and scientific objectives; reporting any significant deviations from the project plan to the GA; solve potential partnership problems and mediate in the case of conflict; and plan and organize the regular GA/SB meetings.
The coordinator is also responsible for overall quality assurance in order to promote transparent and accountable procedures, e.g., for recruitment, supervision, career development, etc. The coordinator is supported by Senior Scientist Mikael Sjöholm.
The Project Management Team (PMT) consists of the Work Package Leaders: Jakob Mann (DTU) for the Coordination (WP1), Mikael Sjöholm (DTU) for Training in WP2, Julia Gottschall (FIWES) for WP3, Stefan Ivanell (UU) for WP4, Andrea Hahmann (DTU) for WP5 and José Palma (UP) for WP6. The team has regular meetings preparing GA/SB meetings and coping with day-to-day problems.
DC Training Manager (DTM): The designated training management role has been included to ensure the quality and coherence between the training performed at different locations and between work packages. This ensures close involvement of each individual DC in his/her planning of the training. The DTM receives reports from each DCs semi-yearly and the updated personal CDPs. The DTM manages, monitors and reviews all training programmes, and coordinates with both the host organisation and the individual DCs. The DTM, together with the Supervisory Board, also ensures that the planned outreach activities are carried out to ensure dissemination to the broader public. Senior Scientist Mikael Sjöholm has been appointed as our DTM and is leader of WP2.
DC Supervision Committee (DSC): The DSC for each DC comprises the supervisors for his/her individual project. All DCs will have a joint supervision arrangement with a university supervisor and an industry supervisor. The university main supervisor will be supplemented by a co-supervisor, and each company supervisor has a backup that will handle a transition in case the industry supervisor becomes unavailable. The DSC’s main objective is to ensure that the DC sets realistic targets on the path to the overall project objectives, meets those targets, and acquires training in scientific and transferable skills to maximize their employability. The DSC will help the DCs to form from the start a feasible Career Development Plan as well as modify this during their training.
DC Committee: All DCs are members of an independent committee, which is a forum for discussions among the DCs. The DC Committee drafts and presents proposals to the SB conveying their views and suggested strategic innovations. The DC Committee has also a formal role to appoint three DC members to the SB to join the meeting. The DCs will be elected for a four-month period. Importantly, this forum also has an inherent training element, where the DCs will learn how to form and run a committee effectively.
Scientific Coordinator: Scientific coordination of the fifteen DCs is performed by Prof. Stefan Ivanell who is also the leader of WP4. The purpose of the scientific coordinator is to ensure that synergies and collective publications among the DCs are pursued.
Open Access Coordinator: Prof. Jose L. Palma, who is also leader of WP6, will as leader of Task 1.6 ensure that papers are published as open access, preferably golden open access, and ensure that data are handled according to the plan.
Intellectual Property and Innovation Management Committee: For the operational handling of the ownership issues, an Intellectual Property Committee with all partners represented will be set up and deal with Task 1.5, in line with Article 16 and Annex 5 of the HEU Model Grant Agreement, with the aim to provide internal approval of planned dissemination/exploitation activities, licensing agreements and decide on IP protection activities. Meetings will be held online monthly but if needed in urgent situation, ad hoc meetings will be called by the coordinator.
Training Event Management: An important component of AptWind is the Main Training Events which are held together with physical General Assemblies and SB meetings and sometimes also back-to-to-back with relevant external conferences. Since we recognize the importance of these events for the training network, we have devoted specific subtasks for the events and appointed Event Managers (EMs), that together with DC event teams (DC-ETs) (elected by the DC committee) will handle the event planning in collaboration with the DTM and additional event hosts and lecturers involved under adherence to the AptWind Green charter strategy and in coordination with the PMT.
The event planning is guided by the AptWind mission of providing the DCs with opportunities for acquiring transferable skills.
