Excellence Project Goals

The aim of the Excellence Project is to produce a “good” research, that is a research with public relevance, whose values are both widely recognizable and recognized.
The strategy to reach the above mentioned objective is a complex one and includes different measures to strengthen the department capacity to answer to the challenges highlighted by the Sustainable Development Goal 11.

People The Excellence Project has allowed to increase the variety of competences of the department, thanks to the opportunity to support with an extraordinary effort the ordinary recruitment policy for the teaching, technical and administrative staff.
SDG11Lab, a meta-laboratory The Project included a “laboratory of laboratories”, a research infrastructure able to become a technological and scientific platform for the department, both universities and the society as a whole: the SDG11Lab.
Teaching A core objective of the Excellence Project regards the strategy to enrich the interuniversity teaching offer of the department, especially through the launch of the new Master of Science focused on the topics of the SDG11: Digital Skills for Sustainable Societal Transitions . The department has a broader and stimulating offer of courses that puts experts and citizens education at the center, to make them aware of the challenges of the current social, economic, and environmental transition.
Funding and networking capacity The Excellence Project had also a twofold objective to (1) strengthen the capacity to promote research projects proposed by members of the department and (2) increase the networking capacity within and outside of the department. The second objective, in specific, has been successfully reached thanks to competitive departmental research calls, based on principles of integration and additionality of resources and on the research for an explicitly multi- and trans-disciplinary perspective.
Third mission The objective to work in synergy with local and regional authorities to reach the targets of the SDG11 has been considered of utmost importance for the DIST department. To this extent, various efforts has been directed to open and involve non-academic actors and the society as a whole.