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Activities by theme
GYA members engage in working groups, projects and collaborations with international partner organisations. These activities, all relevant to societal and scientific debate, are clustered in the following thematic areas:
GYA members come together in interdisciplinary groups and projects to address global challenges relevant at the intersection of science and society, on issues such as biodiversity, global health, climate change, science advice, and science diplomacy.
This theme encompasses working groups and projects dealing with the conditions in which research – inside and outside academia – is embedded. Activities include support and advocacy for women in science and at-risk scholars, discussions and engagement on open science and research evaluation, as well as research on the conditions of young scientists in different world regions.
Promoting science education and outreach has always been a pillar of GYA member activities. In these projects, GYA members focus on international exchange, education for youth and citizen science.
The GYA as a global organisation supports the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). GYA activities, outputs and statements are linked here in the context of how they contribute to these 17 international goals.
Activties by structure
GYA activities can be sorted by themes or by type of activity. GYA members engage in working groups, incubators and focus groups, and selected members collaborate on projects awarded an annual competitive grant. The GYA also engages in joint projects with international partners and Young Academies.
A GYA Working Group (WG) is the most common unit through which GYA activities are conducted. They focus on a broader topic, and can engage in many different ways such as, for example, raising awareness in the field through conducting (online) workshops or panel discussions, running a social media campaign, publishing research outcomes, interdisciplinary findings or policy briefs.
Strategic projects are identified by the GYA leadership. They are closely connected to improving the conditions for young scientists and scholars around the world, and are seen as being of strategic relevance for the development of the organisation. These projects are global in scale, extend beyond the 5-year GYA membership term, and often seek external funding.
Each year, the GYA awards this competitive grant to interdisciplinary pilot projects. The grant scheme thus supports the development of small-scale, innovative, curiosity-driven, blue-sky, exploratory research projects that unite GYA members in low and middle-income countries with those in high-income countries, and cross disciplinary boundaries.
The GYA works with partner organisations in many different ways. Partner projects build on synergies of the organisations involved in order to make a national, regional or global impact.
Incubator groups are working groups in the making: they are nascent ideas that need to be tried out before being given shape as a full-fledged WG.
Focus Areas described a broader topic of global societal importance, and the decision to set up a focus area was made by the GYA General Assembly. The topic of a focus area then constituted a priority topic for the GYA for the years between 2020 and 2022.