Lecture and Panel Discussion "Sense of belonging in the working environment: How diversity research can be transferred into good practice at UZH" (21 March 2024 )

Research of the UZH Center for Leadership in the Future of Work shows how people wish to feel at work. How can this be transferred into good practice in the academic everyday life of a research group?  How can people in a leadership role interact with their team members in order to live diversity and to really create an inclusive atmosphere? This network event would like to show significant UZH diversity research expertise on one side – and the successful transfer/implementation in our own organization on the other.

4:00pm

Welcome and opening remarks
Dr. Christiane Löwe, Head of Office for Gender Equality and Diversity, UZH

4:10pm

Lecture "Shaping a more human future: The UZH Center for Leadership in the Future Work"
Prof. Dr. Lauren Howe and Florence Bernays, Center for Leadership in the Future Work, UZH

4:30pm

Questions from the audience.

4:45pm

Panel Discussion "Sense of belonging in doctoral supervision"
Moderation: Dr. Claudine Leysinger, Head of Graduate Campus, UZH
Prof. Dr. Simon W. Townsend, Franziska Wedgell, Alexandra Bosshard, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology
Dr. Maël Leroux, EthoS (animal and human ethology), University of Rennes, France

5:30pm

Questions from the audience.

6:00pm

Apéro riche (Lichthof RAA).

Lauren Howe is an Assistant Professor in Management with a focus on the future of work at the University of Zurich. In her research, she investigates what people believe about the changing world of work and how mindsets about aspects of the future of work play a role in shaping it. She has a particular interest in the importance of social and emotional skills and social relationships in the future of work. Dr. Howe's findings have been published in widely cited journals in management, psychology, and other fields, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings. Dr. Howe also enjoys writing about science for the popular press and has been published in outlets such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Harvard Business Review, and Scientific American. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University.

Florence Bernays is a PhD Student in Management at the University of Zurich. In her research, Florence examines how people want to feel at work and why these emotional preferences matter for how people perform, think, or feel about their work and their lives more generally. Her focus lies in understanding which specific emotions have the strongest influence on individuals’ and collectives’ performance and well-being. Florences’ research has been published in the Academy of Management Paper Proceedings, Journal of  Traumatic Stress, or Stress & Health. She received her Master in Neuropsychology from the University of Zurich.

Since 2015, Claudine Leysinger has been the head of Graduate Campus at the University of Zurich – a service platform for all PhD candidates and postdocs, committed to promoting postdoctoral researchers and enhancing the quality of doctoral training at the University of Zurich. In this position, Dr. Leysinger has been fundamental in promoting good supervision practices at UZH and beyond. The Graduate Campus offers a course for supervisors, and it awards a prize for good supervision, the UZH Mentoring Award.

Prof. Simon Townsend received his bachelors in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford in 2005. He then conducted his PhD in the School of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The focus of his research was on the vocal communication skills of wild chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest, Uganda. In 2008 he took up a post-doc position at the University of Zurich working on non-primate animal communication, later returning to the UK in 2015 as an Assistant Professor in Language and Learning, in the Department of Psychology, University of Warwick. In 2017 Simon accepted a Swiss National Science Foundation-funded Professorship based in the Department of Comparative Language Sciences, University of Zurich. Most recently he has taken up a Professorship in Primate communication in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Zurich. In 2023 Simon won the UZH Mentoring Award.

Dr. Maël Leroux is an associate professor in Animal Behaviour at the University of Rennes, France. He is interested in the evolution of language, and specifically syntax, which he studies by adopting a comparative approach: he investigates syntactic-like capacities in non-human animals to reconstruct the evolutionary progression of syntax in human language. Since his PhD at the University of Zürich, Maël’s research is centred on great apes, our closest living relatives, and specifically chimpanzees, who share the most recent common ancestor with humans and hence represent a key species to investigate this question. As a result, Maël spent almost two years in the field collecting data on wild chimpanzees in Uganda, and now, as a professor, he continues his work in Uganda with the help of his Masters and PhD students. Maël’s research is published in Nature Communications, Biological Reviews or Animal Behaviour. 

How do animals communicate? This question concerns Franziska Wegdell the most. That is why she is pursuing a PhD in Evolutionary Biology about bonobo communication at the University of Zurich. The aim of her PhD is to understand the influence of the surrounding vocal environment on the ontogeny of bonobo (Pan paniscus) communication. She compares, for example, how vocal input rates differ between all great ape species and describes the first quantitative vocal repertoire of wild bonobos. Her research is part of the NCCR Evolving Language and she collected observational and experimental data on bonobos at the Kokolopori field site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Alexandra Bosshard is a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Zürich. Collaborating with computational linguists and biologists, she tries to uncover the structural complexity of non-human primates’ communication systems. To that end, she adapts methodologies that are usually applied in linguistics to the systems of non-human animals. For this purpose her research is inherently interdisciplinary, which means that she faces the advantages and challenges of working together with many interesting people from different fields.

Thursday, 21 March 2024

Please register here:Registration: Network Diversity Event 21 March 2024