Fabrice Lemoine, “Transfers in Fluids” team, has been elected the new vice president in charge of Europe strategy at the University of Lorraine.
Factuel went to meet him to find out more about his role and to discover the major challenges of the new vice-presidency:
Can you present your vice presidency in a few words for Factuel?
The deputy vice-president in charge of European strategy assists the vice-president in charge of international and European strategy on strategic issues that are specifically European, in particular the European Community: positioning the University of Lorraine in strategic European partnerships, influencing the strategic priorities and programming of the European Union in terms of training, research and innovation, reinforcing the involvement of the academic site of Lorraine in European projects, and developing the site’s attractiveness to European players.
What are the major challenges (and/or timetable) ahead for your vice presidency?
Our strategic positioning on major transitions (environment, health, digital, society, energy, etc.) is essentially an ambition driven by European values. Thus, research, innovation and training must contribute together to this objective. In this context, the development of structuring, visible European partnerships, associating training, research and innovation on several shared issues is one of the priorities of Hélène Boulanger’s mandate.
Strengthening our European impact in terms of responding to calls for projects (training, research and innovation) is also a major challenge, largely supported by the State and the National Action Plan for the Improvement of French Participation in European Research and Innovation Funding Schemes (PAPFE).
The University of Lorraine already has first-rate European project engineering, and now we need to position ourselves at a more strategic level, upstream of calls for projects and European policies in the field of research and training, and to ensure that these policies are in line with our own themes and priorities, while at the same time ensuring that they are well coordinated with the priorities of the French government, as set out in France 2030. To this end, we will use our European relays: through national channels (via French representatives on program committees), European channels (Horizon Europe program partnerships, Club des Organismes de Recherche Associés – CLORA, European alliances, European University Association – EUA). Thus, the University of Lorraine’s response to the France 2030 call for projects to accelerate the development strategies of higher education institutions will provide an opportunity to develop this strategy.
Joining the Eureca-Pro alliance around the United Nations’ sustainable development objective n°12: “Sustainable consumption and production” will require the mobilization of our university and a structuring of our activities in terms of training, transmission of transversal skills, research and innovation; joining this alliance is an ambitious project that will allow us to position ourselves even more in the European field.
The European values must allow us to develop a real attractiveness of our academic site and thus promote incoming mobility of students and an outgoing mobility of our students so that they are exposed to other contexts, other models, other modes of education, so that they are able to face and take in hand the major transitions.