Prof. Iwona Sagan spent a few months at NIAS in the nineties as part of a programme to connect Eastern and Eastern European scholars. She is now the Head of Department of Socio-Economic Geography at the University of Gdansk, Poland.
“In 1998 I was a fellow of Trends in Scholarship programme, a programme set up to connect Western and Eastern European scholars after 1989. Being from Poland I was still from a non-EU country at that time. The two-month scholarship in Wassenaar was one of the most significant experiences in my whole scientific life. The multidisciplinary group of researchers, the unique, peaceful community-spirit-creating place, and the more than excellent library service facilitated the milieu that each researcher may dream of.
Thanks to the NIAS scholarship I quickly completed my habilitation (post-Ph.D.) thesis and obtained a professorship. I was granted with an EU-funded FP6 project to create the RECOURSE Centre of Excellence – “Research and Education Centre for Urban Socio-Economic Development” I am coordinating until today. I am absolutely convinced that the NIAS fellowship was one of the foundations of my scientific career.”
The “Trends in Scholarship” consisted of two-month fellowships for talented scholars from Central and Eastern Europe. With this programme NIAS wished to contribute to the development of scholarship in the former Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall.