Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Events related to Behavioural Research Groups

Over the last three years, we have had a very active seminar programme among this group. For those outside, the Institute has a number of different research groups and the people who post and read on this blog are largely part of one of them - namely an interdisciplinary behavioural research group consisting of research assistants, some UCD and non-UCD faculty, PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and undergraduate interns from UCD and outside.

Our seminar activity revolves around:

- A Tuesday seminar that takes place all during term (with less frequent summer sittings).

- Twice-weekly journal clubs.

- Informal Econometric training including group learning, videos and so on.

- An Interdisciplinary series that hasnt run in 2009 but was quite frequent throughout 2008. This is gradually being subsumed by a more informal in-house Monday morning session and a more formal public policy series.

- An informal Monday morning series hosting in-house 10 to 15 minute presentations.

- One day conferences including recently one-day conferences on health economics, education, health research and behavioural economics.

I am keen to get some feedback either in the comments or through email/in person on how to develop some of the research interactions. In particular, I think we have a very solid academic seminar and events infrastructure among the team and would like to think about developing better some of the links to policy and related real-world applications. For example, a session where people who are applying behavioural ideas in their business, community programme, policy or so on, could present followed by a discussion would be very useful. We have had talks from people like Gerard O'Neill this year and the interaction with people working on real-world programmes is a positive one in my view. While we talk to people in policy and business all the time here in various channels and capacities, a more active session I think would energise some of the things we do here.

I will be developing this as we go. In the meantime, if you have any ideas let me know. If you read this from a business, community or policy background and you have some ideas for interaction also let me know.

2 comments:

David Karp said...

I am a regular reader of your blog from Canada, and a grad student in economics with a keen interest in behavioural economics. As travel to Ireland would be prohibitively expensive, I'd be interested to have videos from some of the seminars posted online, or generally more ways for people who can't make it to Dublin to access the existing seminars, as they sound interesting.

Liam Delaney said...

Hi - we have been doing this for the last six months or so. If you go in to ITunes and search for Geary Institute, we have about six up so far. We will do this more interactively with the blog in October.