PASCAL, as a network of excellence helps you to keep in touch with co-workers in Europe, it gives you an opportunity to participate in events. It also gives you money. In this, PASCAL was different from other networks of excellence. Other networks were mainly about mobility; PASCAL is also about giving real money to fund research – a new dimension. This provides a lot more incentive to participate in PASCAL.

I was contacted by John when the network was initially conceived and so was one of the founding members of PASCAL. I became a member of the steering committee and responsible for the Pump-Priming Programme and the Conference and Workshop Attendance Programme. The Pump-Priming was totally new experience for me– like running a small funding agency and so you’re on the other side of the fence – evaluating proposals, assigning funding, monitoring progress. We’re used to judging scientific quality of proposals, but this was a bit different because we also had to monitor progress. You were a peer not a project officer, but you had to politely insist that certain tasks had to be carried out. But all the participants, in the end, were a nice crowd, so there were no serious problems. I think the programme was very valuable for the network, especially at the beginning when it forced sites to team up to write proposals. In the end we calculated that half of the PASCAL sites were involved with at least one of these projects.

My students have also benefited a lot from PASCAL. They could choose from a huge list of events being proposed all the time, in my field and related fields, which I pointed out to them. So it was very easy to recruit people because of the breadth. PASCAL strengthened links within a central core, but also encouraged participation by providing funding to a wider community following a special measurment system – which really worked, it was amazing. The management was really flexible – we weren’t afraid of changing roles and we were tolerant of small mistakes. The whole management group was really nice. In particular, John is a great coordinator because of his light touch. Problems get solved without you almost even noticing they were there.

Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi