Serendipity Session

At the beginning of this month, the Radboud Young Academy hosted the very first serendipity session. Our aim was to see if and how we can foster more and more intense exchanges across the boundaries of faculties and research fields. Given that many more people attended than we had anticipated, this first attempt showed that interdisciplinary collaboration is not something that can be taken for granted. We organized this session around the topic of coffee. As a vital part of many workplaces, and not just the academic one, coffee plays an important role in our world; by looking at its history, at its impact on the brain, and at the language we use when we talk about it, we were able to arrive at insights that were as bracing as the coffee that we served (and which, admittedly, were just as attractive as the topic itself).