Professor Raúl Zurita-Milla is head of ITC's department of Geo-Information Processing (GIP).
How about starting with a brief introduction?
"Certainly. I'm Spanish and have lived in the Netherlands since 2004. At the end of my Agricultural Engineering studies in Spain I came to Wageningen to do a second Master and, after that, a PhD in Geo-Information Science. Since 2008 I work at ITC. I started as an assistant professor, and thanks to a tenure track programme, I became full professor in April 2021. My specialization is in spatial temporal analytics." (Read more)
Would you say that the tenure track programme was conducive to your personal talent development?
"Frankly, the tenure track left me with mixed feelings. It all started very pragmatically, in a time when no new positions were being offered at ITC because of budget cuts. These circumstances put me at a crossroads in my life. I could either enter the tenure track or continue my career elsewhere. I decided to step into the tenure track, although I didn't really know what I was getting into. The tenure track system was something entirely new for both ITC and me. I was given opportunities to grow but had to work like crazy to "tick all the boxes". Luckily, my faculty and family were very supportive, but it was the hardest time of my life. Sometimes I even felt that this exhausting trajectory got in the way of my talent development instead of promoting it."
I hear you have pretty strong views on team development.
"I believe in team science. Hence, when I became head of department I started to draw up a plan to promote further collaboration, both internally and externally. As our department focuses on methods and techniques to make sense of geodata, we often need collaborators with domain knowledge to define meaningful research questions that help us to work on key real-world problems. This idea of team science grew into a faculty-wide proposal. The main idea of this proposal is to bring together expertise from all scientific departments within ITC in a multidisciplinary team and discuss what we would need to function better at individual and team levels. Our work philosophy will be based on openness. Our work should serve society, so we want to be as open as possible with our data, code and outputs. Another important point is that we need to learn to talk to each other, and for this we need to understand each other’s priorities, needs and terminologies. That in itself is a talent to be managed and developed."
How do you feel about the theme of recognition and rewards in terms of education?
"We as academics are asked to do many things. Sometimes that means working more than 40 hours a week. However, the current recognition and rewards system values only a portion of what we do. There is too much focus on impactful publications and project acquisition. But we also teach and work on capacity development projects. We should realize that in our teaching role we can also have impact; we are educating the next generation of citizens. So, to me it is clear that the metrics of academic success should be redefined. New career paths should be put in place so that all our work, all 40 working hours are recognized and rewarded. For now, we tend to use the stick and carrot system, but talent management – or even changing academia – works better if we forget the stick and focus on the carrot to reinforce healthy and positive behaviour."