Towards Scientific Leadership

Modern Science and R&D critically rely on teamwork. This completely revised and expanded book "Towards Scientific Leadership" offers a unique approach to helping young professionals transition from productive team members to effective team leaders. The authors provide innovative ideas and strategies for leadership development, setting the book apart from others in the field.

The basis of being a successful leader is authentic self-leadership – essential for all who want to control their own life. People who know themselves and realise what it takes to be productive and deliver results also understand how to lead others and inspire them to perform naturally and undertake initiatives. For scientists, who like to focus on knowledge and insight and how to transfer it to others, self-leadership is key to creating value and adopting it in practice. The book explains how to become a successful (self)leader, not with tricks, but with an inspiring vision and mission, the correct mindset, and effective teamwork.

• Based on international courses by both authors on scientific leadership.

• Learn time and project management, supervision, intuition and leading a team.

• Aimed at PhD students and beginners in the academic fields.

Hans Niemantverdriet has 35 years experience in research and education in catalysis and surface chemistry. After retirement from the Eindhoven University of Technology (December 2015) he continues as Director of the SynCat@Beijing research institute, and the private research enterprise Syngaschem BV in Eindhoven. In addition he is Honorary Distinguished Professor at the Cardiff Catalysis Institute of Cardiff University and supervised more than 25 PhD projects and 10 postdoc projects in government and industry funded research. He is the author of more than 280 peer-refereed publications, and two text books, and is frequently invited to speak at international conferences, workshops and Summer schools on catalysis and surface science, but also on e.g. presentation skills. In 2013, he founded Syngaschem BV and started to build up the SynCat@Beijing laboratory together with Synfuels China. All educational activities are organized under the SynCat Academy, with scientific and personal development programs mainly in (but not limited to) China.

Jan Karel Felderhof strives for enhancing organizations and people to their full potential. He does so by developing a source strategy based on the spirit of the organizations or companies he works for, and the people that develop these organizations or companies. From this perspective he supports the design of strategy and organizational structures. He further 'catalyzes' the dynamics of the company by coaching and training team leaders and professionals on self-leadership and self-management to make them fully capable of exercising their accountabilities and responsibilities, establishing an authentic and ambitious culture in the value chain, not only with the employees, but also with other stakeholders, suppliers and clients. Besides serving as director Strategy, Organisation and HR development at Syngaschem BV, Jan Karel Felderhof is founder and owner of Impetus BV (1990), which enabled organizations in several branches (knowledge, professional and services) in enhancing their strategy, organization and people.

From reviews of the First Edition:

"This book by Niemantsverdriet and Felderhof focuses on scientific leadership and is geared towards a person becoming a leader and to following managerialist techniques. [...] The strengths of the authors in approaching people and situations with managerial tools comes to the fore with the final section of chapter 4, ‘Conflict management’."
John R. Helliwell in: Journal of Applied Crystallography 51 (2018) http://scripts.iucr.org/cgi-bin/paper?S160057671800290X