What are the best ways to build and manage your research portfolio?

The best practices for developing and maintaining a research portfolio include establishing clear goals and priority areas, diversifying your work to cover a range of subjects and approaches, adhering to project schedules and deadlines, looking for opportunities for collaboration, updating your portfolio on a regular basis with new publications and findings, and getting feedback from mentors and peers to help you get better at what you do.

Independent research I've done has always been centered around my own curiosity and values. What do I care about, and who else cares about it? What do other people have to say? How can I bring a new perspective to something?

The best ways to build and manage your research portfolio involve setting clear goals and priorities, diversifying your research projects to cover various topics and methodologies, staying organized with project timelines and deadlines, seeking collaboration opportunities, regularly updating your portfolio with new findings and publications, and seeking feedback from peers and mentors to continuously improve and refine your work.

With a Ph.D. in Women's Studies from the University of Pune, India, I currently serve as a Post-Doctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the School of History, Culture, and Arts at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS). My academic journey includes positions at Turku University and Oslo University, as well as institutions in Iran and India.

Consider integrating dynamic content such as QR codes linking to interactive projects or digital assets, showcasing your innovative approach to research dissemination. Embedding short, impactful video abstracts of your key projects can provide a quick overview of your work, catering to the increasing preference for visual and auditory information consumption. Incorporating analytics or metrics that highlight the reach and impact of your research, such as citation counts or social media engagement figures, can quantitatively demonstrate the value of your work. Also, including a section for interdisciplinary projects or roles can reflect your versatility and ability to contribute to diverse research areas.

My interdisciplinary research interests span gender, minorities, migration, culture, religion, political religion, academic freedom, and social movements. While my primary focus has been Iran, I have also conducted significant studies in India and South Asia. I am dedicated to exploring and addressing critical social issues through a multicultural and interdisciplinary lens.

My students and I create online research "notebooks" in Microsoft Teams as they work on their projects. I prefer this so that I can interact with their sources, follow their live links, comment on the quality of the research, and add suggestions and articles that I think they might want to pursue. By the end of a semester, students have an impressive body of digital resources that they can build upon and transfer to other courses for further exploration. I keep my own digital notebook for projects and class preparation from one semester to the next that I can add to and alter--like a "living" record of research that I can continually edit and update. It's fun to watch it grow!

My current research centres on migration and political activism in Middle Eastern countries, especially those with religious governments. Employing a comparative approach, I aim to understand the dynamics of political and social change. My research questions often focus on women from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, investigating their agency and constructive resilience as social activists or political prisoners.

It is important to decide why are you woking towards each of the research projects you take on. It ideally needs to combine prior training and experience, expertise, personal interest and resources available such as funding and/or tools that are available such as a good group of strong colleagues that you happen to be working with. Also it is important to consider next steps and where your research may go. It is important to consider in addition to the list of publication a way to showcase via a few power point slides the work in amore high-level manner that may be proven a powerful technique for interviews or colloquia.