Poland: Poles apart

Decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, is Poland’s research finally starting to look outwards?

In a side corridor at the European Commission’s summer Research and Innovation Days conference, Research Europe overheard a telling remark in Polish: “It’s so nice to see some other Poles here—I haven’t run into any in the last two days.”

Thousands of researchers, entrepreneurs and policymakers attended the event, and at least one speaker hailed from Poland—Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, the former mayor of Warsaw and head of the sustainable cities mission board for the EU’s Horizon Europe R&D programme. But she was a rare Pole among the eclectic throng.