Centre for Unusual Collaborations CUCo

About Centre for Unusual Collaborations CUCo

Future generations face unprecedented challenges: climate change, resource depletion, socio-economic and health inequalities. Systemic structural transitions are urgently needed. Welcome to the Centre for Unusual Collaborations, part of the strategic alliance between four leading Dutch knowledge institutes: Eindhoven University of Technology, Wageningen University & Research, Utrecht University, and University Medical Centre Utrecht.

CUCo’s mission is to equip a diverse group of early- and mid-career academics with the virtues, sensibilities and skills to form unexpected and innovative transdisciplinary collaborations and address the pressing challenges of the age. To that end, CUCo hosts an annual Fellowship Programme for researchers from its affiliated institutes and societal partners.

CUCo strives to nourish passion-fueled research, where scholars can find joy and grow as researchers and as humans. CUCo honours progress over perfection, process over outcome, eco over ego, and doing business as unusual. CUCo is committed to fostering brave spaces that enable scholars to challenge the productivity-driven, competition-based, path-dependent individualism that has come to dominate academia. These take the form of collaborative, non-hierarchical, open, fair and inclusive approaches to inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge co-generation that are currently undervalued and under-supported in conventional academic frameworks.

Keywords

• Collaboration
• Creativity
• Fun
• Fun
• Interdisciplinary Research
• Knowledge
• Learning
• Learning
• Transdisciplinary Research
• Transdiscplinary Research
• Unusual Collaborations

Address

• Headquarters

  Heidelberglaan 83584CS UtrechtUtrecht, Netherlands

Team by function

Based on 10 public job profiles as of 4 September 2026.

• Education / Training2
• Executive / C-Suite2
• Other / Unclassifiable2
• Research / R&D2
• Administrative / Office1
• Marketing1