Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at SEFI 2025

At SEFI, we believe that diversity across all dimensions is essential to enriching engineering educational and professional experiences. We are proud to introduce several inclusivity initiatives designed to welcome and support participation from across the engineering education community. Financial barriers have been identified as particularly significant for students, early career researchers, and caregivers. Therefore, we would like to specifically bring your attention to two such initiatives that you might be eligible for:

Free Childcare:

We recognize that attending a conference while managing caring responsibilities can be a significant hurdle for many participants, especially for parents and guardians of children. This challenge can deter talented individuals from participating and contributing to our event.

To support attendees who are responsible for children, this initiative aims to provide professional childcare and enable participants to engage with the conference content and networking opportunities. There is room for 10 children, taken in the order of request.

The child care is located in Marriott hotel just across the street from the conference venue. The nursemaids are provided by Äidike child-care service.

You can request the child care when registering to attend the conference by simply choosing the childcare option in the DEI initiatives section. – Registrations

Scholarships for Students and Early Career Researchers:

These scholarships are designed to support participation from students and early career researchers from low-income and underrepresented countries, enabling them to share their work, learn from others, and build essential networks. We are committed to fostering diversity and inclusion by offering scholarships (up to 400,00€)  that reduce registration fees for newer researchers and students. These scholarships are designed to empower students and early career researchers, enabling them to share their work, learn from others, and build essential networks.

Criteria for application

• You are a student or an early-career researcher (up to 7 years of research activity post-doctoral degree)
• The geographic location of your institution matches EU widening criteria or Low/Lower middle-income countries
•  You have submitted to the SEFI 2025 conference (e.g., practice paper, research paper, workshop). Your submission does not need to have been accepted.
• Scholarships will be offered in priority of (i) order in which applications were received and (ii) Geograpical diversity

Applying for the scholarship

To express your interest in this service, apply by free form application to sefi2025@taloevents.fi. You should include:

• your personal information, including the country
• your institution
• which paper(s) you have sent to the conference
• your academic status (bachelor, master, PhD, post-doc…)
• your highest completed degree and the year of graduation
• any other information you see as pertinent to the conference scholarship application

Application deadlines

• Applications must be received by 31 May, sent to sefi2025@taloevents.fi
• Decisions will be communicated by June 16th , i.e. before end of early-bird rates for those who do not receive it.
• Acceptance of scholarship MUST be confirmed by June 20th (or else it will be offered to the next person on the list).

You can find more information here.