We are two members of the team from University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück. We work for the Faculty for Social and Business Sciences and are members of the Competence Center for Global Competence.

Our team is led by our coordinator, Professor Genkova, who cannot be here today. And we are four researchers who are PhD or postdoc students and Dieter Jasper and I are here today. Our research topics focus on intercultural competence, especially but also diversity in general and migration and integration.

Which was in this case very interesting because we are sometimes doing research projects on refugee integration. And in this case, we had to practically integrate refugees from Ukraine into our team and to our German system. If you want to have a look at our projects and our team, you can find us on

the web page and if you Google us, you will find us anyway. We from the Global Competence Center conducted a number of research projects. One major project was called Open Diversity and Intercultural Competence in the Context of Refugee Integration.

We did a multilateral cooperation between Germany, Czech Republic, Latvia, Serbia and Hungary and Slovakia. And we expanded our network to many Eastern European countries and even to Spain and Great Britain from the western part.

We thought we wanted to or we actually finished an application for Horizon Europe projects and national network projects and did a number of cross-cultural and culture comparing studies. One example is scale characteristics of intercultural competence measures and the effects of intercultural competence and prejudice in which we would do

or we would culture comparing studies of some psychological scales, which would not always work in, which would work in Western cultures but not in, for example, Eastern European cultures or even Asian cultures. And this is one of our main topics.

Another project we finished was the project DNA, Accepting and Utilizing Diversity, or in German, Diversität, Knudsen und Annemann, therefore DNA. This was a cooperation between the ICORB, GGBH, GGBH and our university in Osnaburg. We did comparative studies of the application of culturally fair recruitment and appraisal procedures in business enterprises and university and

publications are, for example, on diversity beliefs and diversity climates and the potential of diversity for organizations. Or another publication we've written on this topic was Impact of Stays Abroad on

Intercultural Competence of Students. The citation is found below. One project which we are conducted or pursuing right now is Diverse Chance East, global competence, development and diversity challenges in an innovative Europe.

We are doing a joint research project with participants from Germany, in this case our University of Applied Science in Osnaburg, and Ukraine from National Metchnikoff University, Odessa, which have some participants here. And our focus is on attitudes towards migration and conditions for successful integration into another

culture and society and also diversity competence. Our aim is to meet the current challenges of the European economy and society and to generate innovative approaches to practical solutions, for example, especially in these times of crisis of the corona pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. And our means are that we want to deepen the bilateral

cooperation of our partners, meaning Ukraine and Germany, and we want to expand cross-sectional contacts to advance joint research and knowledge transfer. Therefore, we, for example, integrated our partner from the Metchnikoff University

into the cult open network so we can expand our research to more countries. What we did was, for example, organize a networking workshop with researchers from Ukraine, from Hungary, Lithuania, Spain and Germany in February this year.

This was just before the outbreak of the war. It was held online and in Osnaburg. We wanted to find common research topics and discuss the application for possible Horizon Europe grants and tenders. Our topics were once again on migration, integration, intercultural competence and diversity. One other effect of this workshop was that we could expand student exchange programs from Erasmus program, especially with the

Odessa University. More activities include our joint research. We did another series of culture comparing studies on diversity beliefs and intercultural attitudes in Ukraine and Germany.

We expanded the cult open studies with data from Ukraine. Our partner Dr. Ludmila Smokova stayed in Germany since February. She planned to stay there for two months,

but we could extend her stay until now, until the situation changes. Our current studies focus on diversity potentials in German and Ukrainian businesses. This project is also found on our home page.

Another research project we are conducting right now is the promotion of intercultural and refugee specific competence for refugees and host societies during the Russia-Ukraine crisis. A joint research project with participants from Germany and Ukraine after the outbreak of the war is funded by a guest research program for refugee and Ukrainian scholars from the Volkswagen Stiftung.

The focus is once again on migration and integration, conditions for successful integration and support of refugees, especially attitudes of Ukrainian refugees towards the length of their stay in Germany, also mental health issues among refugees and

framework conditions for the development of global and intercultural competence in business and society. We aim to contribute to the creation of a common European cultural space and successful integration as a solution to the global challenges of flight and migration, and our current studies focus on diversity and crisis, intergroup attitudes after the COVID-19

pandemic and during the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. As our research topic collided with our actual human resource management, we learned a few lessons for refugee integration. Especially, we've had a very favorable situation.

We've had a pre-existing cooperation with the National Metricof University and with Dr. Ludmilla Smokova from this university. She already stayed in Germany and we had some collective experience in our research team. For example, some had some experience in refugee work,

some had knowledge about legal matters of structural integration in Germany, some had skills for swift application for scholarships, and some people had Russian language skills, and therefore communication was very swift. And we could very quickly support a structural integration without even contacting German authorities once, and we very quickly could give her a

job at university and housing opportunities in Osnabrück. We've had some benefits of our joint research projects and especially the stay in Germany. We have a multinational team benefits research on intercultural attitudes and migration intercultural competence as we have many

cultures now in our team. We can have multicultural samples for cross-cultural research and the extension of possible research network partners from Ukraine. It's also another benefit. We've had some challenges. For example, language barriers and the team dynamics are differently in different cultures.

Also, the working culture is very different in Germany from other countries. For example, we also always have to strictly separate private and public topics and then when you want to integrate other people from other cultures in Germany, they have multiple social demands, for example, a social network.

What we supported or our solutions to these challenges were that we often communicated via email with non-Russian speaking team members. So you could also, you could always quickly translate, for example, with Google Translate and another motto was, help to help themselves. We wanted to support for social integration by sharing contacts so that

people from outside of Germany could really help themselves to integrate into our structures and social networks. Thank you very much for your attention.