The Dairy Academy – A 'European Excellence in Dairy Learning' (AEDIL Dairy CoVE) Event Series

The ‘European Excellence in Dairy Learning’ (AEDIL Dairy CoVE) project receives funding from the European Union through the Erasmus+ programme (grant number 101055548) and is a vision for a stronger collaboration between stakeholders in the dairy sector, which has a tradition of vocational training and work-based learning. This requires close cooperation between education, industry and science to meet the sector's vision of sustainable and technology-enabled growth. The project currently involves partners from nine countries – Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands, France, Serbia, Poland, Ireland, Türkiye and Romania – which function as Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) and which are represented by stakeholders from the dairy industry, education and science, as well as social partners.<br/><br/>The ‘Dairy Academy’ was established as part of AEDIL Dairy CoVE to offer an international forum to early career researchers, where they can learn about the pressing challenges in the dairy sector and get in contact with industry personnel in order to establish a tighter collaboration between scientists and industry. One of the main goals of the Dairy Academy is to create a network for past and future participants.<br/><br/>This poster presents the four recent Dairy Academies that were held in Aarhus (2022), Cork (2023), Copenhagen (2024) and Athens (2025), reviews their teaching formats, learning activities, and networking opportunities, and discusses the feedback of the participants. A unique aspect of the events is the combination of workshops in an in-person summer school with an online symposium. The workshops offered to the summer school participants are a balance of classroom lecturing and active learning and focus on both dairy science and interpersonal skills, while the online symposium contains keynote lectures and flash talks by early career researchers and is open for everyone interested.<br/>The Dairy Academy 2024 was reviewed in detail in International Journal of Dairy Technology, 78, e13163. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0307.13163.