Meet the cohort: FORGE-AI's first wave of European secondments

One of FORGE-AI's core goals has always been simple to state and hard to deliver: get Georgian AI researchers working inside leading European labs, then bring that experience home. This spring, that goal became a list of names.

Congratulations to everyone selected — this is exactly the kind of milestone the project was built for.

The numbers

Over the past few months, FORGE-AI ran an open call for cross-sector, cross-border secondments. The response was strong: more than 40 applications came in from early-career AI researchers and research managers across the region. After a rigorous evaluation process, 28 candidates were selected to move forward.

Each selected researcher will spend between 6 and 12 months embedded at a partner institution abroad, working alongside established European research groups rather than simply visiting them.

Where they're headed

The secondments send researchers to host institutions in Germany, France, and other FORGE-AI partner countries — placing them directly inside organisations like DFKI and Saarland University in Germany, and Creative Cluster in France, among other hosts across the consortium.

What they're working on

The cohort spans four core research areas that reflect where AI is having the most practical impact right now:

• NLP and large language models

• Computer vision and object recognition

• AI in healthcare

• AI-driven scientific grant management systems

That spread matters. It means the researchers coming back to Georgia won't just bring one narrow specialism home – they'll bring perspectives from across the AI research and application landscape.

Why this matters

Secondments are the most important part of FORGE-AI.Training programmes teach skills; secondments build networks, collaborations, and firsthand exposure to how European research groups actually operate day to day. Twenty-eight researchers spending real time inside real labs is the kind of investment that pays off over years, not months.

What's next

Over the coming months, we'll be following individual secondees as they settle into their host institutions, sharing early updates from the ground, and – later in the project – the research outputs and collaborations that come out of these placements.

For now: congratulations to the 28 researchers who made it through a genuinely competitive process. The hard work starts now.

FORGE-AI has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101216703.