At the end of 2024, we looked back at some of our key highlights and achievements since the Centre for Behaviour Change (CBC) was established in 2014.
The CBC started in 2014 as a Provost’s award funding two postdocs for three years, rapidly growing to be a world-leading centre of multidisciplinary excellence.
The first ten years

April 2024 marked a decade since the CBC was established. In our first decade:
- We led teams in 79 research grants and collaborations for large-scale grants totalling £112m, with a total grant value to CBC of £12.8m
- We produced 1050 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited >68,000 times
- We carried out 31 consultancy projects worth £992,000
- We trained over 3000 people in behaviour change through our training packages
2024 in numbers
In 2024, some of our key achievements included:
- 26 active research grants, contributing a total of £7.2 million in income for the CBC
- 35 students enrolled in our 2024 MSc in Behaviour Change
- 500 attendees at our 10th anniversary in April 2024, with 300 people joining us in person and 200 online
Spotlight on...
Our team
With 29 staff and 6 PhD students, our team continues to grow in numbers and output.
In 2024, we welcomed 11 new members of staff and 2 PhD students. We also secured funding for three new permanent roles at the CBC to support the continued development of our consultancy, training, teaching, and research activities.
Other team highlights included:
Prof Susan Michie and Prof Robert West were recognised in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2024 list of individuals who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their field(s) of research.
Prof Leslie Gutman was appointed as Vice Dean (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) in the Faculty of Brain Sciences at UCL.
Our staff play an active role in the UCL, national and international communities, serving on over 20 UCL affiliated groups and over 40 external groups, boards and hubs.
New research
The CBC’s interdisciplinary research portfolio addresses central questions facing society. Amongst the 26 active grants we worked on this year, we were delighted to commence some major new projects including:
- Behavioural Research UK (BR-UK) was launched in 2024. It is funded for 5 years by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) via the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), receiving a total of £10 million. Its purpose is to serve as a leadership hub for behavioural research across the UK. This year, along with five demonstration projects, BR-UK launched an interactive map of 900 behavioural research organisations in the UK, viewed over 10,000 times already.
- The APRICOT project was funded by the NIH receiving over £1.7m. This 5-year project is an international, multidisciplinary programme of work will develop tools for using ontologies in the behavioural sciences, building on the transformative work of the Human Behaviour Change Project.
- The Improving Research Culture project, part of a larger programme of UCL work funded by the Wellcome Trust for over £1 million, aims to investigate how to foster an enabling and supportive research culture in Universities, with UCL as the case example.
- The NIHR Policy Research Unit (PRU) in Behavioural and Social Sciences was funded for five more years by the NIHR, receiving a total of £1.346m. The Unit uses evidence, theory and methods from behavioural and social sciences to inform government policy on health, preventing ill-health and health systems.
Impact on policy
Using data from Overton, we were impressed to see the scale of the global policy impact of one of our much-used frameworks, the Behaviour Change Wheel.

Examples of global, European and national impact are citations in:
- 'Behavioural Insights and Public Policy' (2017) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
- 'Guidelines for the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19' (2020) by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control,
- The 'Transport decarbonisation plan' (2021) by the UK Government’s Department for Transport.