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Current research culture initiatives
From January 2023, UCL is delivering a programme of initiatives that will develop our research culture. They’ve been designed in conversation with UCL’s research community to make progress against our 10-year roadmap for change.
Cross-UCL initiatives will review and develop the university’s research culture and aim to deliver institutional impact. Faculty initiatives are designed and led by faculties to meet the needs of local research teams.
The Research Culture team, based in RIGE, works with all project leads to facilitate delivery of their initiatives.
Roadmap themes
The five roadmap themes are:
Current initiatives
Initiative | Description | Themes |
|---|---|---|
| The Future of Research Leadership (cross-UCL) | Phased approach to developing research leaders of the future, including cultivating the debate on research leadership and reviewing and updating approaches to talent management and training of research leaders. | 2 and 3 |
| Promotions Review (cross-UCL) | Phased review of the academic and senior academic promotions process, to identify and address gaps between policy and practice. | 1 and 4 |
| Fellowship Incubator (cross-UCL) | Supporting ECRs towards independence through targeted mentoring, seed-funding and grant-writing support. | 1 and 5 |
| Research and Innovation Grants (Faculty of Arts & Humanities) | Create a small grant scheme for use as seed funding for larger external grants as well as to grow impact activities. | 2 and 3 |
| 360 Feedback (Academic Careers Office) | Build on last year’s pilot to develop and test an academic specific 360-degree feedback tool. | 2 |
| ADAPT to Grow – Resilience building and online coaching for doctoral students (Academic Careers Office) | Aims to address common concerns about navigating working relationships, recovering from setbacks, and planning a career path. | 1 and 5 |
ADAPT to Lead – Talent management and leadership training (Academic Careers Office) | Build on the ACO’s well established ADAPT to Lead course for clinical PIs, enabling the development of a parallel offering for non-clinical PIs at LMS while also developing new training elements for both cohorts. | 1 and 2 |
| CONNECT – Support for interdisciplinary researchers (Academic Careers Office) | Support early career researchers in the interdisciplinarity space. | 1, 3 and 5 |
| ECR Survey and Good Practice Sharing (Bartlett) | Undertake an audit of local ECR support activities across the faculty to capture good practices and a faculty ECR survey to capture community views. | 1, 2 and 3 |
| Trial and Error Hackathon (Bartlett) | Design and organise a new type of space for experimentation (hackathon) to explore what success, excellence, and failure look like. | 2, 3 and 5 |
| BEAMS Positive Futures (Bartlett, Engineering, and Maths & Physical Sciences faculties) | Learn together from outcomes of all the 22/23 and 23/24 BEAMS Research Culture activities and share good practice. | 1, 2, 3 and 5 |
| Technician and Research Assistant Leadership Development Programme (Faculty of Brain Sciences) | Address the lack of opportunities for junior researchers and technicians and support the career development for these staff groups. | 1, 2 and 5 |
| Research Centres Away Day (Institute of Education) | Develop, deliver and review a research centres away-day in the summer term. | 3 |
Research Mentoring Training (Institute of Education) | Enhance the quality of our mentoring provision by creating a research mentoring training programme that will have equality, diversity and inclusion at its core through ensuring the diversity of the profile of mentors and mentees. | 1 |
| Research Impact Fellowship (Institute of Education) | Develop a sustainable and inclusive research culture at the IOE through an innovative programme co-created with our research community | 1 |
| Research Leadership programme (Institute of Education) | Aims to provide researchers with dedicated space to explore who they are as leaders, how they motivate others when working in teams and also discover what supports them be at their best. | 2 |
| Faculty Festival of Research (Faculty of Life Sciences) | A research and research culture focussed day for around 300 researchers. | 3, 4 and 5 |
| Inclusive Leadership and Race Awareness Workshops (Faculty of Life Sciences) | A workshop on inclusive leadership specifically from the perspective of race awareness and equity. | 2 and 5 |
| Equality, Diversity & Inclusion networking events (Faculty of Medical Sciences) | Enable the development of an EDI network in the Faculty of Medical Sciences and will expand the number of participants in departmental Athena Swan self-assessment teams. | 1, 3 and 5 |
| Research Culture Seminar Series (Faculty of Medical Sciences) | Expand the current Division of Medicine’s Research Culture Seminar Series to incorporate the whole of the faculty. | 1 and 5 |
Appraisal Survey Analysis (Faculty of Population Health Sciences) | Analyse and share data from our annual pre- and post-appraisal surveys. | 1 and 5 |
| Improving Research Culture Grants (Faculty of Population Health Sciences) | Allow staff or students across FPHS to apply for a limited amount of seed-funding (£500) to carry out a pilot study within their Institute. These initiatives must be linked to improving research culture. | 2, 3 and 5 |
| Teams of the Year (Faculty of Population Health Sciences) | Scale up the successful Teams of the Year initiative at IEHC across the Faculty. These awards are to acknowledge teams that work well with each other and find ways to make the most of everyone’s knowledge and skills. | 2 and 5 |
| EDI - Cross-cultural Understanding (Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences) | Stipends for SHS staff to run training sessions for PGR and post-doc students. | 1, 2, 3 and 5 |
| Fieldwork Safety Standards (Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences) | Stipends for SHS staff to run training sessions for PGR and post-doc students. | 1, 2, 3 and 5 |
| Developing Impact Beyond REF (Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences) | Strategic development of SHS Faculty impact approach. | 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 |