FLF Advisory Board Focus Groups: Testimonials from Césaré Cejas and Hatef Sadeghi

Earlier this year, we held our first Advisory Board Focus Groups, bringing Fellows from across the Network together to discuss emerging challenges, needs, and opportunities. Nominated Fellows from each Group attended our Network Advisory Board in July, contributing to discussions on governance, structure and future offerings.

Two of the Fellow representatives, Césaré Cejas (Round 5) and Hatef Sadeghi (Round 1) have shared their experiences in our blog. They reflect on what they gained from taking part, how the discussions worked, and what they would tell other Fellows considering getting involved.

 

Testimonial from Césaré Cejas

One of the strengths of the Future Leaders Fellowship is its ambition to support future research and innovation leaders across different sectors and career pathways. As an industry-based Fellow, the recent FLF focus groups provided a valuable opportunity to reflect on what that means in practice, and particularly on how the experience of delivering a Fellowship within an SME can differ from more traditional academic environments.

For me, one of the most valuable aspects of the discussion was simply having the opportunity for an open, two-way conversation. Feedback exercises can sometimes feel transactional: views are collected, surveys completed, and participants are left uncertain about what happens next. The focus-group format felt different. It created space not only to raise specific issues, but also to understand the experiences of other Fellows and recognise where apparently individual challenges may reflect broader features of the programme.

The FLF has been hugely important to my own leadership and innovation development. It has provided the freedom to pursue ambitious R&D whilst developing as a leader, and has enabled activities and collaborations that would have been much more difficult to establish through conventional short-term project funding. But delivering a Fellowship from within industry also brings a particular perspective on how these mechanisms operate.

As a Fellow in a dynamic environment, such as an SME, I find that teams evolve, commercial priorities change, technologies mature and external investment conditions can shift considerably over the lifetime of a multi-year Fellowship. A Fellow may simultaneously be a researcher, project leader, grant manager, collaborator and contributor to the strategic direction of the company. This can make the flexibility offered by the FLF particularly valuable, but it can also expose areas where funding structures or expectations designed around more conventional research environments do not always map neatly onto industrial R&D.

This is why representation matters. Industry Fellows may be relatively fewer in number, but their experiences can provide useful insights into questions around career progression, organisational change, co-investment, research translation and what research leadership looks like outside academia. Equally, hearing from Fellows working in universities, public organisations, charities and other environments provides perspective on challenges that are shared across the community and those that are genuinely sector-specific.

The focus groups also reinforced something broader for me: consultation is most valuable when it forms a feedback loop. Gathering Fellows’ experiences is an important first step, but communicating what was heard, what can be changed, what cannot and why is equally important. Not every suggestion will translate into a policy change, nor should it. But closing that loop gives Fellows confidence that contributing their experiences is worthwhile and helps build a programme that can continue to evolve alongside the people it supports.

There is an interesting parallel here with research itself. We generate information, learn from it, adjust our assumptions and decide what to do next. The quality of the outcome depends not simply on collecting more data, but on creating mechanisms through which that information leads to learning and action.

For that reason, I found the process both useful and insightful. It was an opportunity to contribute an industry perspective, but also to better understand the wider FLF community.

If the FLF is intended to develop the next generation of research and innovation leaders, maintaining this dialogue across sectors is important. The diversity of the Fellowship should not only be reflected in who it funds, but also in whose experiences help shape how the programme develops.

With that in mind, I would encourage my fellow Fellows to participate in these focus-groups and wider FLF-events, whenever possible. Our experiences, both positive and challenging, can only help shape the programme if we are willing to share them.

Césaré Cejas, UKRI FLF

MFX

 

Testimonial from Hatef Sadeghi

It has been a profound privilege to return to the FLF DevNet Advisory Board for a third year. When I first joined the board two years ago, I was one of just three Future Leaders Fellows representatives in the room. This year, I was thrilled to see FLF DevNet actively evolve its structure to ensure a wider, more representative array of perspectives. By introducing dedicated focus groups (each tasked with nominating their own representative to the board) our presence at the recent Advisory Board meeting grew to four FLF voices. This is far more than a simple administrative tweak; it is a vital expansion of our capacity to advocate for the realities we face on the ground.

Getting involved in these spaces is deeply important to me because it offers a direct channel to shape the environment we all navigate. As fellows, we are expected to push the boundaries of research and innovation, but we operate within an academic ecosystem that is currently under immense strain. My primary goal in attending these meetings was to ensure that your lived experiences, concerns, and feedback were heard loud and clear by those in charge. Crucially, I also want to highlight that FLF DevNet has been highly successful in delivering its mission to empower fellows with the skills needed to become the next generation of research leaders. This success was widely recognised and celebrated by the FLF representatives present.

While acknowledging these successes, during our recent meeting we did not shy away from the difficult conversations. Armed with the feedback many of you shared, I brought several pressing issues directly to the table:

• Systemic Funding Pressures: We discussed the intense financial squeeze and historically low success rates currently defining the academic landscape. The pressure is palpable, fundamentally reshaping how we plan our research trajectories and support our teams.
• Grant Sifting and Standard Misalignment: We raised significant concerns regarding the increasing use of demand management by UKRI and internal institutional sifting across its grant schemes. This creates a deeply frustrating bottleneck, largely because the selection standards applied by host institutions during internal sifts often fail to align with UKRI’s ultimate assessment criteria.
• Open-Ended Commitments: Crucially, we highlighted the ongoing issue of open-ended positions. The promise of long-term institutional backing is a cornerstone of the FLF scheme, yet we are still seeing instances where host institutions fail to fully honour this commitment, undermining the career security the fellowship was designed to foster.
• The Review Process: We discussed the grant review process, voicing a growing consensus within our cohort that the current system is increasingly failing to serve its intended purpose, frequently feeling more arbitrary than constructive.
• Mid-Career Support Gaps: Finally, I highlighted the stark lack of mid-career fellowships. I asked UKRI about their plans to support the next stage of FLFs and other mid-career talent across the UK, emphasising that sustaining the momentum of early-career funding requires clear, viable pathways for the next phase of our research journeys.

Serving on the Advisory Board provides a practical mechanism for fellows to share their perspectives and help shape the environment we work in. I encourage you to engage with this process and continue sharing your experiences, so that future discussions accurately reflect the realities faced by FLFs.

Prof. Hatef Sadeghi, UKRI FLF

University of Warwick