Plus Funds

Plus Fund Ref: PF002

Team: Katie Sheehan, Andy Guise, Adrianna Murphy

Project Start Date: 1 September 2021

Funding: £22852.52

Summary: Our aim is to develop a toolkit to support institutions and ECR line managers to better champion
career development and progression of their ECRs. Whilst the final outcome will depend on the
development activities, we anticipate the toolkit (downloadable as pdf from Vitae website)
including: 1) checklists of processes for institutions and managers of ECRs to consider in
development for ECRs from final year PhD to 10 years post PhD, 2) strategies for embedding the
toolkit in institutions, 3) information sources, and 4) initiatives from across the sector.

Links: Click here to see the Toolkit

Plus Fund Ref: PF003

Team: Sadie Watson

Project Start Date: 1 February 2022

Funding: £22640.11

Summary: To commercialise Watson’s FLF research, MOLA is invested in creating a Centre that foregrounds social value and the positive impact that archaeology can make in communities affected by construction (including archaeological work).

Research indicates that interventions are most effective when communities contribute to and co-create programmes. We want to embrace this concept and further it, inviting communities to co-create a Centre which will be a focus for social value production.

Construction often occurs in marginalised communities, and archaeology is normally the interest of the privileged (93% >30 years, 56% >61 years, and 96% identify as White British). Therefore, we want to invite those traditionally underserved by archaeology to participate because (1) their communities are the ones most often affected by construction, and (2) they know their communities’ wants and needs best, including the most effective ways to engage them.

Over two months (03-05/2022), together we will explore how to create a Centre that produces positive impacts, building on Watson’s FLF work. We will ask participants about their perceptions of archaeology; their levels of interest in engaging with our work; how they might like to engage with us, or reasons they choose not to; and what public benefits, or social value outcomes, they want from the archaeological process (STSI Category C). We will query participants on potential Centre
characteristics, asking for insight on topics such as accessibility, creating a welcoming environment, and best practice for approaching communities for collaborative and/or citizen-led projects (STSI Category D).

Plus Fund Ref: PF005

Team: Anna Tarrant, Tatiana Salisbury

Project Start Date: 1 January 2022

Funding: £18,018

Summary: Co-creation has been described as a form of ‘collaborative creativity’ (ACCOMPLISHH, 2018), that enables innovation with rather than for involved stakeholders. The workshops are built with this ethos in mind. Cocreation brings different parties together to jointly produce mutually valued
outcomes. The workshops do the same by bringing multiple stakeholder groups together to explore the potential and challenges of co-creation at all stages of the research process.

Built around a creative mix of accessible formats including presentations, 5-minute video provocations, live-drawings and interactive break-out sessions, the workshops will showcase exemplars of co-creation to promote and foster more creative, inclusive and transformative research and practice cultures. Pre-recorded provocation videos will be played at the workshops to provoke reflection and discussion among delegates. These will feature a diverse set of voices, including organisations and communities in the Global South, who are engaging in research implementing evidence-based solutions through research processes to address community identified needs.

Plus Fund Ref: PF008

Team: Joseph Lindley, Victoria Bates

Project Start Date: 1 March 2022

Funding: £25000

Summary:

Research through Design (RtD) is a research method and epistemology which, in the last 20 years, has demonstrated its value in in academia, industry, and in policy and governance contexts. RtD incorporates elements of practice-based research (learning through doing), creativity-led foresight methods including Speculative Design and Design Fiction, and participatory design methods such as Co-Design. Leveraging these techniques RtD is uniquely well positioned to produce insights about the fast-moving socio-technological problem spaces which are commonplace in the 21st century (e.g., trust in autonomous systems, responsible AI, and the privacy and ethics of data economies).

RtD’s value comes from its ability to explore potential futures through interdisciplinary inquiry. Recent examples of RtD include HM Courts & Tribunal Service1, FinTech and blockchain research2, IKEA’s Future Home Lab3, and in Participatory Social Policy Development4. RtD is a nascent but growing approach but if a critical mass is attained, it has the potential to radically alter and enhance the UK research landscape. This project aims to help the FLFDN access this value as well as leveraging the FLFDN to bolster adoption of RtD. 

The proposed activity will bring together experienced RtD practitioners to develop accessible, actionable and practical introductions to the value of RtD for FLFDN members, as well as the wider research community. The activity will be a 4-day residential symposium, designed to provide participants space to address the significant challenges associated with translating the value of RtD for a wider and less-specialised. Moreover, it is deliberately designed to harness the focus and in-depth discussions which can be nurtured during an extended, in person, event (in contrast to a series of short workshops, or normal conference events). 

We will use this unique event to produce ground-breaking materials to help non-specialists harness the value of RtD, with a view to sharing this value first with the FLFDN, and second with the wider research community. 

Plus Fund Ref: PF009

Team: Victoria Bates, Fay Bound Alberti

Project Start Date: 10 January 2022

Funding: £24585

Summary:

This workshop series will explore the challenges and opportunities of working with creative industries, including artists and designers. It will involve a combination of practical advice, methodological training, and sharing of experiences in the form of a support network. It will involve people with extensive experience of such work, alongside FLFs who are interested in working with creative industries but uncertain about how to approach the work.  

In terms of the project aims and objectives, it will meet many of those outlined in the Plus Funds ‘Spheres of Influence’ and ‘Signature Themes’. The project aims to explore ‘enterprise and self-leadership’ in terms of exploring ways to problem solve, have clarity of purpose, and pursue knowledge exchange when working with creative industries. One of the core purposes of the project is to ensure that common mistakes in communication are avoided from the outset, and that such partnerships are set up in ways that are ethical and respect creative expertise. In this sense, the aims are also closely aligned with all those for ‘leading teams and collaborations’, as the workshops will explore how to maximise the potential of working with creative industries rather than treating them as ‘add-ons’ for public engagement or communication. This aim also addresses the goal of ‘transforming research cultures’ in terms of being open to new ways of thinking, as another aim of the scheme is integrating creativity and ‘design thinking’ methods into our own practices. Taken together, we hope that this scheme will improve FLFs’ abilities to partner with the public and engage in knowledge exchange. We will also consider how such practices and partnerships may differ when working with international partners, ensuring that we address global citizenship and the potential power inequalities that we must be aware of when commissioning creative practitioners. 

Plus Fund Ref: PF011R

Team: Jenevieve Mannell, Emily Bridger, Katie McQuaid

Project Start Date: 2 January 2023

Funding: £24918.34

Summary: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought mental health and wellbeing to the forefront of working lives. As future leaders in research on sensitive and often emotionally charged topics – including violence against women, sexual abuse, and climate change – we recognise that the emotional burden of our work has in many ways been compounded by the pandemic. Although vicarious trauma – the negative emotional reaction to being exposed to the traumatic experiences of others – has long been a concern for other professions (social work, law, medicine and psychology), there is currently a dearth of tools available to support the mental health and wellbeing of researchers.

This project will develop a toolkit for principal investigators and funders to revision the types of support needed for the mental health and wellbeing of research teams working on emotionally or ethically challenging topics. Our aim is to first create a toolkit that will be useful for a wide range of funders and PIs from different disciplines and UK research institutions, while also enabling FLFs to find strategic opportunities to: i) support the mental health and wellbeing of their teams as part of their current projects, and ii) develop the connections and skills in order to lead a culture change that prioritises the mental health and wellbeing of diverse research teams.

Links: View the RES-WELL Toolkit Here

Plus Fund Ref: PF012R

Team: Emily Draper, Jennifer Hiscock, Jessica Louise Boland, Sarah Pike, Charlie McTernan

Project Start Date: 1 November 2022

Funding: £24990.81

Summary:

Lately, increasing attention is on equality, diversity, inclusion and accessibility (EDIA) (or the lack thereof) within research cultures. For example, the UKRI held a public consultation on their proposed EDIA strategy, and the UK Parliament Science and Technology Committee called for consultation and expert witnesses.

In this project, we will consider how to tackle EDIA in science, including where it does (and should) sit for funding and dissemination (within disciplines, or in more general academic fields such as education), and how the lack of diversity impacts public trust and understanding. We will do this through the lens of the supramolecular chemistry community.

This project will achieve:

1. a two round Delphi Study around EDIA in scientific research. The Delphi Study will involve a diverse group of international experts and interested parties (including policy makers, funders, publishers, industrial scientists, UG and PGR students, technicians, PDRAs, permanent staff members at all levels, and wider members of the community working outside of academia) who will be consulted to share their views, and to come to consensus on their priorities, conclusions and recommendations around EDIA, leading to….
2. an in-person event in Spring 2023. This event will support networking for all participants, as Delphi Studies are designed to be anonymous, and do not provide opportunities for networking. The event will give practical hands-on training around using creative and reflective approaches to discussing EDIA as have been used successfully within WISC, and suggest approaches to implement changes to research cultures. The Delphi Study and in-person event will result in resources that will be of long-term value to the sector, including a toolkit for junior researchers and group leaders to be shared with UKRI. This will be interwoven with…
3. an interlinked Public Engagement project which will create online content in the form of videos for social media channels and/or podcasts showcasing findings and sharing lived experiences with the broad aim of supporting public understanding of research and research culture, and the people and personalities driving change.

Plus Fund Ref: PF013R

Team: Anne Templeton, Martha Newson

Project Start Date: 20 January 2023

Funding: £19481

Summary:

Groups is intended to develop through a process of co-creation and co-design, building on the ideas and interests of the Fellows who attend and steer it.  

Our co-productive approach is based on the methodology set out by UKRI and successful examples, such as the NIHR Involve project. This will include establishing our collaborative approach, responsibilities of members, and the outputs and legacy of the collaboration (please see Section 3 for a detailed description). We envisage co-creating Group’s outputs, the framework we include here is thus a starting point from which Groups will grow collaboratively. An initial framework and core objectives have been agreed between the founding members, but we commit to collaboration and reflexivity to ensure Groups best supports its members.  

 Links: Click here to visit the Groups Network. 

Plus Fund Ref: PF015

Team: Oliver Mytton, Laura Carter

Project Start Date: 1 February 2023

Funding: £24376

Summary: The UKRI Future Leaders Fellows (FLF) networks comprises over 450 emerging research leaders tackling some of the biggest and most interesting research challenges. Their work will shape the future of innovation, engineering, business,
healthcare and ultimately society.

As a group, we want to share our research with the public. We are passionate about what we do. Our work is of wide interest, having the potential to touch on the daily lives of many people. We also recognise it is vital to build trust and understanding in our work, to help it have its maximum beneficial impact.

A group of six of us (including the applicant and co-applicant) would like to produce a pilot series of six podcasts to showcase some of our work, and explore key issues/themes within our work, such as collaboration; failure and null results; inter-disciplinary working; and research methods.

Following an initial piece of scoping work (Crucible Application, October 2022), including significant input from a professional podcast producer (Hester Cant; see attached Podcast Proposal), we would now like to request funding to undertake a pilot podcast.

Links: Listen to the Podcast Here.

Plus Fund Ref: PF016

Team: Payel Das, Daniel Cole, Guang Yang, George Gordon

Project Start Date: 31 January 2024

Funding: £23019.10

Summary: The use of ML/AI and Big Data is expanding in every area of research, and researchers with the skills to make use of these tools are highly sought after. It is an area of growing strategic importance in the UK and also within research and innovation schemes, e.g.  National AI strategy https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-ai-strategy, it is mentioned specifically in the UKRI strategy “securing UK strategic advantage in game changing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)”; and AI is one of the strategic priorities of EPSRC “artificial intelligence (AI), digitalisation and data” https://www.ukri.org/publications/epsrc-strategic-delivery-plan/epsrc-strategic-delivery-plan-2022-to-2025/.   

However, there is a steep learning curve when starting out in this research area, and community support is vital to ensuring a useful learning experience and to ensure that researchers in diverse communities are not ‘reinventing the wheel’.  With DEVISE, we aim to dramatically increase the potential for impact in this research area within the FLF community.

The key deliverables of the project are to 1.) develop a community support framework for FLFs interested in AI; 2.) create an AI Wiki resource; 3.) generate novel case-study AI applications; and 4.) ensure a sustainable future for DEVISE. 

Plus Fund Ref: PF020

Team: Leah Morabito, James Aird, Chris Harrison, Brooke Simmons

Project Start Date: 1 January 2024

Funding: £24803

Summary:

FLFs Morabito and Harrison are located at Durham University and Newcastle University, respectively. They both had budgeted funding from their FLF projects for scientific workshops on the topic of growing super-massive black holes (AGN) at the centres of galaxies and how they can impact upon galaxy evolution. These budgeted FLF workshops both had aims to: (1) showcase the work of the FLF teams; (2) facilitate knowledge exchange and networking within the research community; (3) promote and support the development of their teams and wider early career researchers. Furthermore, both FLFs recruited African astronomers into their teams, and the teams are geographically close (Durham/Newcastle). 

Through the benefits of FLF networking and co-ordination, it became apparent that there is an opportunity, to go above and beyond the original expectations of these separate workshops.

By working together, and with additional support from FLF Development Network Plus Funds, a more ambitious workshop can be conducted, which can, in additional to the original scientific outcomes and local benefits, affect both change in the global community and benefit the wider members of the Development Network. Here we propose for funds to bring African scientists to the workshop, to facilitate these goals.

Plus Fund Ref: PF021

Team: Sabina Lawreniuk

Project Start Date: 1 February 2024

Funding: £22396

Summary:

“Issues of diversity in the academy are reaching a fever-pitch”, note the authors1 of a recent flagship paper assessing the contemporary state of the field of economic geography. “Amidst expanded media coverage of harassment of and discrimination against female and racialized scholars”, they continue, “structural barriers to career success and advancement have been documented in all aspects of academic life, including journal publishing and citation practices”. As a result, “many scholars are calling for diversification in what is studied, how, and by whom”. 

Within the sub-discipline of economic geography, in particular, concerns about gendered and racialized practices in publishing, citations, editorial board representation, conference participation, tenure proceedings, and the selection of keynote speakers for high-profile events are notably acute. The same study cited above, for example, found that 75% of papers published within the two top-ranked sub-disciplinary journals (the Journal of Economic Geography & Economic Geography) are by male authors. These biases, moreover, have important consequences for the representation of topics and subject areas within these journals and, as such, shape the very definition of economic geography and our understanding of the spatialisation of economic phenomena.  

In response, our FLF Plus Funds project addresses the authors’ call to move towards a more “engaged pluralism” in economic geography, by diversifying the representation of authors within this field and, in doing so, taking steps to reshape the field of knowledge itself. Supported by the current editors of the Journal of Economic Geography, and two recent former editors (Co-applicants NC & AS), we propose a paper development workshop, targeting a diverse cohort of participants. The paper development workshop aims to guide the development of working papers into a special issue for publication within the Journal of Economic Geography, providing a unique opportunity to steer the development of work by diverse scholars into an eminent journal that has otherwise been noted for a non-diverse base of authorship.  

Plus Fund Ref: PF024

Team: Giacomo Melis

Project Start Date: 26 February 2024

Funding: £23738

Summary: Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature of knowledge and how subjects may acquire and lose it. It’s typically characterized as a so-called “armchair” discipline but in recent decades some epistemologists have shown interest in empirical research, if only to the extent that the findings of sciences like psychology and comparative cognition may be relevant to address traditional epistemological questions. One problem facing the empirically minded epistemologists is that they tend to be isolated and not organized. The first goal of the EEN is to establish a venue where empirically minded epistemologists may connect and exchange knowledge in a nascent field of research.  

In the present context, where interdisciplinary research is gaining ground, it is becoming apparent that a foundational discipline like epistemology may contribute to, and gain from engaging with, a whole range of disciplines in the humanities, and natural and social sciences. The anticipation and scope for such future interdisciplinary work is attested by the variety of disciplines from which 36 current FLFs have expressed interest and support for the establishment of such network. The second goal of EEN is to connect empirically minded epistemologists with researchers from other disciplines who have a stake in the dynamics of rational belief-formation and revision. 

Plus Fund Ref: PF025

Team: John Baison, Yoselin Benitez-Alfonso

Project Start Date: 15 April 2024

Funding: £24792

Summary: The proposed workshop aims to equip Fellows with the necessary skills and cultural competence to effectively mentor Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students, staff and postgraduate researchers within the UK. This workshop recognizes the importance of diversity in academia and seeks to foster an inclusive and supportive environment that empowers both mentors and mentees.

By providing training on culturally sensitive mentorship, the workshop aims to promote diversity, equity, and academic excellence within higher education institutions and industry. The workshop will be delivered over the course of two days but will build long-lasting implications and follow-ups. We will hire a professional coach, but an important component will be the participation of students and staff (FLF fellows and their teams) from minoritised backgrounds, who will be invited to share their experiences in a reverse mentoring approach.

Members of the Future Leaders cohorts (from non-minoritised backgrounds) will be also invited to speak of the challenges they have faced in mentoring minoritised researchers. Together, we will create opportunities and a safe space to discuss and build solutions. The goal of this workshop is to create tools and remove the barriers to communication. We anticipate that this will contribute to a better research culture for the benefit of all members of the community and promote excellence.

As an outcome of this workshop, a set of recommendations/suggestions will be prepared to improve research culture in the workplace. These will be shared with the research community in a publication, and via social media, and promote via the ‘future leaders’ podcast. The workshop will improve understanding of coaching/mentoring for people from minoritized backgrounds. In collaboration with Katie Nicoll Baines (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Manager, Future Leaders Fellows Development Network) and Charlotte Bonner-Evans (Mentoring Partnership Manager), the recommendations/ suggestions emerging from the workshop will be fed into the continuous improvement of the FLFDN Leadership mentoring programme, and provide useful material for the mentoring toolkit that FLFDN is developing.

Plus Fund Ref: PF027

Team: Regent Lee, Weston Struwe, Louise Slater, Christopher Vogel

Project Start Date: 1 March 2024

Funding: £22550

Summary:
Vision: A boutique consultancy group consisting of FLFs which rivals the top international consultancy firms.

Mission: This consultancy service will tackle challenges that require interdisciplinary expertise and access to world-leading academic and industry experts. We will provide a seamless pipeline to manage the consultancy service: from client to expertise matching, contracts and administration.

Context: The FLF cohorts represent a unique pool of diverse talent, each with expertise in delivering interdisciplinary research. The collective depth and breadth of the FLFs’ expertise is ideally positioned to solve complex and diverse problems that require cognitive diversities and an interdisciplinary approach. There are clear and tested business models based on consultancy services.

Key Features:
• Brand recognition: A unique market positioning by leveraging the FLF ‘brand’.
• Operational pipeline: We will develop central pipeline to administer all stages of the consultancy service.
• Pre-negotiated commercial terms: simplifies and streamlines the negotiation process for all stakeholders.
• Demand and expertise matching: Expertise (assets) within the consultancy group is defined and curated (based on the
voluntary data provided by each FLFs);  A client’s project brief will be analysed and a FLF team will be designed based on the project requirements and matched to the project

Deliverables from the Plus Fund: This project has the grand ambition to promote the wider role of the FLF Developmental Network. Successful establishment of the proposed FLF consultancy service will contribute to building (inter)national leadership and catalyse the development of entrepreneurship among the FLFs.

Plus Fund Ref: PF028

Team: Miranda Sheild Johansson

Project Start Date: 4 March 2024

Funding: £22200

Summary: The project will support young scholars working on tax in Bolivia, through scholarships, training and mentorship. The expertise built within the research team (the PI, the RF and the Bolivian partners) will then engage with, and extend, the existing knowledge within the wider Development Network on best practice of international collaborations.

This project has three main objectives:
1) To foster innovative, local scholarly work in Bolivia on the sociality of tax through the support of young scholars, thereby enriching this area of work and ensuring it is developed by scholars from across the globe.
2) To build expertise on international collaboration within the FLF research team and the Bolivian partners.
3) To engage with, and extend, current expertise within the FLF Development Network on best practice in international collaboration to promote new learning and add value within the network.

Plus Fund Ref: PF029

Team: Zoe Mildon, Nathan Mayne

Project Start Date: 1 May 2024

Funding: £24400

Summary: This project has been inspired by heartfelt conversations with several FLFs about the pressures and expectations they felt were placed on them by others and those they placed on themselves. In some cases, these were so extreme the FLFs had seriously considered walking away from their fellowship and research altogether, despite the freedom, prestige, and flexibility of the scheme.  

We know from UKRI diversity data that, in general, people who are marginalised by one or more characteristic (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, religion, or disability) are less likely to apply for and win large research grants or fellowships. FLFs seem to be more equitable in terms of the demographics of applicants and awardees. Unlike an evaluation project, we aim to explore the lived experiences of FLFs from Rounds 1-6 and find out whether those experiences are influenced by holders having one or more protected characteristics. 

Our findings will shed light on how individual FLFs have navigated uncertainty and leading themselves and their teams through the course of their fellowship. We hope that this provides a community of peer support that will extend beyond the limit of this project. 

Plus Fund Ref: PF030R

Team: Laura Carter, Laura Pallett, Laura Wolz

Project Start Date: 1 May 2024

Funding: £14421

Summary:

We are three Laura’s (who also happen to be mothers) who met and connected at an FLF Development Network Leadership retreat in 2023. During the retreat conversation covered our experiences as mothers in academia and how we had ‘escaped’ from our immediate caring responsibilities to attend the event. Conversation covered many of the common ‘positives and negatives’ associated with support provisions to help enable/facilitate/promote the careers of those balancing career and caring in our various Institutions/Departments. 

The transition period from an ECR or Research Fellow to permanent academics often coincides with having young children which can make this challenging professional period even more complicated. Similarly caring responsibilities for elder parents often coincides with the early to mid-career transition.  

This is often a crucial time in an academic career to develop an internationally visible profile. To enable this travel is essential – we need to participate in events/ workshops/ meetings/ interviews/ viva examinations etc. Despite some progress in the right direction, for example the implementation of policies from major grant funders (e.g. Wellcome Trust/UKRI/Royal Society) to recoup childcare costs, the provision of on-site creches at many conferences (e.g IUIS, UKRI Annual Meeting), and the introduction of some small grants for carers (e.g. British Society for Immunology) – we believe carers still face many hurdles.  

To allow us to call on Universities, funders and learned societies to invest appropriately in dependent care responsibilities we need evidence of the scale of the problem. Is this a national, sector wide issue as we suspect. Therefore, this proposal seeks to design and implement a comprehensive survey to capture data/evidence pertaining to the awareness of policies for carers, the current policies in place to support caring responsibilities in academic careers and obstacles in obtaining support for caring in the academic setting. 

Plus Fund Ref: PF031R

Team: Maria Chiara Arno, Amit Kumar, Amanda Jarvis, Lethy Krishnan Jagadamma, Josh Makepeace, Stephen Wallace, Alexander Forse, Alison Garden, Ana Jorge Sobrido, Clare Mahon

Project Start Date: 1 January 2025

Funding: £24400

Summary: As the world pledges to achieve Net Zero by 2050, chemists and chemical industries face significant challenges for rapidly developing new sustainable methods to produce/store fuels/energy, chemicals and materials from renewable feedstocks, and to upcycle waste such as plastics and CO2. To solve problems of such broad nature requires wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and complementary expertise and infrastructure. The vision of this project is to develop a network of chemists, material scientists and engineers to join forces in developing solutions to the challenges of Net Zero.

Plus Fund Ref: PF032

Team: Beth Mills, Sofia Ferreira-Gonzalez, Hannah Griffiths

Project Start Date: 1 July 2024

Funding: £13824

Summary: We propose to capitalise on the knowledge and experiences of peers within the FLF programme to develop a dynamic “lab manifesto” web-resource. This will enable a plug-and-play approach to selecting the appropriate core values across research culture/values/EDI of the research team to populate a manifesto for the research group. This could form part of the “welcome package” for new FLFs and be available as a toolkit on the FLFDN Website. The purpose of the manifesto will be to enable smooth on-boarding of team members, recognising the responsibilities of each member, setting expectations and the tone for the research team. The manifesto will be buildable and tuneable by an individual PI or research team to ensure it is in alignment with their group values and encompassing of discipline specific requirements/scenarios (e.g. emotionally challenging research topics, field work, industry collaboration etc – to be identified as part of the funded programme of work). This will be a practical, usable toolkit for use by FLFs, and it will be integrated into the EDI toolkits currently being developed by the FLFDN, hosted on the FLFDN webpage.  

Plus Fund Ref: PF033

Team: Sarah Dempsey, Fedra Zaribaf

Project Start Date: 14 October 2024

Funding: £24860

Summary: Our vision for this Plus Fund project is grow the next generation of strategic leaders, and to strengthen the offering of the FLF DevNet to current and future business hosted fellows. We will achieve this by working with the FLF DevNet to develop and disseminate a career development toolkit to help business-hosted Fellows hone their innovation, commercialisation and entrepreneurial skills, needed for taking a strategic role in their organisation/industry. The toolkit is built upon UKRI’s recently launched Research Skills and Innovation Framework, which has recently been expanded to include these three skills.

Plus Fund Ref: PF035

Team: Rowland Seymour, Tyler Kelly, Linda Cremonesi, James Lea, Daniel Herring

Project Start Date: 1 January 2025

Funding: £24981

Summary: Research culture in STEM fails to fully support LGBTQ+ researchers. The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on DEI in STEM found that LGBTQ+ researchers are underrepresented in science (APPG on DEI in STEM, 2023). In 2021, the APPG recommended the STEM sector to be better coordinated in removing `structural inequity’ and that ‘career development … is brought to the fore’ (APPG on DEI in STEM, 2021). 

The aim of this project is to cultivate and coordinate change in STEM’s research culture, and a develop a leadership team of Fellows who can continue leading this change for the next generation of researchers. We have formulated two work streams focused on cultivating and coordinating positive change for LGBTQ+ researchers in mathematics and statistics, as well as STEM more broadly.  

Plus Fund Ref: PF036

Team: Tatyana Shelkovnikova, Rebecca Beveridge, Philip Pearce, Francesco Aprile, Alice Pyne, Daniel Cole, Halim Kusumaatmaja, Janet Kumita

Project Start Date: 1 June 2025

Funding: £23650

Summary: Biomolecular condensates are cell structures formed via phase separation of biological macromolecules. They are emerging as critical organisers of cellular metabolism and key drivers in numerous diseases. The condensate concept integrates the molecule-scale and systems-biology dimensions and provides a framework for holistic studies of biological phenomena, having led to a paradigm shift in biology in recent years, also paving a path for synthetic biology developments. 

Multiple FLFs, across all rounds and many disciplines, are involved in what we called “condensate-applicable research (CAR)” – applying an array of theoretical and experimental approaches to improve the understanding of dynamic condensate systems and ultimately, harness their power to fuel basic biology, biomedical and synthetic biology discoveries. 

Recognising that biocondensates is a fast-growing area of research and innovation worldwide, it is a prime time to bring together the UK-based researchers working in this space. This creates a unique opportunity for UKRI Future Leader Fellows to drive the establishment, development and maintenance of the UK condensate network. 

This project aims to accelerate the development of a UK-wide network of excellence in CAR, with FLFs at its core, in partnership with other stakeholders in this highly interdisciplinary field. In particular, supported by the Plus Funds, the applicants will organise key CAR events, creating a framework for supporting interdisciplinary collaborations across FLF cohorts, with other UKRI-funded researchers, and beyond. This project will provide a springboard for the UK condensate network and help it maintain momentum, ensuring its sustained role in providing the opportunities for career development, leadership and engagement in policy-making in this future-facing research area.