From Ideas to Action: introducing and developing our Research Culture Pillar groups

Enhancing our Research Culture is an institutional strategic priority and researchers from across the university recently came together to discuss our eight Pillars of Research Culture and how they might evolve from being support and interest groups to being action groups.

The eight pillars were identified after an awayday in January 2025 in which 60 professional services and research based colleagues from across the university were asked for their view on what a great university research culture would look like.

Although excellent research cultures already exist across the university, it was thought that some activities were naturally best coordinated and more likely to achieve a critical mass if a university wide interest group could be formed. Each of the Research Culture Pillars has at least one lead or chair whose role is to bring together cross-university communities of researchers and associated staff to provide support and address key concerns in their areas.

A small amount of funding (£3K to £5K) from Research England has been allocated to the Pillars to support their activities. On January 23rd 2026, we brought together all eight pillar leads, and 40 Research leads and stakeholders from across the university to hear the plans for the pillars, to discuss how they will feed into future research culture initiatives, and how these in turn will help us illustrate and explain our excellent research culture in a future REF SPRE return. The session started with an introduction by Prof Vikas Kumar, the DVC R&I about our research Culture and REF 2029 ambitions. Lisa Rhodes, University Training and Research Culture manager, then introduced the day through an overview of current progress within the pillars, with a reminder of what good research culture looks like within the university. Research leads from across the university including ADR&Is, AHR&Is, UoA coordinators and others then attended a ‘carousel’ of discussions led by the pillar leads. These sessions focussed on indicators of good practice in each pillar, and importantly, what evidence could be gathered to show or demonstrate this. After a quick coffee and networking break, this was followed up with a session on identifying current evidence gaps and what the priority actions should be for each pillar.

The half day workshop ended with a summary of the next steps for each of the pillars and how updated pillar action plans will shortly be published, with delivery and follow events being held from March.