Enhancing Research Culture projects 2026 to 2027

For 2026 to 2027, the Enhancing Research Cultures Fund has supported ten projects in the Research Cultures stream with £144,962 of Enhancing Research Cultures funding received from Research England.

This amount forms part of an allocation provided to LJMU to develop and initiate activities to ensure the research system is made of talented and diverse skills, working in an environment that nurtures and empowers everyone to do their best.

Another six projects were supported in the Bid Development stream.

Academic and professional staff were invited to submit Research Culture stream, applications by open call. The following projects were selected for funding:

Enabling Opportunities in Astrophysics

Team: Gavin Lamb

Summary: This project matches LJMU undergraduate students who are in, or entering, their final year with researchers at the Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) for a six-week paid summer internship. Aimed at underrepresented groups in STEM and first-generation students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, it offers access to research experience that is often unpaid or out of reach elsewhere in the UK.

The programme brings immediate research benefits and supports interns into future industry or academic careers. The interns develop professional research skills, build confidence in meetings and presentations, and contribute to live research. They produce a report and present their work at a Research Interns Symposium attended by ARI faculty and PhD students. The projects also give researchers, particularly early-career researchers such as PDRAs and Fellows, the chance to test new ideas, progress long-term work, and gain experience in mentoring junior colleagues.

The First Step on the Doctoral Ladder: An immersive induction for enhancing culture and community

Team: Emma Ball, Michael Monaghan, Scott Foster, Ellen Dawson, Simon Roberts, and Graeme Close

Summary: Doctoral students join LJMU from diverse backgrounds and typically enrol in October, February or June, meeting a wide range of induction activities in their first week. This can lead to information overload and offers limited opportunity for sustained peer engagement.

Extending undergraduate induction principles from research by Ball (2025), the programme aims to improve doctoral transitions, build autonomy and foster lasting peer and supervisory relationships. The project will co-design and deliver an immersive, peer-mentor-led induction programme over three to four days. Using an enquiry-based learning approach, it will simulate the academic and structural stages of the doctoral journey, supported by trained doctoral peer mentors and input from LJMU Professional Services. The team aims to scale the model into an institution-wide programme for all doctoral students, irrespective of research pathway.

Research Storytelling: A pilot initiative for interdisciplinary collaboration

Team: Xinrui Wang, Denise Lee, Dominic Wilkinson, Gemma Reed, and Alex Robinson

Summary: Research at LJMU is often organised within disciplinary boundaries, and students can have limited access to live research beyond formal teaching. This pilot will bring researchers and students together to interpret and communicate research across disciplines, starting with collaboration between the School of Engineering and Built Environment and the School of Art and Creative Industries. By making complex research more accessible, the pilot aims to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration, support knowledge exchange and seed future joint proposals, providing a scalable model for other Schools and research themes.

Researchers propose topics that would benefit from creative interpretation. Interdisciplinary teams of mainly undergraduate and postgraduate students then work with academic mentors to explore them through visual narratives, conceptual outputs, physical models, and short research films, supported by workshops and training in research communication. The project will culminate in showcase events for the LJMU community and external audiences, including industry partners, local communities and the wider public.

Research Roasters: Extending our reach and monitoring our impact

Team: Zoe Knowles, Krisztina Rudolf, Samanvita Ravikanti, Alexandros Amorginos, Zainab Mahmood, and Ellen Johnston

Summary: Research Roasters is a postgraduate researcher (PGR)-led programme that brings research into informal community settings. It began in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences in 2023 and expanded across the Faculty of Health, Innovation, Technology and Science in 2025–26. Holding public events in a coffee shop next to campus, it has attracted more than 450 bookings and enabled LJMU PGRs to develop communication skills and gain new perspectives on how their work is relevant in Merseyside.

The programme was commended in the 2024 Pro Vice-Chancellor for RKE Awards and has informed external activity, including a Biochemical Society Outreach Grant. This funding award will scale the programme sustainably across both faculties, strengthen governance, support researcher development, and capture impact. It will also complete an academic paper and open-access toolkit so that others can replicate the model.

What does 'Research Culture' mean to PGRs? What we know and what we think we know

Team: Katherine Stephan, Victoria Sheppard, Cath Dishman, and Scott Foster

Summary: The project will hold a series of PGR focus groups to explore what PGRs understand by research culture, what LJMU does well and what it could do better. An additional focus group with supervisors will test whether the two groups share an understanding. Findings will feed into current and future PGR action plans and inform the broader research culture and strategy planning across LJMU.

The LJMU Pan-Faculty Innovation Cluster: Dismantling silos between BEST, GERI, LiRICS, and ARI through co-innovation

Team: Ana Bras, Andy Shaw, Iacopo Carnacina, Ibijoke Idowu, Kurannen Baaki, James Ren, Colm Bowe, Christos Kontovas, and Ian McCarthy

Summary: This institutional pilot aims to build new discovery research connections between four LJMU research institutes: the Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Research Institute (BEST), General Engineering Research Institute (GERI), the Liverpool Research Institute for Climate and Sustainability (LiRICS) and the Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI). It is delivering a three-phase intervention, based in Silo Mapping, a Pan-University Co-Innovation Lab, and Outreach Excellence, to review how university research processes ensure value for society and for how individuals work together.

It will reimagine the annual BEST Research Summit as a Pan-University Co-Innovation Hub where ‘Implementation Stations’ of early career researchers and research assistants lead interdisciplinary teams that combine resilient infrastructure, drone technologies, behaviour change and climate action strategies, and data science and supercomputer simulation to tackle complex regional challenges. The project will deliver a university-wide toolkit for embedding innovation ecosystems across faculties.

Bridging the Gap: Supporting the transition from funding to project delivery

Team: Laura Bellinger and Alessandra Messeder

Summary: Receiving an award is the point at which a proposal's ambitions must become delivery, and Project Leads are often faced, sometimes for the first time, with contracts, staff recruitment, budget management, and compliance requirements. This project will standardise the pathway from pre-award to post-award while remaining flexible to different activities. Led by Research and Innovation Services, the project will map existing award set-up processes, identifying inefficiencies and proposing improvements. The key outcome will be a unified ‘one-stop-shop’ resource for Project Leads, including structured kick-off meeting agendas, funder-specific guidance, and workflow maps showing how support functions interact.

Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement: Preparation, readiness and practice (PPIE-PREP)

Team: Tracy Branagan, Kehinde Ross, and Avril Rowley

Summary: PPIE-PREP is a practical training development project to strengthen staff capability to build, manage and sustain high-quality patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) partnerships in research.

Expertise often sits with individuals, varies by School and is not yet consistently shared across the institution. The project responds by developing five short, modular training modules, drawing on two cross-faculty case studies: participatory bioscience research in the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences and participatory education and community-based research in the School of Education.

Strategies for People: Research enablers and EDI

Team: Olatunde Durowoju and Ria Cheyne

Summary: Research enablers are staff who manage, support or facilitate research. Their decisions shape how research is managed, how people are supported, and how individuals engage with each other. This project aims to enhance how LJMU's research enablers reflect on and engage with Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). It speaks to REF 2029's emphasis on valuing everyone who undertakes, enables or supports research across academic, professional, technical and doctoral roles.

The team will carry out 30 interviews with research enablers to identify existing internal and external resources and good practice. The project will produce a report and recommendations for Research and Innovation Services, and a roadmap for embedding EDI into research support processes, including supporting research enablers to work more effectively with researchers with protected characteristics.

Data capture to improve understanding of the socio-cultural backgrounds of ECRs from non-Western cultures and co-creation to enhance global research landscape competence

Team: Amos Fatokun, Bukola Fatokun, and Yomi Benson

Summary: This project aims to understand how the socio-cultural backgrounds of early-career researchers (ECRs), including postdocs and PGRs from overseas non-Western cultures, shape their lived experiences in the UK and the outcomes of their training.

Building on a previously successful Diversity and Inclusion project, the team will add research-relevant scenarios to an existing collection of animations and gather qualitative and quantitative data on the experiences of UK- and overseas-originated ECRs. They will also follow nine postdocs from Asia, South America and Africa, who are beginning training at LJMU, across their whole training cycle to understand how their needs compare with those of UK-originated postdocs.