Research & Innovation Services

UKRI Cross-Research Council Call 2024 Networking events 

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) will be launching round 2 of their cross-research council responsive mode pilot scheme in 2024, offering grants from £200k - £1.2M. The 2023 scheme details can be found here. Ahead of this funding call, the SRI team will be hosting a series of networking events to bring together the University of Glasgow research community across disciplines and ways of working. 

In the first of these we will highlight the key details of the call, facilitate cross-disciplinary discussions to explore new inter-disciplinary ideas and host an informal networking session. 

Tuesday, 20 February 2024, 13:00-16:00 at the Researcher Development Suite in the ARC - You can secure your place here.

At this event will be also hearing from members of the Interdisciplinary Assessment College for Round 1 of this call and incorporating feedback from our 2023 events to ensure you get the most value out of this time.

At registration you will be asked a few questions about your current research interests and expertise. This will allow us to facilitate key conversations. To take full advantage we encourage you to attend the event in full.  Please note that we will close bookings at noon on the 15^th February 2024.

Further events 

Follow up sessions are planned for Wednesday, 20 March 2024 - 10:00-12:00 and Thursday, 25 April 2024 - 13:00-16:00.

Please also note that filming/ photography will take place at this event for promotional purposes. The photographs and recordings made are likely to appear on our website and social media. If you would prefer not to be photographed/filmed, please let the photographer/ videographer know.

This event is part of the SpARC initiative: A new programme of activities delivered in partnership between Research Services and the ARC to encourage and support the ideation and development of new research and collaborations.

UKRI Building a Secure and Resilient World

• Tuesday 23 January – Supply chains / technologies for security (Booking link via Eventbrite)
• Thursday 8 February – Global order /  behavioural and cultural resilience (Booking link via Eventbrite)

*Pilot cohort now complete*

Dipping a toe in interdisciplinary waters is a new pilot programme designed to support a small cohort of scholars from SHAPE disciplines to explore their interdisciplinary understanding and practice. 

Time commitment:

Applicants will commit to attending four in-person half-day sessions between February – March 2024: 

• 9.30 – 12.30, Wednesday 21 February (workshop 1) – Studio 2, ARC
• 9.30 – 12.30, Wednesday 6 March (workshop 2) – Studio 2, ARC
• 9.30 – 12.30, Wednesday 20 March (interdisciplinary networking session with wider group of colleagues from across UofG) -- Researcher Development Suite, ARC
• 9.30 – 12.30, Wednesday 27 March (workshop 3) – Researcher Development Suite, ARC

Aims and rationale:

As a research community, we are increasingly seeing funding calls that span multiple research councils and/or explicitly require interdisciplinary teams. This has been great for highlighting the importance of collaborative working, and we have made huge strides in supporting people who feel ready to come together in reaction to specific calls. This programme is aiming to answer a different question: How to support colleagues who may be “interdisciplinary-curious” to explore the concept of interdisciplinarity, before asking them to commit large amounts of time to collaborative funding bids?

The Dipping a toe.. programme is not about interdisciplinary bid-writing, or pitching your ideas to potential collaborators. Instead, it’s about providing time and space to think about interdisciplinarity as a concept; the different perspectives, assumptions and insecurities we bring from our “home” disciplines; our own journey in collaborating with others; and where we want to develop our skills. 

We want to think about the types of questions that working in our disciplines allows us to ask, and how these inform the ways in which we might contribute to, or benefit from, interdisciplinary research. As part of this work, we hope to think more deeply about how we move beyond arts, humanities and social sciences as the “poor relation” or bolt on area in interdisciplinary projects. 

We’ll use small group discussions and activities to explore these issues. We will ask you to share reflections and to join in activities with an open mind, but we won’t ask you to stand up and present anything in front of a group. 

This programme is designed to be of interest to you if…

• You know there are opportunities for interdisciplinary research, but are uncertain about what your role might be in this sort of project;
• You have been interested in interdisciplinary calls in the past, but lacked the confidence to put yourself forward as part of a team;
• You sometimes feel uncertain or insecure about how others might “judge” your discipline or methods; 
• You’re interested in exploring interdisciplinarity, but genuinely don’t know if this is something you would enjoy or be “good” at.  

The programme is open to all career stages post-PhD, from PDRAs to Professors. We welcome applications from those with no practical experience of interdisciplinary research, and from those with some experience who want to reflect on and deepen their practice. This programme is not aimed at researchers who already have significant experience of leading interdisciplinary work.

The intended outcomes include…

• Be better able to articulate, and feel more confident in explaining, your own potential contribution to interdisciplinary projects;
• Have a better understanding of why some aspects of interdisciplinary research may feel challenging to you, and where you are willing (or not) to invest your time and energy;
• Better understand some of the assumptions and dynamics of interdisciplinary research, and explore potential ways of working through these;
• Develop new connections with a small network of SHAPE researchers interested in exploring the possibilities for interdisciplinary research.

Participants will be expected to….

• Commit to three half day (in person) workshops, attend a “practical” networking session, and carry out a small amount of reflection between sessions;
• Be willing to reflect on your own experiences and actively participate in the sessions;
• Be open to listening to others’ experiences, including where these experiences differ from your own.

Application process and timeline:

This is a pilot project, so spaces are limited.

Applications were handled through Inkpath.

Please note:  we strongly encourage applications from people who have limited or no involvement in funded interdisciplinary research projects. If that is you, please do apply. “Experience” here might also include being part of interdisciplinary reading groups, attending cross-college networking events, being interested in interdisciplinary calls but not pursuing for whatever reason, or simply being curious/ intimidated by the current focus on interdisciplinarity.

In August 2023, the Strategic Research Initiatives Team hosted a Research Development Workshop to support our research community to prepare for several calls on the funding horizon linked to infectious diseases. Based on the feedback from that event, we are pleased to announce a programme of five research development workshops over November and December 2023, focussed on the questions our research community expressed the most interest in, in the formats they identified as being most useful, and with unlimited amounts of our best attempt at good coffee (we hear you and we will do our best).

Please sign up for as many of these sessions as you like (you need to register for each one separately), and there is no need for you to have attended the August event. All of these are open to every member of our research community.

• Research Development Workshop - How do we incorporate inequalities and equitable partnership into infectious disease research (both as factors affecting disease dynamics and the delivery of research programmes themselves)?

Date/Time: 15 November 2023 from 10:00 - 12:00

Venue: Researcher Development Suite, Advanced Research Centre

Includes: Facilitated table discussions focussed on a key question and informal networking

• Research Development Workshop - How are infectious diseases affected by climate change?

Date/Time: 28 November 2023 from 09:00 - 12:00

Venue: Researcher Development Suite, Advanced Research Centre

Includes: Facilitated table discussions focussed on a key question and informal networking

• Research Development Workshop - Why do diseases appear/outbreak when and where they do?

Date/Time: 28 November 2023 from 13:00-16:00

Venue: Researcher Development Suite, Advanced Research Centre

Includes: Facilitated table discussions focussed on a key question and informal networking

• Research Development Workshop - How can we better understand people's behaviour in response to disease threats/predictions and what impacts those responses have on disease spread?

Date/Time: 05 December 2023 from 13:00-16:00

Venue: Studio 2, Advanced Research Centre

Includes: Facilitated table discussions focussed on a key question and informal networking

• Funding Call Briefing and Brainstorming Session: Horizon Europe Call - Host-pathogen interactions of infectious diseases with epidemic potential.

Date/Time: 14 December 2023 from 10:00-12:00

Venue: Researcher Development Suite, Advanced Research Centre and on zoom

Includes: Insights into EU infectious disease calls from one of our researchers who sits on the panel and an overview of the support available to you from UofG teams to develop an EU funding application followed by discussions focussed on the call topic.

Note: This session is designed in response to the live EU call on the noted topic. We expect to host more sessions on specific calls as details become available. That being said, this session is open to everyone, even if they are not planning an application to this specific call.

All five events are part of the SpARC initiative: A programme of activities delivered in partnership between Research Services and the ARC to encourage and support the ideation and development of new research and collaborations

UKRI announced a new cross-research council responsive mode pilot scheme, designed to support breakthrough or disruptive interdisciplinary ideas not routinely funded through existing UKRI responsive mode schemes.

In preparation for the launch of this pilot scheme, we convened a series of facilitated networking events to bring together academics from across the University with the aim of exploring new research ideas that could lead to interdisciplinary research collaborations.

We hosted three open networking events over March and April, where we highlighted the key details of the call, facilitated cross-disciplinary discussions to explore new inter-disciplinary ideas and enabled informal networking sessions. Thereafter, we also hosted six thematic networking events on the basis of key research themes that emerged from the earlier session. 

Thematic networking events

In May, we hosted three in-person sessions to enable parallel thematic discussion and networking events on six different and deliberately broad themes. These events, held in Studio 2 in the ARC, were open to researchers, with interests in these themes, who might be considering an application to the UKRI Cross-Council Call or other funding opportunities. 

These events have developed as part of our SpARC initiative designed to provide support for accelerating research collaboration. This is a new programme of activities delivered in partnership between Research Services and the ARC to encourage and support the ideation and development of new research and collaborations.