The new role will provide leadership of work to identify existing barriers and challenges and address them through design and evaluation of a new open process to foster research collaboration in the health research community. This role is part of a broader ambition to deliver the University’s commitment to ensuring a positive research culture for all its staff and driving continuous improvement in research quality across all areas of research activity.

Ian will contribute to this ambition through building research ideas and developing collaborations in ways that pay due attention to considerations that the research community think may benefit from improvement.

The expected outputs from the role include design, implementation and evaluation of an open research process to inform current practices as well as a clear understanding of whether the process works well, what can be done to improve it, and how it would feed into a foundation for future design of funding processes or innovative approaches.

Ian said: “I’m excited to start work on this role – I’ll be working on ways to ensure that our funding applications are transparent and open, improving the diversity of our research teams and ultimately increasing the quality of our interdisciplinary projects by emphasising values of open team science and inclusivity.

“I’d be very open to hearing ideas from the research community on these topics, and there is flexible funding available to support work in this area. Please don’t hesitate to contact me directly.”

Contact Ian: i.s.penton-voak@bristol.ac.uk