Grants Awarded to the Centre

PI: Dr Christin Henein 

Start date: 1 September 2024 

Co-Investigators: Aikaterini Fotopoulou (UCL), Anna Cox (UCL), Simona Aimar (UCL), Naaheed Mukadam (UCL), Natalie Marchant (UCL).  

Aims and objectives: 

This study targets: (1) internal selection and preselection processes at universities, which lack the transparency of external funding processes; (2) inequalities in internal grant selection that affect early career researchers due to subjective over objective judgments, impacting career trajectories; and (3) disparities in grant processes for alternative careers in industry, enterprise, and innovation sectors. 

The primary research question is: "How can internal (pre)selection processes for research funding and key career decisions (e.g., prize nominations, industry knowledge exchange) be redesigned to minimize bias and better support marginalized early career researchers?" 

The aim of this project is to develop and implement fairer, more transparent internal preselection, selection, and nomination processes for research funding that address the challenges faced by marginalized researchers, especially in early career stages. Using the FBS as a case study and FAAH as validating environment, this project seeks to develop equitable processes adaptable across UCL and the wider academic and discovery sectors. 

Specific objectives include: 

1. Existing System Mapping: Review prior studies and collaborate with stakeholders to identify disparities in information, resource access, and support, and map potential biases in social promotion (using social network analysis for internal research prizes and grants). 

2. Amplifying Silent Voices: Use qualitative methods like focus groups and interviews with marginalized ECRs and other key stakeholders, including those who have left academia. 

3. Co-design and Implementation: Utilize findings from (1) and (2), along with existing literature and partnerships with research, culture, and EDI networks, to co-design, implement, and evaluate interventions to reduce these biases and disparities. 

Co-Production Collective PI: Aikaterini Fotoupoulou, a.fotopoupoulou@ucl.ac.uk

Team: Tom Plender (FND Action Charity); Georgia Pavlopoulou (UCL); Venessa Bobb-Sway (A2ndVoice); Christin Henein (UCL); Dawn Golder (FND Hope); Michael Moutoussis (UCL); Natalie Marchant (UCL); Indy Sira (Voices of Colour).

Summary of proposal:

The project is led by an inter-disciplinary collective of UCL researchers and clinicians, also leading the newly founded Centre for Equality Research in Bran Sciences, and dedicated to promoting equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in mental and neurological health research. This project aims to collaboratively develop and evaluate a co-production approach to strategic, inclusive decision-making in mental health and wellbeing research. Towards realising this aim, the project team includes partners with representatives from, and allies of, minority and marginalised communities of people with lived, or living, experience of mental health and related areas of intersectionality, such as neurodiversity, and co-produced the proposed project, with the following objectives:

(i) Co-produce strategic priorities/themes for the centre, particularly for key grant applications (‘Doing Together’)

(ii) Co-evaluate our shared learning from the process of co-production (‘Learning by Doing Together’)

(iii) Co-disseminate, together with the Co-Production Collective, our reflective guidelines (‘Sharing and Beaconing together’).

UCL Grand Challenge Justice & Equality Special Initiative 2023-24 PI: Natalie Marchant, n.marchant@ucl.ac.uk

Team: Anna Cox (UCL), Aikaterini Fotoupoulou (UCL), Lynis Lewis (NOCLOR), Ione Fraser (community collaborator), Lorraine Cezair-Phillip (community collaborator), Naheed Mukadam (UCL), Jabeer Butt (Race Equality Foundation), Harpreet Sihre (UCL).

This project aims to make dementia research more inclusive by creating a roadmap for inclusive recruitment practices that addresses the challenges experienced by researchers and ethnically minoritized communities using co-production methods.

Greater participation of ethnically-minoritized groups in dementia research is urgently needed to understand the reasons for differences in vulnerability and survival, and to provide better interventions. It is imperative to know what barriers ethnically-minoritized communities experience that prevent their participation in dementia research projects. It is also necessary to know what barriers researchers experience that prevent them from using inclusive recruitment practices. Knowing how to work collaboratively with multiple stakeholders will improve inclusive recruitment practices.

Equity in human research means that research studies are conducted with a diverse population that represents the true demographics of the people who have the disease in the “real world.”