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An Academic in the World was a series of four half-day workshops ran as 2 day events on 22nd March and 23rd April 2010. The idea for the series of workshops arose out of outcomes of a previous White Rose residential event, “Making your Impact in Academia” aimed at research staff in Arts in Social Science.

Developing research funding applications is a multi-stage process including; refining the question and methods, finding collaborators, identifying appropriate funding sources, knowing what makes a successful application and who to get advice from, costing the bid and writing the application form. This project seeks to address some of these stages. The specific objectives are: 1. To create a series of short video clips/ audio recordings featuring staff from Department of Health Sciences, covering: • Features of successful applications. These will spotlight on senior staff who are panel members for some of the major health research funding bodies. • Staff experiences of applying for external funding. These will contain reflections of staff who have applied for research funding, both successful and unsuccessful. These resources will be stored on the Health Sciences Staff Intranet (on a web page dedicated to the project) with links from both research and teaching related pages. An online survey will give people who access the resource an opportunity to feedback their views on its usefulness. 2. To establish a Learning Set of early to mid career research staff to facilitate the development of skills in writing research funding applications. Early to mid career researchers will present research ideas to the learning set for discussion or commenting on applications in progress. The group would meet once a month and maintain an email list of members that could be contacted for advice when needed. The project team will be supported by two senior members of staff (Karen Bloor and Karen Spilsbury) and has been approved by Head of Department (Professor Christine Godfrey) and Chair of Departmental Research Committee (Professor Nicky Cullum).

Skills Forge is a single website containing a range of modules to help track and organise research postgraduate activity. It has three key themes: 1. Reflecting on skills (currently based on the Joint Skills Statement, moving over to the Research Development Framework in Summer 2010) including research management, covering; designing systems for collating information, identifying and accessing bibliographic resources and other relevant information, and using IT appropriately for database management and recording or presenting information. 2. Identifying and recording development activities. 3. Supervisory and progression monitoring processes.

The University of York has committed to the Concordat and to the provision of impactful, useful training for research staff. Using the CROS data and longitudinal follow up surveys on two of our biggest (White Rose) programmes we tested this assertion. The details below describe how we triangulated these different forms of evaluation to develop confidence that what we are doing is of high quality.

Applications are invited from individual and teams of doctoral researchers at Durham University responsible for organizing short-term, well-defined conferences and events of a subject-specific, interdisciplinary or generic nature. Applicants submit an application form in which they are asked to describe their proposed project, explain its relevance for the potential audience, justify the expenditure requested and provide a time-line for the completion of the project. The maximum level of award is £1000 per conference or event and although funding can be used for most purposes, it cannot be used for providing travel bursaries for attendance. In addition to funding, Graduate School can also provide: • project management support • equipment on loan, including poster boards, flip charts and delegate name badges As a condition of the award, successful applicants are required to write a short report after the event or conference. There are three submission deadlines for the year, in late October, January and April. Applications are considered three times per year by a ‘Graduate School Conference and Event Grants Panel’ and the results published two weeks after the submission date. Doctoral researchers who wish to submit an application must discuss their ideas and submission with their supervisor(s) and/or colleges.