Vitae Impact, Culture and Engagement (ICE) Awards Criteria and Nomination process

Vitae 2023 award winners
The 2023 Vitae ICE Award winners

Nominations for the 2024 Vitae ICE Awards have now CLOSED

Following a successful inaugural year, we are delighted to be running the Vitae Impact, Culture, and Engagement (ICE) Awards again in 2024. The final awards ceremony will be held on Monday 23 September as part of the Vitae International Researcher Development Conference Gala dinner at The Rep, Birmingham, UK. 

If there is a colleague you feel is demonstrating impactful work and should be recognised, we encourage you to read the information below, and then submit a nomination using our short form.  

Nominations have closed.

How to make a nomination  

  1. Identify which category to nominate for (full criteria below). It is worth considering this carefully as the judges will review nominations against the specific criteria.

  2. Speak to the nominee about the nomination. Although we know you may wish to surprise your colleague, we do ask that nominees are made aware of the nomination and are happy for you to share their details.

  3. Write your supporting statement. The nomination form includes space for a 400-word (maximum) supporting statement. In this, please share with us why you are nominating this person/group, including details of what they have done and when, and what the impact has been. Please include details of how this nomination meets the awards criteria. 

  4. Identify someone to be a secondary supporter of the nomination. This might be another colleague or someone from a different institution who supports the nomination. 

  5. Submit your nomination via the form!  

The nomination form should articulate why you are nominating the person or team in question and make the case for why you think they should be acknowledged by the community via this award. The community panel will seek to understand what the nominee/s have done and how their work has made an impact. 

If you were nominated or nominated someone for the Vitae ICE Awards 2023, you may nominate them again; however, please update the nomination to include recent progress.

Award timeline 

  • Wednesday 19 June 2024 at 12 noon GMT+1 – deadline for nominations
  • End of July - Vitae ICE Awards community panel shortlists nominations based on criteria and the shortlist is announced 
  • Early August - Shortlisted nominees are interviewed remotely by the Vitae team to create short videos for the Award ceremony 
  • Mid-September - Vitae ICE Awards judging panel to select winner from shortlisted nominees 
  • Monday 23 September - Awards ceremony

Award Criteria

Newcomer of the year 

Please note this Award is for researcher developers rather than researchers, please do read through our other Award cateorgies to see if your researcher meets the criteria

This award recognises someone early in their researcher development career who has made a significant contribution in their role in a short space of time.  

Nominees may have: 

  • been proactive in engaging with their peers or colleagues to the benefit of researchers or others 
  • demonstrated an exceptional approach to their work, by coming up with novel solutions, ideas and initiatives  
  • had a positive impact on research culture and the researchers in their communities through their work 
Nominees should be within the first 2 years of their career in the development of researchers. 

Outstanding contribution  

This award seeks to recognise and celebrate someone who has made an outstanding contribution to researcher development, delivering a lasting and exceptional impact for their institution and/or the sector as a whole.  

Nominees may have: 

  • played a key role in the researcher development community, leading positive change and delivering impact at an institutional, sector or strategy level  
  • advocated for the value of researcher development, working to influence policy on research culture or related issues 

  • developed programmes or initiatives that engage with and support fellow researcher development professionals  

Innovative and inclusive practice  

This award champions excellent practice within researcher development that demonstrates inventive approaches to complex challenges, and that contributes towards achieving equity of access to researcher development opportunities and support.  

Nominations can be for individuals, groups of people or teams, and examples of practice may include: 

  • work that focuses on removing barriers of access 
  • creating welcoming spaces for collaboration 
  • work that takes an innovative approach to tackling complex issues, such as precarity 
  • engaging with the researcher development community to share examples of innovative and inclusive practice that can be applied more widely 

Research culture impact through researcher development  

This award aims to showcase activities or work within researcher development that has had a positive impact on improving research culture. Nominations can be for individuals, groups of people or teams, and initiatives can be at any scale, from institutional or sector level to smaller scale work focused, for example, on a particular group of researchers.  

The award seeks to recognise examples which demonstrate how researcher development can act as a catalyst for change in research culture, including (but not limited to) the obligations outlined under the Environment and Culture principle of the Researcher Developer Concordat.  

Examples may have already been submitted to The Concordat Platform of Practice and may include: 

  • innovations in the area of equality, diversity and inclusion  
  • the support of researchers wellbeing and mental health  
  • improving collegiality  
  • the facilitation of collaboration or the creation of communities, resulting in improvements to the research environment  

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