UCD Research Culture Local Actions, Initiatives and Measures (ReCLAIM) is supported by the Wellcome Trust through the Institutional Funding for Research Culture grant, ReCLAIM is a seed-funding initiative with UCD Research Culture. The fund supports teams in their exploration of new ideas to foster a positive research environment at UCD -- both locally within their unit or team, and more broadly for wider impact across the university.
Recently, UCD Research Culture hosted the ReCLAIM Round 2 Award Ceremony, celebrating 16 teams awarded with funding under ReCLAIM.
Congratulations to UCD School of Medicine's Round 2 winning project:
'UCD Physiology Research Festival'
Lead PI: Dr Marie-Victoire Guillot-Sestier
Co-PIs: Assoc Professor John Baugh, Mr Darragh Flood, Miss Mia McCalmont
Project Summary:
The Physiology Research Festival is an innovative two-day event aimed at fostering a collaborative and supportive research culture within the UCD Medicine Physiology section. Scheduled for April 2025, it will bring together undergraduate/postgraduate students, researchers, and academic staff to share and discuss ongoing research in an engaging and interactive manner. Stage 4 Undergraduate Students will present the findings of their 10-week research projects with the broader physiology community. Postgraduate students and post-doctoral researchers will present their research in a poster session in hope to promote research collaborations within the section. PhD students will deliver concise, accessible 'My Thesis in 3' talks about their research to introduce undergraduates to various research areas within physiology.
The festival will end with an award ceremony highlighting:
Impact: The festival will enhance community cohesion, promote research collaborations, and create a positive research environment. By involving students early in their academic journey, it seeks to build a supportive network encouraging further studies and research careers in physiology. The festival will celebrate and advance UCD physiology research and potentially inspire other disciplines within the broader UCD community to foster interdisciplinary collaborations.
Round 1 awardees were invited to provide project updates presentations. These included:
Dr Shen Wang - 'Responsible use of GenAI for daily research activities’
Sergey Katsuba - 'The Generator: Post-Doctoral Research in an Interdisciplinary World’,
Dr Megan Welton - ‘Interdisciplinary Early Career Seminar for Medieval Studies’
Professor Thilo Kroll - ‘Enhancing research culture, problem-solving and knowledge translation: Robust evidence synthesis meets innovation through creativity and design thinking’
UCD School of Medicine's Round 1 successful project was:
'Advanced Communication Skills for Research Teams'
Lead PI: Dr Carol Aherne
Co-PIs: Dr Deborah Wallace, Dr Sergio Rey–Keim, Dr Stephen Thorpe
Project Summary:
The School of Medicine (SOM) is interested in facilitating an advanced communications workshop series to work towards building strong relationships within research teams. An anonymous survey was carried out of the SOM graduate students by the SOM Biomedical Research Degree Committee in December 2023, where the 132 graduate students within the school were invited to participate, with a 23.4% response rate. Of those that responded 28% stated they had a poor relationship with their supervisor. Furthermore, 28% stated they did not have a clear plan for their PhD studies and that they felt they could not approach their supervisor for help with their project. This highlights that there is lack of clear, consistent, communication within some research teams that is posing a significant problem for a large population of graduate students in the SOM. Clear and consistent two-way communication is central to maintaining a good research culture within teams. The goal of our proposal is to build confidence in communication within all research team members. They aim to achieve this by hosting facilitated workshops for graduate students, research assistants, postdoctoral fellows and faculty where communication skills for sideways, top-down and bottom-up conversations are taught and practiced. What is unique to our proposal is that we will offer advanced communications workshops tailored to the multiple elements of the research team where practical exercises of learned skills are the focus. This project aims to provide three separate offerings, one for students and research assistants, one for postdoctoral fellows and one for academic faculty.
Congratulations to all the ReCLAIM awardees.