NIHR ARC South London Applied Research Leadership Academy

NIHR ARC South London’s Applied Research Leadership Academy is a place for health and social care professionals, researchers, public involvement members and PhD students from across all 15 NIHR ARCs to come together to learn leadership skills and build their research careers.

ARC event

15 Jan 2025 - 1:00pm - 25 Jun 2025 - 2:00pm

The academy is led by Professor Cilla Harries and aims to enhance the skills and leadership qualities needed to develop successful research careers. Launched in 2022, this year the academy will open to participants from across all 15 NIHR ARCs in England.

Participants will be supported to be more able to:

Reflect on their personal vision for their research career
Develop a deeper understanding of their research leadership qualities
Develop skills to design, and deliver research projects and impact
Understand the value of stepping up for leadership opportunities
Understand how to strategically lead research at local/national/international levels
Understand how to organise, give and receive mentorship/coaching

Elements of the course will include:

Research leader’s journeys: successful research leaders will give talks about their journey and career decisions and will host Q&A.
Skills training: opportunities to learn how to: cost grant applications, manage research finance, project management, rules about applying for specific funding streams.
Leadership qualities development: learn how to build effective collaborations, develop credibility and ensure ethical leadership.
Research in the NHS: navigating the challenges, facilitators and systems
Driving research quality: the Research Excellence Framework (REF)
How to engage diverse and minoritised groups of people in research
Your research: route to impact and developing a theory of change
Individual mentorship/coaching session – 1 hour (including guidance on how to organise the session with the mentor/ mentee yourself).

Key information:

We particularly encourage applications from people from diverse backgrounds.
A briefing session was held in October to provide further information and answer questions (see below).
Please obtain your line manager's approval for your application. A panel will assess applications in November and those that are approved will be notified before the end of the autumn term.

Public members

We offer this course as a free resource and those who feel they can benefit are very welcome to join. There are no entry requirements for members of the public who attend. We welcome people who have ambitions to become research leaders. Please note - this is not a course in how to do research and there is no expectation for public participants to offer advice on how to manage PPI. Unfortunately, we are unable to fund any costs for PPI participants (e.g to attend the academy or to cover carers’ costs, or travel costs).

How the programme will be delivered

The programme will be delivered online and will start on 15 January 2025 concluding with an in-person celebration event on 25 June. The sessions will take place each Wednesday between 1pm – 2pm (excluding half term breaks and Easter). All events will be recorded and shared with the participants. There will be a minimal engagement expectation of 20 hours over the full programme (30 hours). Participants will be asked to complete an evaluation in June 2025.

Register your interest for the 2026 Academy

Read the programme for 2025.

Feedback from participants in 2024

The course was well structured and provided some much needed time for personal reflection both in terms of the lectures and action learning sets.

Academics sharing their personal experiences and journeys, not just their achievements but also the challenges in a very candid way, was very inspiring. The mentorship session also added a lot of value to the academy, more so personally than professionally, making me rethink my priorities and shape my journey.

Apart from the amazing lectures and the informative sessions, personally, the Action learning Set with my group has really been helpful. Listening to others speak about their experience, challenges and ways they have navigated their way through their research career has been very encouraging.

I enjoyed the opportunity to meet and talk with researchers from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds, the action learning sets, being pushed to find a mentor who is keen to keep in contact, learning about areas of research leadership I haven't anticipated - so I can now look ahead.

Read the evaluation report

Read the evaluation report from the 2024 cohort.

For information or enquiries

Contact, NIHR ARC South London, Capacity building theme email: arcshortcourses@kcl.ac.uk