Open Research Champions
A community of champions helping to promote and support a more open research culture.
About our Open Research Champions
Our Open Research Champions are colleagues or research students who volunteer a small amount of their time to help facilitate the adoption of open research practices within their units. They do this by promoting and advocating for open research locally, signposting their colleagues to relevant support and providing feedback on challenges of adopting open practices in their discipline.
As this is a voluntary role the activities of each champion may vary, but may include:
- Sharing information about open research to colleagues in their unit.
- Modelling open research behaviours in their own practice (where appropriate.)
- Advocating for open research within school meetings, communications and activities.
- Managing queries from their colleagues, directing them to sources of specialist support.
- Promoting open research training opportunities at the University and helping to co-deliver training
- Providing feedback on University guidance and training in open research to ensure it is suitable for their unit/discipline.
We believe local champions will make a real difference to the uptake of open research practices and that by working as a community they can help develop a more open research culture that accomodates differences between disciplines and research methodologies.
Meet our Open Research Champions
Our first cohort of champions includes academics and researchers from units in all our faculties, as well as research students and professional and technical services colleagues as listed below.
If you are interested in representing your unit as an open research champion, please contact the open research team.
Open Research Champions by Faculty
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Research Associate/Data Lead for Insights North East. Geography, Politics and Sociology.
Computational political scientist specialising in public policy, policymaking, and governance. Co-lead of the Researcher Network, a community of postdocs at Newcastle University, and the North East Data Network, advancing data-driven policymaking. Chair of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Politics and Business.
Lecturer in Sociology, Geography, Politics and Sociology
Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University Business School
Prior to becoming an academic, Vic spent nearly a decade working in a commercial research and consultancy context with a range of public sector clients. Her research interests are qualitative and interpretivist, focused on: Knowledge- its generation, uses, and violations (epistemic violence, epistemic injustice); Morality and ethics- the expression / suppression of moral emotions; and social justice- equality, equity, diversities, inclusion / exclusion. She has recently published on her exploration of the uses, and impacts of the uses, of non-disclosure agreements in a range of workplace contexts, specifically the implications for freedom in terms of restriction and liberation across work boundaries (employee/employer perspectives), metaphor and story as a way to resist their impact. Her work in progress continues to explore tensions between secrecy and transparency, understanding the space between the two, and associated implications for voice including muting and silencing.
Senior Lecturer Architecture, Planning and Landscape
NUAcT Fellow: Water Security History, Classics and Archaeology
Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology Education, Communication and Language Sciences
Cong Zhang is a Lecturer in Phonetics and Phonology at Newcastle University. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and has professional experience in speech technology. Her research focuses on the prosodic features of speech and uses experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology to explore prosody’s role in shaping communication. Beyond prosody, her work bridges linguistic theory with speech technology and develops new research methods for phonetics research.
Faculty of Medical Sciences
Professor of Ethology, Biosciences Institute.
Melissa is a behavioural biologist with interests in the impacts of limited and unpredictable food (aka food insecurity) on health and welbeing in humans and other animals. She is President of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
Research Associate - Methodologist. NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Diagnostic and Technology Evaluation.
Specialist Experimental Scientific Officer, Bioimaging Unit.
Glyn manages the Bioimaging Unit, which provides access and training to Light Microscopy provision in the Faculty of Medical Sciences for staff and students from across the University. As a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, he is involved in their Quality Control interest group as well as being co-chair for an international consortium which aims to provide open tools/ protocols for Quality Control of Microscopes and standardise the image metadata to allow for true reproducibility, re-use and findability of imaging data (www.quarep.org). Within Newcastle, Glyn has recently established an image database (OMERO) for robust storage and easy sharing of results within the University and externally.
David Phillips Research Fellow, Biosciences Institute.
Data Manager, Clinical Trials Unit.
Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering
NUAcT Fellow. Natural and Environmental Sciences.
Jordan is a NUAcT Fellow and lead of the Foraging Ecology Research Group, which uses molecular and ecological data to investigate what animals eat and why. Jordan is also an Editor-in-Chief of the Royal Entomological Society (RES) journal Agricultural and Forest Entomology, and sits on the society's Publications Committee which oversees seven journals across entomology. Through this, Jordan is working with the RES to implement open research practices across the society's remit. Jordan has been advocating for open research practices throughout his career and regularly engages with these practices across the full research lifecycle.
Professor of System Security, Director of Newcastle Centre of Research Excellence in Cyber Security & Resilience School of Computing; NUCoRE Cyber Security and Resilience.
Reader in Astrophysics. Mathematics, Statistics and Physics.
Chris is a researching working on fundamental research (understanding galaxies and supermassive black holes) and finding new methods to communicate science and data which are more engaging and accessible to wider audiences. For the latter he is specifically interested in sonification (using sound to represent data).
PhD Candidate, Ecology Group. Natural and Environmental Sciences.
Executive Support Administrator. Natural and Environmental Sciences
Supports the Director of Research and Innovation, Director of Business, Innovation and Skills, Associate Director fo Research (Research Culture), and Co-Director of Postgraduate Research in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences. Supports the SNES School Research and Innovation Committee, RA Committee and RA Network, Research Excellence Preparation Group, External Advisory Board, and School research symposiums (SNESFest and SNESFestive). Member of The Researcher Network Steering Group, Research Culture Community Action Team, and SNES Green Impact team.
Lecturer in Statistics Mathematics, Statistics and Physics.
Clement is a statistician with research focus on Bayesian hierarchical modelling and extreme value analysis of networks, and an advocate for computational reproducibility and writing open-source packages in R. Clement currently sits on the panel the Royal Statistical Society Statisticians for Society scheme, through which he has worked with charities on making sense of their data.
About the programme
The Open Research Champions network is managed as part of the University’s Research Culture Programme. It is led by Natasha Mauthner (Associate Dean of Good Research Practice) in collaboration with Steve Boneham (Open Research Officer) and with support from the Library Research Services team.
Open research is the cornerstone of responsible, robust and reproducible research. I'm really excited by the potential of this scheme to break down barriers and open up more conversations across the University about the how and why of open research.