Early Career Committee

Current members

Committee purpose

The Committee serves to raise the profile of the HDR UK community (publication authors and the Early Career Committee members themselves); shine a light on HDR UK’s most significant achievements in our mission to uniting the UK’s health data to make discoveries that improve people’s lives; and in support of open access.

Our minds are open to other ways in which this Committee might enrich HDR UK and we will come to a collective decision about any diversification of the terms of reference. For example, members of this committee also joined committees to select HDR UK’s annual award winners.

Membership

Members are all HDR UK-supported and early career researchers – as defined by being within the first eight (full time equivalent) years of their of their research career (including post-graduate training). They are a diverse group of people drawn from across the country, disciplines and HDR UK National Priorities. This is an informal, pragmatic group, who work as a team to develop the processes by which they carry out our role.

We openly advertise for new members periodically and membership is time-limited – rotating off the group is staggered to ensure a mix of experienced and new members, and to allow members flexibility in stepping down.

We are always open to applications to join the committee. Please see more information on how to apply here.

Publication of the month selection criteria

The criteria by which Health Data Research UK’s open access Publication of the Month is selected are:

1. Science quality
2. Team science
3. Scale
4. Open science
5. Pubic/patient involvement/impact
6. Equality, diversity and inclusion

Where all else is equal, over the fullness of time, we aim to reward a balance of publications across these secondary criteria:

• Geography (HDR UK Sites in particular)
• Diversity of authors
• HDR UK Science Priorities:
  • The Human Phenome
  • Applied Analytics
  • Understanding Causes of Disease
  • Better, Faster, More Efficient Clinical Trials
  • Improving Public Health
  • Better Care

Alumni

The Committee was set up in autumn 2019. Ruth Blackburn, Amy Mizen and Xiao Liu were founding members of the team, part of the group highly commended for Team of the Year 2020, and stood down from the committee in summer 2020.