Our Impact Committee, comprised of Early Career Researchers from across roles, disciplines and geographies, are proudly leading HDR UK’s transformational approach to impact assessment ensuring that the Institute captures, understands, communicates, and celebrates outcomes and impacts across its programmes.
Assessing the outcomes and impacts of research at HDR UK provides accountability to the board and core funders, whilst strategically ensuring sustainability, inclusivity, and efficiency.
This new approach is the outcome of collaborative co-design work carried out together with the Impact Committee and building on feedback from the HDR UK Board, the Senior Leadership Team, the Professional Leaders Group, the Science and Infrastructure Integration Group, a community representative working group, and more.
In alignment with the initial decisions put forward for REF2028, the Impact Committee is committed to ensuring that:
- Impact is broad and holistic – and inclusive of the diversity of impacts beyond ‘improved health’ such as enabling infrastructure, thought leadership, and more
- Impact is decoupled from researchers – with a focus on team science and the many roles (both academic and beyond) that enable impact
- Research culture is captured and counted
To explore the full breadth and depth of HDR UK’s impact, and to recognise the contributions of everyone who submitted, check out the full collection of case studies (PDF) shared as part of our transparent impact assessment process.
Who should submit a case study?
All HDR UK programmes, including those from the 1st and 2nd five years, were welcomed and encouraged to submit up to 10 case studies using the Case Study Template.
This included all Driver Programmes, Infrastructure Pillars, Regions, and Partnership Programmes e.g. BHF Data Science Centre. In addition to this, we also expected where relevant, programmatic case studies describing outcomes and impacts from HDR UK’s first five years to be captured.
Anyone submitting a case study was encouraged to work closely with their programme lead and other teammates ahead of submission to ensure that the information provided is complete and to help avoid duplication. Individual programmes may wish to put in place their own plans to co-ordinate and/or approve submissions proactively – however, this is not mandatory and all case studies will be shared transparently.
