The group asked me if I would tell them a little bit about one of my other hats at our regular Tuesday meeting, and this blog is about that.

In October 2019 I was seconded part-time to UKRI as the Deputy Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research council (EPSRC). What is UKRI (UK research and Innovation)? It’s a non-departmental public body that funds research and innovation. It is made up of the seven disciplinary research councils (acronyms to please Tom – AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, NERC, STFC and MRC), Research England, and the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.

As Deputy Executive Chair of EPSRC I was helping with UKRI strategy, learning how a spending review round works, visiting universities to talk about how they could work better with UKRI – pretty much everything I was expecting to be doing. But like everyone, my world changed in early 2020.

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