In this week’s episode, host Emily Goodall speaks with Karen Glerum‑Brooks and Lucy Cheseldine about the Valuing Voices project — a Wellcome-funded initiative co‑created by the University of York and Mahidol University in Thailand that’s helping researchers rethink what equitable, collaborative and responsible research can look like in practice.

Episode highlights:

1. A practical toolkit for culture change: How the Valuing Voices online tool supports researchers worldwide to design and deliver equitable and responsible research — grounded in the principles of Engagement and impact, Equity and diversity in teams, Strategic risk mapping, Environmental sustainability, Reflection and learning.
2. Equity, diversity & working together: Why diverse teams and inclusive practices matter, and how simple approaches such as fair attribution and inclusive meetings help dismantle hierarchies and strengthen collaboration in research environments.
3. The Living Lab in action: Karen and Lucy share how experimenting within their own team — from distributed leadership to sustainable conference materials — led to creative, people‑centred ways of modelling equitable research culture.
4. Empowering researchers at every career stage: From early‑career researchers in Uganda to new PIs in the UK, hear how the Valuing Voices principles empower people to plan, collaborate and deliver meaningful, impactful research everywhere they work.

You can explore and use the Valuing Voices Tool for free, wherever you are in your research journey.

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Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be. You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors. To help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

Hello and welcome to Research Culture Uncovered.

I'm Emily Goodall, a researcher, developer from the University of Leeds. Today we are joined by two guests from the University of York, Karen Glerum and Lucy Cheseldine, who are leading on the Valuing Voices Project, which supports the research community to design and deliver equitable and responsible research practices.

They have developed an online toolkit and deliver training around the world. So I'm really excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you. Pleased to be here.

To start with, could you introduce yourselves in a little bit more detail and tell us about the Valuing Voices project.

My name is Karen Glerum Brooks, and I'm a training and resource development officer for Valuing Voices, and I've been doing that since March 2025.

And in my other job, I'm a patient and public involvement manager at the York Trials Unit.

And I'm Lucy Cheseldine. I'm also a training and resource development officer on the Valuing Voices project. And I've been working with Karen since March to develop the tool and to deliver the training and to produce a suite of resources around the tool.

And I've got a research background and, and lots of work on public engagement in the arts and humanities. So that's sort of how I got here.

Could you tell us a little bit more about the Valuing Voices project? Where did it all begin? It sounds like there's quite a lot of overlap with the public engagement space.

So valuing voices for Equitable and responsible research is a project that is run by University of York and Mahidol University in Thailand, and it was the answer to a call by the welcome trust to see if research culture could be changed at scale. Which meant that could we find ways to help researchers help themselves to make changes?

So Mahidol University and the University of York answered that call and said, yes. And the way to do that was first of all to talk to researchers in various fields and various places to actually think what is equitable and responsible research, what is that all about? And from that distilled. Five principles and the principles are what we promote in Valuing Voices, projects, and the tool.

So why would we want to influence research culture? Why did welcome trust even put out that call research culture influences how research is done, and it's well known that there's lots of inequalities in that research culture. So simmering underneath that stop. Researchers from thriving and working together well.

So for example, there's do junior researchers get enough space to develop their ideas, to voice their opinions, and so on and so forth. There's differences between global, north and global sales in terms of opportunities and how they're viewed. Quantitative research versus qualitative research, how that is viewed.

You know, the quantitative researchers may think that their findings are slightly more important than the qualitative finding, for example. And also between the sciences and the arts and humanities, there's all sorts of underlying tensions that prevent everybody and everything from thriving because you need everybody to bring their best self to work.

So that's in a nutshell, what this. Project addresses and what this project is all about. So trying to level the playing field, trying to empower everybody as much as possible, and ultimately, uh, create research that is as input full as possible.

Thank you for that overview. Lucy, can I bring you in here?

Could you just outline very quickly what the five principles are?

Yes, these five principles that we've developed and co-designed with researchers that are taken from 10, which we originally had, but in order for researchers to really work deeply and practically with principles, we thought that five was enough to handle, encompass all of the different topics that came up over that shopping period.

But we have an engagement and impact, which. Might be the principle that's most familiar to people we know it's the most visited principle on our tool. Certainly in the UK it's been driven by ref, but we've worked with our Thai partners who do engaged research really, really well. So that's key. We have equity and diversity in teams, so.

Putting together research teams that are diverse can deal with the complex challenges of research today, but also thinking about how we work in big international research teams, we work across disciplines, and how do we do that equitably? And then we have strategic risk mapping, thinking about. What can go wrong in a project?

Making sure you've planned, prioritized, thought about mitigation measures, and as Karen and I found out recently, you can easily get caught up in the, the kind of geopolitics and through the unstable climate of the world at the moment. Because when we were going out to deliver some training in Uganda, we were supposed to be flying via Doha and ob, obviously due to conflicts in the Middle East.

Our flights were canceled, we were directed. So it's thinking about that wider climate that we're caught up in. The things we can't control, but we can plan for. And then thinking about those risks in the project that you can make contingency plans for the things that you can control as well.

Environmental sustainability is our fourth principle, which is in a way self-evident, but we're not asking people to solve the problem of fossil fuels. It's thinking about really practical measures that you can take in your day-to-day research practices. So things like the food and the catering you have at conferences.

Thinking about the climate emissions of travel for research, can you have meetings online? Can you get hold of digital copies of things you might be traveling miles to see in archives? Do you really need to go to all of those conferences? And then thinking about how, if you do create products from your research, are you using those materials and sourcing them in sustainable ways?

And then finally we have reflection and learning. And this is, I guess in a way, it's the principle that's embedded. Throughout everything else really that to be a, a researcher who is reflective of your practice is really important. And to be capturing the learnings as you're going through and making time to evaluate where you're going, where you want to go, are things going as well as possible.

We find that is a really key part of everything we do and underpins the rest of the principles. As we've been delivering our training, we've learned more and more how interconnected they are. That if you want to put together a good team, for example, you need to think about who you want to engage with and is that community that you want to work with going to see themselves reflected in that research team and therefore trust the team.

And we've thought about, okay, if there's potentially conflicts between stakeholders that you are working with. Then you can identify those at the point of risk mapping at the beginning of a project. So more and more we're finding as we work with researchers, that these five principles really do speak to one another.

I completely agree with the time for reflection and learning. That's not always easy when you're a researcher to take that time to step back and think. So hopefully by using the tools and maybe attending your training, that gives kind of the gift of time to actually go and do those activities. That sounds really valuable.

From a research culture perspective, I'd really like to focus in on the equity and diversity in teams. Principle. In your view, why is this one so important and what does it actually mean in practice for the researchers?

So equity and diversity in teams, it feels like a really central principle to our own project as well.

And really it gets at the heart of what we're trying to do. We're thinking there about team equity, and we're also thinking about global equity. And those are the really two central parts of this principle, right from the start of a project. So for example, on our project, we have a HR officer, so we are thinking about.

From the very beginning, how do you recruit a diverse team Who's gonna be up to the challenge of the research? How does that include early career researchers, perhaps those who've come from industry and bring different kinds of knowledge to the project? How do we balance the really important work of professional services staff in managing projects and understanding the way that funding works?

And keeping things on track with the lead researchers who carry forward their own expertise in the project. So we thinking right from the very beginning, how do you put together that team and then how do you sustain the team? So how do you have shared values that you work with and how do you understand one another's experience from the beginning of a project and carry that through?

How do you make room for professional development? In projects that are short term and in a climate that everybody's working with precarity, how do you make space for that long term career trajectory? These are huge terms, equity and diversity, and they mean different things to different people. And really our project is very much grounded in, okay, so these are defined by the actions that we take, the practical models and the things that we do and build up from.

We have lots of those on the tool, but we've also been practicing what we preach, really. So we see ourselves as a living lab, our own research team, as a place to experiment, and we've been using different models to think about what does this actually look like in practice. Karen, would you like to talk a little bit about some of the models that we've been using?

In our team, we started off with a, just a completely flat model where everything was very democratic and everybody could have a say about everything, but it took too much time, basically. I mean, we soon found out that that was unworkable. So we're now, uh, working in, uh, distributed leadership model where the day-to-day tasks we can lead on ourselves, make our own decisions, work through it really efficiently, whereas bigger.

Questions and bigger decisions are still made either by the group or by the managers of this project. So there's a balance between what you're responsible for and your pay grade, for example, but you also feel like you have an input and a steer in how the overall project is developing. So it's been a really nice balance in that way.

I also would like to say is that in a really practical way, we have not only implemented equity and diversity in our own team, we're also trying to help others to install it. That in their teams, for example, we have a training that we offer, and that's very popular, is on inclusive team meetings. To ensure everybody has a voice.

So we try to calm down the more enthusiastic voices in the room, give space to people who may not always speak up and you know, have different strategies for drawing out opinions and voice from different people. And that's speak really popular actually. So it's definitely an appetite to use this in teams.

Another one we're going to run is on fair attribution. Making sure that everybody benefits equally from the work that has been produced and everybody gets recognized for what they're adding to the process and to the end result of research.

There's some really good ideas in there. It can be quite challenging to think how you.

Include everyone and make sure everyone's voice is heard. The fair attribution. I've just started running the ethics of authorship training here at Leeds and I think there's quite a lot of nuance to things like authorship and how you fairly attribute. What other kind of methods of attribution do you think there are apart from authorship?

I think that's been really nice in this team is just a recognition. Of who does what in the group. For example, we've put in a proposal for a session at a conference, and we gets accepted. We say, well done to the person who put in that proposal, and I think it's those little touches that are really nice.

That's not the big thing of authorship, but that's just from day to day, recognizing when a person does a good job. And that can be anything from running the meeting well to having a good idea, to writing a great report and just hearing that is a boost and it's nice and you realize sometimes you just do something and you don't even know it's that special.

But realizing you have done a good job is a boost as well.

That kind of gets another part of our project and how we see research. It's not just a series of articles at the end that are published in academic journals. Part of what we're doing is to encourage the diversity of outputs as well. And if you're working with communities or the government on policy, the output is not going to be an academic article.

It might be a series of workshops or a series of recommendations, or it might be a. Creative piece of artwork that embodies the ethos of, of the engagement that's gone on and becomes the research itself. I know with our partners in Ma Haddon. There's a seed funding grant that's been going on before our project, but has become a core part of what we do.

That funding is very much aimed at the exploratory methods of outputs and what does it mean to work with other people and what comes from that. It doesn't have to be a traditional output, and that in itself is a form of attribution because it's recognizing research needs to be translated and needs to be meaningful to those who've taken part in it.

It speaks into the first principle of impact and engagement and how we do it in different ways. You mentioned the living lab model as a way of working. What reflections do you have on this experience of using that, and what lessons did you learn from it?

We started the Living Lab, I think, without really realizing we were living lab, we were just experimenting, for example, with the.

Leadership model. But I think once we realize that we really run with it because it's practicing what we preach makes it so much more valuable to us to say, look, we're doing this ourselves. We are more reliable source because we make mistakes. We correct mistakes, reflect on what's going well, what could be improved.

It gives us a lot of room to say, okay, here is a gap. Let's try to fill it. Let's see what we can do. For example. Really simple thing we did was when we went to a conference, we wanted to give out some paper to draw people to our website with a QR code. We said, what can we do that's not very environmentally sustainable to give out all that paper that goes in the bin?

Let's print the QR code on seed paper so you know you can grow the seeds into little flowers. It'll be a nice touch, and you reuse that paper so it's more environmentally sustainable. So we did that and we only thought about the reuse, but what we learned was it the impact changed. When we gave the seat paper, we could say, look, environmental sustainability is one of our principles.

And we also realized people saw it as a bit of a gift, so it was received very positively and from feedback that we got pictures of flowers that people had grown, we also knew that, you know how the voices and projects stayed on their mind for a lot longer. So that was just one example of how just toying around with one of the principles actually opened our minds too.

That this was just about reuse, this was actually about creating more impact and it was, it was a really nice surprise to, to see how when you think out of the box a bit, something really wonderful can happen.

I love the idea of the seed paper. I might steal that one. So from what you've learned so far, how do you think you could build things like distributed leadership more generally into research cultures?

So a couple of things. The tool that we've been developing, as, I guess the major output of our project is packed full of practical resources for searches and professional services staff who want to trial out. The principles in practice. Karen and I have sifted through lots and lots of resources that are out there, and we've created some of our own to curate a set that is really based on practical implementation of these.

Let's face it, quite complicated and often unwielding ways of working. There are lots of checklists. We love a checklist and lots of short, practical resources on there that will help you. Things like leadership models into practice. There's checklists for reflection meetings. There's different ways of running meetings on there.

There's things like carbon calculators if you want to think about, okay, so should I go to this conference? What will happen if I do? There's digital carbon calculators, so there's all kinds of practical resources based on the five principles. Also to step back and answer your question in a slightly in the bigger picture way, one of perhaps the most inspiring things that we've had the privilege to do on this project was deliver some training on the five principles to masters and PhD students at Mbarara University.

That was feeding into a bigger agenda of training a million PhD students across Africa because there's a huge young population and not as much of an infrastructure projects like ours. But also just the general enthusiasm that we were met with when we went there is really key to pushing forward the next generation of researchers who are hoping to develop the world that they live in and make an impact through their research.

That was a fantastic experience because it was probably the most engaged that, uh, group of people and researchers that we've worked with so far. The discussions were buzzing. They were clearly really already tapped into the funding landscape, having to think about. How they're gonna become an independent research and fund their ideas.

And so they were already a few steps ahead and tapped in to where they need to go next. And I think it's doing that kind of training and working with young researchers who can take these models, practices, reflections through into the next generation of researchers. And the hope is that from there. They will build their own culture and take control of that and be able to embed equitable and responsible practices within it, and we hope that we're part way, giving some tools to support them to do that.

It's a really fantastic opportunity to work internationally. That sounds brilliant. On a very practical level, I do signpost your strategic risk mapping tools and resources. 'cause I work with researchers who've just become a PI or about to become a principal investigator and that's step up from kind of early career to perhaps starting off to lead and manage your own group.

And I think strategic risk mapping is. Part of that. So I'm gonna say thank you on a personal level that I signpost your resources and some of my training.

That's great to hear. Thank you so much. What, what we're, uh, it can be quite overwhelming, especially making that step up that you just referred to.

And I think one thing value invoices is helping with is, is sort of giving a, a little bit of peace of mind that you look at as five principles and you're well on your way. We're not saying you have to do everything and you have to do everything perfect. But keep those five in mind and you can have some, some peace of mind in a way.

Yeah, and as I said, it's a really useful resource that we can then signpost looking ahead, what would you say are your biggest hopes, perhaps your biggest challenges when it comes to creating those equitable and responsible research environments that are fit for the future? I mean, you mentioned early career researchers there and they are the future.

So what do you think are the biggest. Kind of hopes and challenges, aspirations for valuing voices.

What we set out to do was to create a tool for any researcher anywhere by going internationally as well as locally to spread the word. We're almost testing that if that is the case, what we're seeing is that it is definitely a tool that everybody can get something out of.

So I think that aspiration. It has come true. What we're also seeing is early success, which was very important. You know, we don't want just someone to say, oh, here's a tool. This is good for you. We want to also back it up with evidence that this tool does in fact build stronger funding applications that this.

Enables people to speak to the requirements that funders have. We've seen that, for example, with one of our professors at the University of York who was awarded 10 million euros in the European research grant, and had in fact used the tool in his application and in the interviews that he had. Fantastic.

But at the same time, we've heard of people who've, uh, earned a fellowship and used the tool. So that's really important to us. We'd like funders to take this up and in their guidelines, for example, use this tool to think about our questions. That would be a huge step forward. What we also see is the international partnerships are becoming more and more important.

This is a tool that you can be used in international partnerships. We see that from the Ma York Seed Grant funding. You know, how do we work together is a very important question. It's also very difficult question just in our own living lab, just going abroad and delivering training there. There's all sorts of things that can get in the way that you need to think about beforehand.

Even something as mundane as how do we pay the bills overseas? Is our own university equipped to pay it overseas? What kind of paperwork is involved? Is that fair? Is there an equal burden on the other party? Things like that. So it's a very important to think about these things ahead because they don't just happen, and it's an important tool in that to support the trend for international collaboration.

Overall, we just wanna keep going. We feel like we've started the movement and as Lucy said, a fantastic response set out to build a tool that was for people writing grant applications. We've also learned through our workshops that we can take it a step earlier, get those people still doing their Masters and PhDs.

Thinking about how they shape their research. So there's still so much to do and we'd love to do it, but there's also the, the reality that the funding for this project will run out in August, and so we're hoping to find more funding so we can keep pushing this development.

I think it's worth us saying what the four questions actually are, because I realize that we haven't really drilled down into what they actually are.

We have these five principles, and as Karen mentioned, the exercise at the end of thinking about what those principles mean to you, working through the resources to think about what they look like in practice. There are then four questions based on results based planning, and those questions were designed to help you write grant applications, but we think that they can do much more than that.

They ask you to start with the end, with the vision that you really want for that principle in your project. So what does successful equity and diversity in teams look like in your research project? And to be ambitious with that vision to take forward. Something more than you usually would to think to really embed equity in your project.

And then the questions drill down into the details of exactly how you're going to make that happen. So what outputs will you need to create that equitable and diverse team? How will you assess your team values? Have those early conversations, understand where everybody's coming from, and come up with models that allow you all to work together.

And then what day-to-day activities will you put in place to make sure that those processes are happening? So how will you hold yourself accountable and actually get things done? And then finally, how will you resource that? And I think that's really key. As Karen said, sometimes it's the little things that become the barriers.

Things like paying people, things like having the resource held back to make sure that everyone in the team can go to their share of conferences. Those little resources that make a huge difference in terms of equity. And I think. It is changing the mindset a little bit for researchers. We see this in training.

You're so used to thinking, okay, so what do I need? And then how will I get there? And then, okay, what happens at the end kind of happens. Starting with that vision is a little bit more difficult, but it really does enable you to think bigger, and I think that's what we see from our activities with researchers when they're using the tool, but also from the successes that are coming from it.

Researchers are able to just take that step up and think a little bit bigger about equity and then be really clear on how they're gonna deliver that, and whether that's at the point of you designing your research, applying for a grant, or sitting down with a team and deciding how you're going to work together.

We've seen that this strategy is just a little step change. Makes, that's making a difference for people. So I hope that method is useful to people in different situations in the research environment, and that it will become a way of thinking

and just thinking about expanding your ambitions to keep going with the Valuing Voices project, what's.

Piece of advice or practical tips would you give to research teams who really want to embrace these principles?

We always say, go and look at our tool. It's there for you to use for free. It's a great way to start discussions and to elevate your thinking about these principles. We also say, start small.

Maybe you wanna have a closer look at one of the principles. It's definitely not a requirement to say, okay, we need to implement all five of these and we need to do all encompassing changes to make this happen. Start small, pick a principle, have conversations around the questions and implement it. See how you get on and see how you can build on it.

Lucy, any practical tips or advice from you?

I can't say any more than go look at the tool, which is full of practical tips and advice. But one thing I will say is that the ethos of what we're doing is really based on collaboration. And I think so much of what the tool offers about working together, embracing diverse and teams and working across international and disciplinary builders is really key.

And that involves. A shift in outlook, and we see it in our ambitious and enthusiastic early career scholars, but it's about saying, okay, this isn't competition. That the way we get beyond this is working together. And there are all kinds of things that stop you from doing that and all kinds of hierarchies that we've mentioned, and they still exist.

This project hasn't broken them all down, but working together is so key. To building the kind of culture change that we want. We really hope that some of the things on the tool give you ways to do that and give legitimate ways to do that and empower researchers to say, this is the way forward and this is how we'll get the best out of research.

So yeah, just embracing that way of working.

Thank you. I think those thoughts on collaboration working together and that empowerment is a really some key messages that I've taken away from our conversation today. That's all that we've got time for. So thank you so much for joining us, and I hope that you have inspired some of our listeners to join the valuing voices.

Movement. So thank you very much and I hope our listeners will join us for future episodes.

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