We’ve developed a series of personas designed to reveal something about you as a researcher and help you explore our range of free resources tailored to your needs.

The Established Researchers Hub brings together curated resources organised by persona and topic so you can skip the generic advice and filter our ever-growing library for the materials most relevant to how you work.

Could you be a Boundary Spanner?

“Engagement is not an add-on. It is the centre of my research career.”

The Boundary Spanner works at the interface between academia and external partners – policy, industry, communities or practice.

For this persona, engagement is core research work, not a supplementary activity.

Common worries

• Competing stakeholder expectations
• Impact work not fully recognised internally
• Relational and emotional labour going unseen

What support helps

• Recognition frameworks for engagement leadership
• Boundary-setting and workload negotiation
• Institutional sponsorship and advocacy

Use peer discussion guides for a structured way to explore common challenges with a small group of colleagues, without the need for an expert facilitator.

Hear directly from other Boundary Spanners

In this collection of career stories, you will find honest, grounded reflections from established researchers on the decisions they made, the trade-offs they navigated, and what they would tell their younger selves. 

These are not polished success narratives; they are the kind of frank, practical perspectives you told us you rarely find, such as Saniya moving from the NHS to academia, or how an individual recalibrated identity, patience and progression after moving institutions. 

Resources curated for Boundary Spanners

Over the course of your projects, you may find challenges shifting from conducting the research yourself to navigating the deep, relational work required to connect diverse stakeholders. 

This Boundary Spanner collection supports you as you manage competing stakeholder expectations and the unseen emotional and relational labour of collaboration while advocating for engagement work to be fully recognised as a core research activity within your institution.

For example, creating a research group charter or team/lab manual can help to set clear expectations, shared values, and standard practices so that your group can collaborate efficiently and avoid confusion. This can be a valuable resource for getting new recruits up to speed quickly, saving you time during induction. Some research leaders send the manual to prospective students or postdocs so that they can see what to expect from the team.

At an established career stage, work rarely comes in neat, single-track projects. This resource shows you how to create a work breakdown structure, typically used in project planning, as a thinking tool. Seeing it in this way can help you gain a sense of scale and the ability to influence by highlighting any unknowns and gaps to reduce the risk of panic and overwhelm.

The Research Adventure Podcast is a great resource to hear directly from researchers and research-adjacent professionals who have turned research into real-world outcomes through routes such as industry partnerships, spinouts, licensing, and social enterprise. It’s useful as “on-demand mentoring”: short, concrete stories that surface what works (and what doesn’t) when collaborating beyond the university. 

Not quite the right match?

Explore other personas to find free resources specifically tailored to your career stage.