Life Long Health and Wellbeing - Effective Multidisciplinary Research Networks
A one-day workshop followed by a launch of the Phase I LLHW Centres.
Held in partnership with the Medical Research Council
May 2009
The event was hosted at the Library's Conference Centre on behalf of the funders for the Cross-Council Initiative in Lifelong Health and Wellbeing (LLHW).
In March 2009 the LLHW partners jointly invested £500,000 to establish 10 Collaborative Development Networks (CDN), to build multidisciplinary teams in one of four priority areas of research into ageing.
The workshop brought together members of these new Networks to synthesise participants’ experiences and knowledge to inform best practice, to ultimately build research capacity and capability of the CDNs in the future. These CDNs form phase II of the LLHW. Phase I funded three new lifelong health and wellbeing centres.
Speakers included:
- Prof Ian Deary, University of Edinburgh - LLHW Initiative
- Prof Nick Tyler, University College London - LLHW Phase I Experiences: Challenges of a successful collaboration (PDF)
- Prof David Hawkes, Imperial College London - Multidisciplinary research: Knowledge transfer and exchange
- Angela Barnard, INVOLVE - Involving the Public
- Dr Lee-Ann Coleman, The British Library - Lifelong support for research: The role of information providers
The workshop was chaired by Professor Ian Deary, Director of The University of Edinburgh Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology – one of the centres established through Phase I of LLHW - who contributed his considerable experience on the challenges of, and best practice in, multidisciplinary working.
Other speakers with experience of multidisciplinary research included Professor Nick Tyler, Director of the UCL Crucible Centre (also funded in the first phase of the initiative).
He advised the Networks to allow sufficient time and space for the researchers to understand one another’s cultures. “Multidisciplinary collaboration involves bringing together dramatically different working approaches – lawyers, physicists, architects and computer scientists all have totally different expertise and ways of approaching a problem, and these must be respected before collaboration can take place,” he said.
Also speaking at the event were; Professor David Hawkes, Director of the multidisciplinary Centre for Medical Image Computing at UCL; Angela Barnard who spoke about engaging with and involving the public in research; and Dr Lee-Ann Coleman (The British Library) who gave a presentation on the role of information providers in supporting research.
In addition to these insightful and inspirational plenary sessions, the delegates took part in breakout sessions. These were facilitated by British Library staff and afforded delegates the opportunity to network and exchange information on the creation of effective networks and to address the challenges they faced in doing this.
Feedback obtained from delegates was very positive – they found presentations interesting and informative and breakout sessions valuable in enabling networking and discussion.
The day was brought to a close by the official launch of the three phase I LLHW Centres by Lord Sutherland of Houndwood , chair of an influential House of Lords select committee which produced a report on ageing research.
“Demographic change is something we have to live with, and we will all age better if we understand better the ageing process. That is why it is tremendously important that the research councils have thought through their priorities in this area.” Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
