Every year we give our Doctoral Researchers the chance to voice their opinions on EDI issues via an anonymous survey. The results of the survey are analysed, and suggestions are taken forward, wherever possible.

For example, based on the results from the first survey, we improved the signposting of support available in our handbook, which is provided to students and supervisors at the start of each academic year. Likewise, we have made changes to the structure and organisation of our annual conference, as well as instated a flexible approach to our training timeline to best suit students' needs.

The CDT takes great care to continue to develop our supervisor community, and hosts a regular meeting for all our supervisors each year. A healthy and collaborative supervisor community is vital for us to capitalise on the wealth of supervisory experience we have across the two institutions (Newcastle & Durham). As part of this, EDI considerations form a key part of the Supervisor Community Meeting’s agenda, including sharing best practice and fostering a healthy research community for our staff and students. One of the advantages of the CDT is its cross-institutional nature, and we will continue to draw on the broader wealth of experience and insight this provides to the benefit of all.

During covid lockdown, our enterprising Communications group initiated a MoSMed podcast. Most significantly, in June 2023 we held a major outreach event with Life Science Centre, attracting over 500 attendees, including a number of local community groups. You can read a write up of the Marvellous Molecules and Medicine take over day on the Life Science Centre blog to find out more about the exciting activities held on the day, with hopefully a number of budding scientists inspired by our fun experiments.

Our Doctoral Researchers are always excited to get out and about in the local community, and to share their exciting research with new audiences. We hope this will help to get young people interested in science, who may not otherwise have considered a future in STEM.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in partnering for Outreach activity with our MoSMed students and staff.

When lockdown started in March 2020, we quickly set up a weekly cohort catch-up, to ensure we could all get together at least once a week, and to check on the wellbeing of our research community during a difficult time.

These weekly catch-ups soon turned into an exciting opportunity to get to know more about the interesting research being carried out within MoSMed by doctoral researchers and their supervisors, as well as learning more about the supervisors' backgrounds and career paths. This led to a programme of weekly events lasting from May 2020 to August 2020, and included invited speakers from outside MoSMed, who also shared their stories and invaluable advice with our student cohorts.

As demand for these events was high, it was decided to keep them going, but changing to fortnightly from September 2020, given that most researchers were back in the labs for at least some of the time.

Post lockdown, in order to continue providing an opportunity for the cohort to catch-up informally, we host regular coffee mornings so that members of all cohorts are able to keep in touch, get to know each other, and share their experiences as MoSMed PhD researchers. We believe open communication and informal social gatherings are a key part of maintaining a vibrant research community for our staff and students. With this in mind, each year, we appoint a student to the position of Social Representative, who takes the lead in organising fun socials and team building activities for our PhD researchers.

We have also continued to invite researchers (both from within the two Universities, as well as externally) to present to the cohort, in order for them to learn more about leading researchers' backgrounds and career paths, with many of these talks opened to either the general public or the wider research communities at each institution. Please see our Events page for more details.