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June 2025

NIHR Leicester BRC and LHIIP PhD Scientific Symposium 2025

A day of bright ideas and detailed discovery for BRC and LHIIP PhD researchers

We ran a PhD Scientific Symposium on Wednesday 18th June 2025 in partnership with the (BRC), bringing together our brightest early career researchers for a day of fresh thinking and future-defining ideas. The event formed part of the NIHR Leicester BRC’s Half Time Celebrations; a whole series of activities taking place over the summer of 2025 to celebrating everything they have achieved so far and to look forward to even more success over the next two years.

The PhD Scientific Symposium gave opportunity for all current students to showcase their research projects funded by and . With 12 oral and nearly 50 poster presentations, the day featured work across respiratory health, cancer, cardiovascular disease, lifestyle, environment, health data science and health inequalities themes. From exploring how exercise affects appetite hormones to new insights into air pollution, rehabilitation, and inclusive patient involvement, the student oral presentations showed the incredible breadth and impact of our doctoral research. Eleanor Massey, BRC PhD student said: “It is nice to see such a wide range of topics coming out of the BRC and having the opportunity to collaborate and communicate with different areas of research.” 

Congratulations to all the prize winners and runner ups: 

• Outstanding Presentation: Robin Wroblewski 
• Outstanding Poster: Martha Thomas 
• Highly Commended Presentation: Eleanor Massey and Alfred Charlesworth 
• Highly Commended Poster: Thivviya Sivakanthan and Jialin Li 

The event welcome keynote talks by leading academics with topics including topics such as AI in Healthcare, as well as the facilitation of uptake in healthcare innovation through implementation research. Talks were given by: Dr Daniel Pan, NIHR Doctoral Research Fellow; Professor Gregory Maniatopoulos, Director of the Centre for Healthcare Innovation, Policy and Management; Dr Natalie Darko, Associate Professor of Health Inequalities and BRC Director of Inclusion; Dr Anshul Thakur, Departmental Lecturer in Clinical Machine Learning from University of Oxford.

Professor Sally Singh, BRC Director of Training and Capacity Development and LHIIP Programme Director shared: “It was a fantastic day, full of energy, thoughtful questions, and impressive presentations. What stood out most was the level of confidence and clarity with which our PhD students presented their work.” 

The University are proud to support the next generation of health research leaders and this event is proof they’re already delivering work that matters. If you are interested in postgraduate research, the University continues to advertise funded student opportunities.

Download PDF of the Event Programme

January 2023

Live online Q&A

On the 23 January 2023, a live online Q&A took place. The panel included:

• Professor Sally Singh – programme director
• Professor Amanda Daley – programme co-director representing Loughborough University
• Frank Arsenyadis – Doctoral Training Programme fellow
• Dr Sylvie Kilford – programme coordinator

During the event, the audience was able to pose their questions to our panel. Questions covered eligibility criteria, experiences on the programme, training and the application and interview process. .

October 2022

CoNavigator Tool event

On Monday 17 October, we hosted our first CoNavigator Tool event with the help of the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies.

Gathering at College Court for a full day event, we hosted a mixture of senior researchers, early career researchers, community leaders and our first cohort of research fellows. Present were also researchers from our partner, Loughborough University.

The is a novel method of collaboration and brainstorming, developed by David Earle, Katrine Lindvig, Line Hillersdal from the University of Copenhagen.

The CoNavigator enables groups to work together in a tactile, collaborative space, using 3D visualisation of a theme or field. The particular advantage this method has over others, is that it enforces a democratic sharing of voices and space, so that everyone counts the same. It enables each member of the group to express their view, to cast their vote and to pitch their thoughts.

This seemed a perfect method of brainstorming ideas for research projects aimed at improving inequality in healthcare, because it encouraged our researchers, regardless of rank, to listen and to share ideas, in contrast to the traditional top down approach.

LHIIP Director, Professor Sally Singh said: “We were delighted to have such a high level of engagement in this event. We are anticipating a number of truly collaborative PhD proposals being submitted that address themes of health inequalities across Leicester and Leicestershire.

June 2022

The Leicestershire Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Programme Application Guidance webinar was held and led by Professor Sally Singh and Dr Claire Lawson. During this event, Professor Singh and Dr Lawson shared their advice on how to polish an application to the programme. Attendees were then invited to ask questions about the application process. A video recording of this event is available to view on our application help and advise page.