Over the past few months, the UK-HyRES Early Career Researcher (ECR) Webinar Series, led by ECR Chair Dr Sibimol Luke, has brought together researchers from across the hydrogen community to explore some of the key challenges and opportunities facing researchers today.
From securing funding and commercialising research to managing workloads, building your professional profile and navigating the growing role of AI, the series has provided practical insights, expert advice and opportunities to connect with fellow researchers.
In total, the series attracted over 230 attendees across 5 webinars, demonstrating strong demand for professional development opportunities tailored to the needs of ECRs.
Topics We’ve Covered
Commercialising Your Research – Dr Ben Voysey, Royal Society of Chemistry
This session explored how researchers can maximise the impact of their work beyond academia. Topics included intellectual property, industry collaboration, spinouts and innovation pathways, helping participants better understand how research can be translated into real-world solutions.
Writing a Good Project Proposal – Professor Chris Bowen, University of Bath
One of our most popular sessions, Professor Bowen shared practical advice on developing competitive funding proposals, communicating impact effectively and avoiding common application pitfalls.
Engineering Your Career: Sustainable Time Management for ECRs – Professor Rachael Rothman, UK-HyRES Co-Director
This highly engaging webinar focused on managing competing demands, avoiding burnout and building sustainable working practices for long-term career success. It generated one of the strongest attendance rates across the series, highlighting the importance of career sustainability for today’s researchers.
Promoting Yourself and Your Research & ECR Poster Competition Training – Karen Brooks, Deputy Director of GW-SHIFT & UK-HyRES
Combining research communication, networking and poster and pitch competition training, this session provided practical guidance on raising professional visibility, engaging with industry and communicating research with confidence.
AI for Research with Academic Integrity – Dr Yuerong Zhang, UCL
Our most popular webinar to date, this session introduced researchers to a range of AI tools that can support literature reviews, writing, evidence synthesis and research workflows, while emphasising the importance of responsible and ethical AI use.
A Growing Interest in AI
One of the most surprising insights from the series was the level of interest in our AI webinar.
Just 2 weeks before the event, only 24 people had registered. Following a targeted promotional campaign, registrations grew to 160 participants, making it the most popular webinar in the series and prompting us to increase the event capacity.
The response highlights a growing appetite among researchers to better understand how AI can support their work while maintaining academic integrity and rigour.
Missed a Webinar?
Don’t worry, many of our webinar recordings are available to watch on demand. Whether you’re looking for proposal writing tips, advice on commercialising research or guidance on using AI responsibly, there’s plenty of practical content available to explore.
Access our webinar recordings here
Join the UK-HyRES ECR Network
Want to be the first to hear about upcoming webinars, development opportunities and networking events?
By joining the UK-HyRES ECR Network, you’ll receive information on future webinars directly and be able to stay connected with researchers across the community.
Join the UK-HyRES ECR Network here: ECR Network Application Form – Fill in form
Help Shape Future Webinars
We’re always looking for ways to ensure our webinars are relevant, practical and valuable for our ECR community.
What topics would you like us to cover next?
Whether it’s:
- Career progression and academic pathways
- Fellowship and grant applications
- Industry engagement and collaboration
- Leadership and management skills
- Research impact and public engagement
- AI and digital tools for researchers
- Work-life balance and wellbeing
…or something else entirely, we’d love to hear from you. Submit your ideas here
Suggest a future webinar topic
Thank you to all our speakers and attendees who have contributed to the success of the series so far. We look forward to continuing to support the development of ECRs across the UK-HyRES community and welcoming even more researchers to future sessions.
We’ll be kicking off the Autumn series of ECR webinars in September with: Why Does Your Research Matter? An Introduction to Research Impact for ECRs on 23 September, 13:00 – 14:00, online.