It’s simultaneously exciting and daunting to be starting as Deputy Vice Chancellor and Provost at Bath – exciting because of the opportunity that it presents and daunting because it’s a role that carries considerable responsibility. One of the challenges, of course, is to get to know a new institution – its people, culture, ways of working and various foibles. Although I have many friends and colleagues at Bath already, you don’t really get to know an institution properly until you’re on the inside. Now that I am, I intend to spend my first few weeks and months listening, learning and getting to know people.
But of course I also want people to get to know me! For that reason, I’m using this opportunity to publish the letter I submitted when I applied for the position? Why am I doing this? Two main reasons…
One is that I believe that transparency is an important guiding principle – the more open and transparent we are in how we work, the more trustworthy our work and ways of working will be. Of course, there will always be limits to how much transparency is appropriate (I often joke that the gender pay gap would disappear very quickly if we published everyone’s salaries, but that might be a step too far at the moment!). But in general, if people and processes are open and transparent that sends out an important message – we have nothing to hide, we are confident that our processes are fair and robust, and so on.
The other is that I believe in accountability. It’s quite exposing for me to publish my letter of application because it’s very personal – I tried to be authentic throughout the application process rather than present a polished version of myself! I outline not only my experience but also my values – and what I value. So here it is – on the record. It will serve as a reminder to me why I applied for the job, and what I hope to bring to it. And it will allow others to hold me to what I said. I talk about being values-led and believing in the importance of a just culture, for example. I hope that the Bath community will hold me to that!
And of course by publishing my letter people will get to know a bit about me – my background and experience, what motivates me, and what I’m hoping to achieve. At the very least, it will be a conversation starter as I start to meet and get to know people.
I wish to apply for the position of Deputy Vice Chancellor and Provost at the University of Bath. Having worked within academia for over 20 years, across a variety of institutional and sectoral roles, I bring a broad range of relevant skills and experience. In particular, I have relished the change programme I have led in my current role at the University of Bristol. I see this position as an exciting opportunity to bring the same lens and approach to a larger challenge, at a time when the sector urgently needs transformative change to ensure that it is fit for purpose in the 21st Century. Universities like Bath, in particular, represent the most exciting opportunity to achieve this, being dual intensity whilst at the same time modern and agile – not held back by outdated notions of what they are or should be. It is, for me, a challenge I am excited by.
Below I outline my experience and skills as they pertain to the person specification. Together they demonstrate my long-standing commitment to creating an environment that nurtures excellence, my ethos of servant leadership and the development of teams and individuals, and my willingness to challenge and be challenged. They also illustrate my track record in strategy and planning, informed by my experiences outside of academia in the military and elite sport, and my ability to work with a range of stakeholders across complex topics. My work with major national and supranational sectoral organisations means I bring a clear understanding of the sector, and in particular the challenges it faces. My work at the University of Bristol to develop a high performance research environment that fosters a positive research culture and ensures that people are supported and developed has had national impact.
I consider myself to be a principled leader - a values-led pragmatist who is able to maintain a focus on my moral compass whilst being able to hold the tensions inherent in complex scenarios and arrive at a balanced solution that accommodates different perspectives. Throughout my career, both within academia and in high-performance environments outside of academia, I have focused on building strong teams with a clear sense of purpose, and developing the individuals within those teams. My belief in the critical importance of leadership at all levels led to the development of the Leadership Ethos website (leadershipethos.org), and of Leadership in Academia workshops that were subsequently commissioned by the University of Oxford. This work was inspired by my military career and training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (the motto of which is Serve to Lead).
In my current role as Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Research Culture, I work across the broad university community – including university senior management, academic researchers at all career stages, research professionals, technicians, and professional services staff drawn from all the major divisions. This has included regularly deputising for the Vice Chancellor and the Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation (e.g., at relevant Russell Group meetings), and leading projects on behalf of the Vice Chancellor (e.g., two major reviews of internal bureaucracy, one focused on research and one on teaching). I chair the University of Bristol’s Research Culture Committee, which comprises approximately 36 academic, technical and professional staff from across the university, including staff at a range of career stages, and a number of sub-groups that report to this committee, each of which comprises a different mix of academic, technical and professional staff, and career stages.
Developing a research culture programme that supported – and was informed by – the needs of all those involved in the research process required a collaborative, responsive and inclusive approach. Over a year-long process of developing our vision and strategy, I identified five priority areas and, from a basket of indicators against which we could measure progress, identified three key performance indicators. These are embedded in an implementation plan that is reviewed and refreshed annually so as to focus our efforts on maintaining progress across our priority areas, reviewing key performance indicators as necessary. This speaks to working collaboratively (including offering constructive challenge when required), embedding equality, diversity and inclusion considerations throughout, and developing focused solutions. Our collaborative approach extends to making much of our work available to the sector.
My role has also required me to work closely with University Research Committee and the Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, shaping research planning discussions and in particular complex issues around the size and shape of our research portfolio. I have championed open research, in particular, and led a range of key initiatives, from signing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment in 2019 through to the signing of the Barcelona Declaration in 2024. In particular, I have always argued for an evidence-informed approach to institutional decision making, and my research group has received funding from Research England and Wellcome to explore the extent to which institutions do (or do not) take an evidence-informed approach to decision making. This combination of transparency and rigour is a wider feature of all my work.
I have also chaired a number of funder panels and boards. Currently, I chair the Medical Research Council (MRC) Neurosciences and Mental Health Board, which comprises 22 senior academics and colleagues from the pharmaceutical industry and is responsible for an annual budget of ~£70M. I am responsible for ensuring that fair and robust funding decisions are made, through an inclusive and transparent process, in partnership with Board members and MRC staff. This role also requires me to chair annual meetings with MRC major investments that report through this Board, where Unit Directors bring challenges and opportunities to discuss, and report on progress against their funded objectives. I am also a member of the MRC’s Science Strategy Board and attend meetings of Council.
As co-founder of the UK Reproducibility Network, I created a structure explicitly designed to bring together the breadth of stakeholders across the research system, including grassroots researchers (through our Local Networks), institutions and their senior management teams (through our Institutional Members), and the diversity of sectoral organisations (funders, publishers, learned societies, government laboratories, professional bodies etc. through our Stakeholder Engagement Group). This included communities that ranged from the highly activist through to the more pragmatic and those heavily invested in the status quo. In the context of a rapidly evolving sectoral landscape (particularly in the context of research culture and open research), this required me to be highly responsive, and maintain the collaborative and constructive ethos on which the Network was founded. It also required me to be able to identify solutions to complex challenges that balanced the broad range of perspectives represented (e.g., guiding principles to inform engagement with organisations that elicit diverse reactions, such as for-profit publishers).
In my role within the UK Reproducibility Network I have contributed to major sectoral reports, including the UKRI Research Integrity Landscape Study and the recent UK CORI report on the enablers and inhibitors of research integrity. The Network itself has served as a model for the creation of similar national Reproducibility Networks in over 20 other countries, and has informed a Horizon Europe Framework Call (Enhancing the European R&I System). I provided written and oral evidence to the recent Science Innovation and Technology Committee Inquiry into Research Reproducibility, and served on the challenge panel of the UK Government Independent Review of Research Bureaucracy. I am now a member of the DSIT Bureaucracy Review Reform and Implementation Network.
In my research, I have provided syntheses of research evidence to make clear and actionable recommendations for policy and practice (e.g., working with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities to develop a decision-making tool for policy makers on the impact of legislation to ban flavourings in vaping products). I have also worked with several other agencies outside of academia, including Non-Governmental Organisations such as Action on Smoking and Health UK, as well as the Behavioural Insights Team (when it was part of the Cabinet Office), and supra-national organisations such as the World Health Organisation and the European Commission.
I currently lead a Research England Development Fund project that aims to embed open research practices across the UK sector and – critically – across disciplines. As part of this, we are conducting a project to harmonise incentive structures and research assessment frameworks across UK institutions (the Open and Responsible Researcher Reward and Recognition project). This has brought together 48 UK institutions working to reform recruitment and promotion practices, with the aim of ensuring that the approaches adopted by these institutions is coordinated and interoperable.
Outside of my academic career, I also bring experience drawn from 15 years in the Army Reserve (where I rose to the rank of Major and spent several years training soldiers for deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq through a period of enduring operations), and in elite sport (as coach on the GB Under-23 Rowing Team). Both have provided me with a deep understanding of servant leadership, high performance environments (and individuals), and the need for developing and maintaining a just culture. It has also instilled in me the value of diversity in all its forms.
All of my work has included a focus on equality, diversity and inclusion – from support for specific projects through our research culture programme (e.g., funding work to develop an inclusive research toolkit, and establishing a task and finish group to increase the diversity of PIs), through to championing the inclusion of equality impact assessments in policies and guidance, and establishing an EDI committee for the UK Reproducibility Network to ensure diversity is embedded into our work (including our Open Research Programme). I am also a mentor on the 100 Black Women Professors Now programme. Underpinning all of this activity is the need to listen and understand, and implement programmes and activities that will unfold over an appropriate timescale. Academia continues to be extremely non-diverse in many respects, and addressing this will require solutions that are co-produced by those directly affects (without inadvertently creating a burden for them). The solution, for me, will require a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches.
With my sectoral experience and standing in the field, I hope that I am a strong candidate for this position, which represents a genuinely exciting opportunity to lead transformative change that can serve as a model for the sector.
Thank you for considering my application.
Marcus Munafò
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