Translation Manchester was delighted to host Macaulay Turner, a PhD Student co-supervised by Prof. Kathryn Else and Dr Katie Moore at the University of Manchester, for a 3-month internship as part of his BBSRC ‘Professional Internships for PhD students’ (PIPS) placement. The aim of PIPS, is to expose students to diverse work environments beyond their academic research, to cultivate their transferable skills, enhance their understanding of various career paths, and contribute to their personal and professional development.

During the internship, Macaulay worked with the Translation Manchester team on various projects aimed at assessing the greater impact of the Translation Manchester funded research.

Macaulay Turner

A key project he took part in focused on developing a method of tracking specific outputs of projects funded by Translation Manchester such as publications, patents, clinical trials, acquisition of follow-on funding and more. For this purpose, Macaulay undertook a training course on Qualtrics, an online survey tool, and further designed the questions to include in the survey that would get circulated to all of the recipients of Translation Manchester funding. To design the questions, Macaulay took into consideration the key performance indicators (KPIs) set out by the team within the Wellcome Translational Partnership Award (TPA), that defines the criteria by which the success of the TPA programme is assessed. This enabled Macaulay to capture a wide range of outputs and ensure that all developments are reported on.

The survey aimed to capture the outcomes of recently completed projects as well as those that had concluded some time ago. While initial outputs had been reported at the time of completion, the purpose of the survey was to gather insights into the longer-term impacts, recognising that translational research often requires longer time to demonstrate its results. Thus, Macaulay had set up a framework that allowed the survey participants to either update their outputs (if they had reported on them before) or provide new ones.

Based on the data collected, Macaulay was able to conduct several analyses including:

• Updating list of outputs from projects dating back to 2018.
• Assessing how far along the translational pathway the projects had progressed following support from Translational Manchester funding.
• Reporting on the number of interdisciplinary collaborations mentioned in the applications to gain insights on the collaborations supported and highlight areas where collaborations could be strengthened.

All these findings were reported to Wellcome, who funds the Translation Manchester programme through the institutional TPA.

Example graph of Macaulay’s work in identifying the number and affiliation of collaborators formed by FBMH awardees (per School), as a result of receiving funding from Translation Manchester.

In addition to this significant contribution, Macaulay was also involved in creating blogs showcasing funded projects, highlighting their translational journey from bench to bedside! Macaulay quoted that he found particularly enjoyable learning about research areas completely different from his own, and the creative ways researchers use to get around bottlenecks in their work.

Macaulay was also presented with the opportunity to participate at a review panel for funding applications for one of the Translation Manchester funding schemes. Macaulay quoted about this experience “This was an extremely exciting opportunity, and it was good to see what the decision-making process looks like. I am currently planning to continue to a career in academia, so having knowledge of how the process occurs from the other side and the things that reviewers value will be extremely useful.”

In his reflection, of his time with the Translation Manchester team, Macaulay detailed how enjoyable and useful this experience was, and how it helped him to gain a better understanding of the research support services and research funding, and also develop skills in data analysis.

It was a real pleasure to have Macaulay as team member for this short spell, and we wish him the very best in his future research endeavours, which we are confident will be exceptional!

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