In March 2025, the first BBSRC-funded Connecting Research Culture Conference was held at Norwich Research Park, organised by the Earlham Institute.
The conference brought together around 200 people from across the eight BBSRC strategically funded research institutes, partner universities, funding bodies, and other research culture stakeholders.
This pioneering event was designed to connect and amplify research culture efforts across the biosciences sector, providing a platform to share best practice, explore challenges, and strengthen cross-institutional collaboration.
To achieve these goals, the conference organising team—led by Dr Siobhán Dorai-Raj, Inclusion, Diversity, Equality, and Accessibility Manager at the Institute alongside our Advanced Training team—knew that inclusion needed to be embedded in every aspect of the planning, design and execution of the conference.
Ahead of the next conference at Roslin Institute in November, Siobhán’s reflected on some of the things she learnt about organising an inclusive and engaging space to speak openly and share best practice:
As a commitment to our BBSRC funding we carried out an equality impact assessment of the conference, something that we hadn’t done before for an event. It turned out to be a very useful and important exercise. It required us to deeply consider all barriers to attending events and being fully engaged and included at the conference—from being a parent to being neurodivergent, being trans or being physically disabled. This allowed us to put in as many measures as we could, from the outset, to remove or reduce these barriers.
We knew we wanted to share as much information as soon as possible with attendees so we tried to start planning very early on. This helps alleviate anxiety and stress for attendees and helps with scheduling, especially for people who will need to make specific arrangements due to disabilities or because of caring responsibilities.
Early planning is also essential to ensure that you have a diverse set of speakers. Speakers dropping out at short notice is inevitable with any event, so we wanted to make sure we had some really good alternative speakers we could reach out to.
We shared an extensive conference information pack 10 days before the event—which unfortunately was almost three weeks later than our aimed dissemination timeframe. The pack included details of our inclusion measures, maps of the conference venue and wider Norwich Research Park, details of the conference dinner venue with full menus including all allergens listed, the full programme, speaker biographies and consented contact details of conference attendees. The conference information pack was the most highly rated inclusion measure at the conference, getting a rating of 4.7/5.
These working group members were from diverse backgrounds, ages, neurotypes and role types and were invaluable for advice and opinions on how to make the conference as inclusive as possible.
We had both a core Earlham Institute conference organising team and a large multi-institute conference organising working group which had members from all eight BBSRC strategically funded research institutes and our partners at University of East Anglia.
These working group members were from diverse backgrounds, ages, neurotypes and role types and were invaluable for advice and opinions on how to make the conference as inclusive as possible. To understand what participants wanted from this inaugural connecting research culture conference, we widened our consultation base even further by circulating a pre-conference survey around the eight institutes. The responses from this survey formed the blueprint for the format and themes of the conference, which included cohort specific discussion sessions and presentations on varied topics such as neurodiversity, mentoring, research integrity and wellbeing and mental health challenges in the research environment.
At the beginning of the conference, we gave a short “inclusion and accessibility speech” to sign-post everything available and make it clear that our aim was to make this event as inclusive as possible.
We told people that taking breaks from the conference was encouraged and gave them their options; we had a quiet room with no activities, a quiet room with activities, a quiet room with a live feed of the conference auditorium, or they could simply leave the conference venue altogether. You should work on the assumption that people have not read their conference information pack and signpost to the information again.
One of the quiet rooms and separate well-being spaces we provided had colouring sheets, colouring pencils, playing cards, origami and a badge making kit (that could be used for random designs or to make pro-noun badges or to indicate neurodivergence). We also had fidget toys at the conference registration desk and scattered around the well-being space. These measures were appreciated and well used and cost less than one hundred pounds.
Almost everything needs to be optional, for example some people loved the ice-breaker games and prompts, some people didn’t, and this was true for both neurodivergent and neurotypical people. Several people didn’t want to go to a conference dinner after a long day of networking, or couldn’t because of childcare responsibilities. Others found it to be the most useful part of the conference.
So, we recommend making dinner attendance optional, while being mindful that if you do, you can’t disadvantage people who don’t go. Therefore, avoid including key speeches or formal networking sessions at the dinner. Instead, try to make it fun, we had a low-stress quiz for the whole table at the dinner, with questions designed to help people from different institutes interact and learn from each other. We gave people help with inter-institute networking and had mixed tables, both in terms of their institute and role type and gender. But we also gave people the opportunity to sit with their colleagues if they’d prefer.
We were very aware that food is super important and has a huge influence on how happy and included people feel. This was an area that we put a lot of time and thought into and we liaised with our caterers to make sure it was right. This paid off and we received a lot of positive in-person feedback about this. Our survey respondents rated the quality of the food as 4.7/5.
It’s important to make sure there’s enough food and that everyone has a variety of options. So, make sure that there are several options that include vegan, gluten free, and halal options, and that there are intersectional–e.g. gluten-free vegan food.
If there are desserts, make sure all dietary options are covered here too. Capture this information at registration with tick boxes for as many things as possible and leave an open text box to ask people to fill in their dietary needs/preferences. We offered people an area to prepare their own food (fridge, microwave, kettle, table) and indicated this was an option at registration.
We are all guilty of not reading information, or our emails, which is why the earlier point of “scene setting” is important. This information reminder should be repeated on any other days of a conference, because some people will have missed it or not taken it in.
You can also leave holder slides with information up between sessions and have QR codes on posters to link to your conference information pack. Sustainability and inclusion can sometimes clash; we made a sustainability-based decision to not provide printed programmes or pens, but it turns out that people really like printed programmes and pens! We had a few of each and they disappeared as soon as we put them on the table, which necessitated frequent last-minute printing of programmes and other key pages from the information pack.
You cannot have too many conference staff, especially at registration times! We had lots of volunteers, clearly wearing Earlham Institute t-shirts but we only had five people at our registration desk, which turned out to be about three or four people too few for a conference of ~200 people. There were many more questions than we anticipated and many of us had to go on unexpected errands to assist people.
We used the Slido app during the conference to give people the opportunity to ask questions anonymously. We hadn’t used this app at a conference before and quickly realised that we had not resourced this adequately. More questions came in than could be quickly processed by the one staff member in charge and we hadn’t allocated enough time for questions.
We prioritised questions from people who raised their hands, which in retrospect, was unfair. We should have given equal time to both sets of questions. To help make up for this, we gave the relevant Slido questions to our speakers after the conference and published their answers in our post conference report, which all attendees received.
You won’t be able to keep everyone 100% happy, either because of budget constraints, logistical constraints, conflicts between personal preferences or conflicts between inclusion and priority delivery. You will have to compromise on some things but explaining the reasoning behind decisions can help minimise negative feedback.
As highlighted earlier, giving people choices helps. The biggest compromise we made on an inclusion measure was our decision to not live-stream the conference. We made the decision based on the experience of members of our organising team who knew that if we offered a live-stream of the conference post registration – for a conference where no one had paid for registration, accommodation, or travel – a high proportion would cancel their in-person attendance. And since the whole point of the conference was getting people in the same room, we couldn’t take that risk. So, our compromise was to advertise that we would be recording the main auditorium sessions and sharing them with the institutes post-event. Even with this incentive to attend in person, about 10% cancelled at the last minute, which meant wasted food and hotel costs.
As you’ll see from this list, planning an inclusive conference takes a lot of thought and time. However, we feel that it was well worth the effort. Attendees rated the extent that the conference was inclusive and welcoming to people from diverse backgrounds and roles as 4.3/5. When questioned on connections they made, 34% said they made some connections they might follow up on, 37% made valuable connections that they plan to build on, and 13% made several connections that will likely lead to ongoing collaborations.
When asked if they would be interested in attending a future Connecting Research Culture Conference, 0% said no. Which is great news, since BBSRC is supporting another Connecting Research Culture Conference hosted by the Roslin Institute, and held at the University of Edinburgh John McIntyre Centre in Edinburgh, 4-5 November 2026!
