An update from Tanja Müller, SEED Director of Postgraduate Research

29 May 2025

Fostering interdisciplinary working, positive improvements and current challenges

Dear all,  

This is my last year as SEED PGR director, and I continue to be impressed by the diverse and enthusiastic PGR community across SEED. When I took on the role in February 2023, one of the key priorities I wanted to accomplish during my three-year tenure was to foster more active engagement of PGRs with research cultures in SEED. I was aiming to build on the good practice already present in some research groups (RGs) but absent in others, combined with fostering (more) interdisciplinarity engagement beyond the often rather narrow and territorial boundaries of research groups.  

Making research group membership a key milestone for PGRs has given us for the first time a clear oversight of PGR links with groups. However, membership does not imply a sense of belonging to a group. To foster the latter, RG leads were invited to present their group at SEED PGR induction and/or produce a short video introduction to the group and its activities. Over the past two years, I have seen many encouraging signs of increasing PGR involvement across all disciplines. I subsequently introduced two calls a year for interdisciplinary PGR-led project funding. This year, we are funding five exciting projects – ranging from engagement with diverse methodologies and the questioning of core theories, to creative and therapeutic endeavours. The call for applications to the 2025/26 fund will open in late September, and I look forward to supporting more interdisciplinary working. 

Another visible sign of a marked increase in interdisciplinary engagement was this year’s fantastic PGR conference which took place on Wednesday 21 May, in the Nancy Rothwell Building, under the theme Future Worlds: Creating Resilient, Sustainable & Inclusive Societies. It was organised by a committee made up of PGRs from all SEED disciplines and also including, for the first time, PGRs from other schools - an experiment that worked extremely well. The scene for the day was set by an excellent keynote by Dr Heather Alberro, SEED’s Lecturer in Sustainability, whose sub-title ‘Love and hope against a necropolitical present’ summed up not only what type of academic work the world in its current state needs, but also the essence of a PhD journey in these challenging times.  

When asked in a session I chaired at the conference what the most joyful part of the PhD experience had been, two answers stood out from the presenters: the freedom to determine one’s own research agenda, and the opportunity to engage with a diverse cohort of students (and staff) and experience the PhD journey with all its ups and downs as a community. I sincerely hope we can keep fostering such communities in future years. Recent proposed changes in UK immigration policy, on which a PGR wrote a blog recently, put this into doubt. And then there are the often prohibitive Visa and NHS surcharge fees that most scholarships do not include. These additional costs contradict the values of EDI and may impose real hardship on those whose excellence earned them a scholarship. Taking it up may literally mean families back home having to sell valuable livelihood assets to cover these additional costs. I do hope the university will actively explore ways to address these costs in the future. Doing so would demonstrate a meaningful commitment to supporting future global leaders and would align strongly with the university’s core goal of social responsibility. 

Tanja Müller,  

SEED PGR Director