Find out about the latest upgrade to Research Explorer and what it means for researchers at the University.

As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme, The University of Manchester (UoM) has made a £1 million investment into computational resource to further enable research across all faculties and institutes.

Come along to the Research IT club in December to find out more about all the large research IT infrastructure procurements that are coming soon as well as the use of HTC Vive Pro in VR teaching. There will also be a presentation from Malcolm Whitehouse, CIO of IT Services about his vision for a digital university.

There is a lot of activity in Research IT regarding investment in research IT infrastructure and the Research Lifecycle Programme. It can all get a bit confusing! We have put together a summary of the current position regarding investment and workshop outcomes which we hope you will find useful.

As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) we are looking at procurement processes alongside HPC provision. We know that many researchers at the University are already using Cloud provision and that many more would like to do so. However at the moment there is no official process in place to procure or access Cloud resources.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! To see presentations on the latest news from the research lifecycle programme (RLP), research IT infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as an interesting use for your Android phone, click on the links below.

The Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) scoping phase is drawing to a conclusion. Over the past six months there has been an intense period of consultation with the research and support community staff through workshops, one to one interviews, deep dives, and a Thought Exchange survey. The Thought Exchange provided us with a comprehensive insight of the ideas of the community from PhD students to professors and support staff of how they envisage future e-infrastructure data management and support.

We need you to get involved with the Research Lifecycle Programme by contributing to a Focus Group to have your say on what matters to you in your research now, and in the future – computing platforms, research data management, software, collaboration tools, and managing your research.

Do you support research through your role in finance, as a technician manager, RBESS or in a support role such as Senior Experimental Officer? If so we want to hear from you! This Research Life Cycle workshop will look at the current state of administrative research support in the area of managing funding: post-award management and closing of award.

Research IT is currently seeking researchers to attend two Research Life Cycle workshops. The first workshop will aim to establish the current “as-is” model of administrative research support and establish the parameters for change and possible options to enable change. The second workshop will investigate how researchers would like research administration for the University of Manchester to work in the future.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! The presentations are now available from the links below.

We plan to update you regularly on the Research Life Cycle programme so you can keep fully up to date with progress and, more importantly, find out how you can be involved and contribute to the project.

The Research Life Cycle (RLC) aims to deliver uplift in management and support of Research within the University to support the goal of world class research. This will be done through a set of targeted substantial investments to provide streamlined research support and upgrade in the e-Research infrastructure of the University. An outline budget of £15M over 5 years has been set.