Meet Eylul Oguz, The I-REACCH Project Coordinator!

As the project coordinator, I support the I-REACCH team from communications, admin, and events. Most prominently, I am the person behind all the social media, webpages, email digests, and newsletters (including wherever you are reading this from!).

There’s great satisfaction from having access the “front line” forms of communications, because I can directly see the result of our efforts. Whenever I see any form of engagement, comment, email enquiry, or sign up, I know that we are helping the research community, and people are interested. It’s also great to see how engagement picks up exponentially, sowing the hard work of the seeds we plant to grow research culture.

Conversations about research culture are already happening within the sector, and we aim to not reinvent the wheel, but to support existing activity within (and beyond) the university. For example, we’ve successfully funded 15 smaller-scale research culture projects, and we are further supporting them through logistics and promoting these activities within our communications.

It is a steep learning curve to figure out how we can reach groups to maximise impact and engagement. At first, I thought this was due to me joining Leicester just a year ago, but I later learned that this is prevalent across the sector. There is so much going on, but we just need to find out about it. What we aim to do within I-REACCH is exploring we can engage with both people who are eager to collaborate and the “hardest to reach” groups within the university. Hopefully, our navigating through the university landscape for our own project will naturally enable us to strengthen the connections within research environments.