Applications for the 2025-26 Cohort of Data Impact Fellows are open! In this post we share some reflections & updates from our most recent cohort of Data Impact Fellows.
You can find out more information and apply on our website here.
Dan Muir, Senior Economist at Youth Futures Foundation
The UK Data Service Data Impact Fellowship is a great opportunity for early career researchers to celebrate their work in this space, to meet like-minded individuals and to learn more about how familiar datasets and analysis techniques are being applied in different spheres. The UK Data Service team do a fantastic job of facilitating the scheme, bringing the fellows together for both networking opportunities but also providing insightful webinars and talks. The grant funding is also hugely beneficial for investing in your development – the flexibility with which the funding can be used allows you to tailor it’s use to whatever you think would benefit you most. I also particularly enjoyed helping out at the Poverty in Data event this spring, getting to meet fellow fellows in person, and to hear more about what they are up to with their research. Additionally, I’m appreciative of how accommodating the team have been in fitting the scheme activities around my working schedule, which has at times sadly limited what I have been able to give back to the scheme, but the team have been completely understanding of this.
As for my plans for the future, I’m currently really enjoying my new role at the Youth Futures Foundation, and am really looking forward to getting the programme of work I am leading on off the ground. Working with employers to engage in research and evaluation comes with its challenges, but I’m excited by how the work is taking shape, and the scale of the potential impact the findings could have on the futures of young people from marginalised backgrounds. Given the poor labour market outcomes many individuals with special educational needs and disabilities, from ethnic minorities, and that are care leavers or experienced with the criminal justice system experience, I see this work as critical not just for these individuals but also for society as a whole.
Natasha Chilman, Teaching Fellow and Research Associate in Population Mental Health at King’s College London
I was awarded the UK Data Service Data Impact Fellowship in the final year of my PhD in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London. What a year it has been! I recently completed my PhD, which focused on mental health and multimorbidity for people who have experienced homelessness. I collaborated with people with lived experience of homelessness for my research. The Data Impact Fellowship enabled me to continue this involvement right to the end stages of this research by supporting two meetings to discuss the results and avenues for impact. I had the pleasure of co-presenting this research with a collaborator who had experienced homelessness, for an inclusion health primary care event in July 2023.
Furthermore, I was thrilled to present my research at the World Congress of Epidemiology in Cape Town, South Africa. This substantially broadened the global reach of my research, and would not have been possible without the support and funding from this scheme. I have enjoyed the opportunity to meet other researchers who are passionate about addressing health and social inequality using data. We met regularly as a cohort to learn about ways to maximise the impact of our research from each other and from experts in this area, and I recently co-hosted a panel of previous Data Impact Fellows at the Poverty in Data Early Career Researcher event.
I am now a Teaching Fellow and Research Associate at King’s College London, where I am working as part of an exciting UK-wide Consortium investigating population mental health. I look forward to keeping in touch with the Service and the friendly community of past, present, and future Fellows.
Niels Blom, Research Fellow at the Violence and Society Centre at City, University of London.
About a year ago I started as a Data Impact Fellow where I have aimed to generate impact with my work regarding violence and abuse and its impacts on victim-survivors lives. I am a Research Fellow in Criminology at the Violence and Society Centre at City St George’s, University of London, where I work on the UKPRP Violence, Health and Society (VISION) consortium. My research is primarily on violence, specifically domestic violence and abuse. I focus on its impact on people’s working life, wellbeing, and health. Additionally, I work on a programme of work to compare, harmonise, and integrate violence data from different sources including various surveys and administrative records.
Since joining as a Data Impact Fellow, I have met with key stakeholders in the field, for instance with the Home Office and the Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse. With them I have discussed ongoing research work on domestic abuse and its impact on working life. We show that 3.6% of victim-survivors of domestic abuse lost their job as a result of the abuse and 1 in 10 took a period of leave from work. The more types of abuse people have experienced, the higher the risk of losing or taking leave from work. Our meetings with the Home Office and the Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse focussed on how this research can inform policy and costings of domestic abuse, hopefully resulting in a lasting impact.
With the funding from the scheme, I have followed a course on spatial econometrics at the Essex Summer School. Here I learned how areas, such as neighbourhoods or countries, influence other nearby areas and how to model this correctly. I am using these newfound skills immediately in a project on how social cohesion in an area is related to violence in a neighbourhood, and how social cohesion may form a buffer against negative spillover of economic deprivation on violence.
Overall, the Data Impact Fellow scheme has provided me with opportunities to meet interesting people, to build new contacts both within and outside of academia, and to develop my research skills.
We’ll share more reflections from some of our other Fellows in another post in the next couple of weeks!
The Data Impact Fellows programme aims to provide career development opportunities for researchers and analysts at a relatively early stage in their career in the academic or charity sectors.
We are aligning this cohort with two of our Impact Themes, Mental health and wellbeing in data and Children and young people in data.
The scheme offers:
- Financial support to help you develop your idea of data impact.
- An opportunity to meet and network with other Fellows to share and develop ideas.
- Sharing your work and ideas, and opening up discussion on our Data Impact blog.
- Showcasing your work and its impact through co-creating a case study.
- Contribute to our impact events.
You can find out more information and apply on our website here.