Research Mingle - Get Ready for RAE 2026

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Rundown

1. Sharing on “Tactics / Tips on how to prepare for RAE” by

- Professor Crispin Coombs, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation & Professor of Information Systems, Loughborough Business School

- Professor David Parker, Chair Professor in Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Hong Kong Baptist University 

- Ms Laura Tucker, CEO, Hivve

2. Panel Discussion 

3. Mingling Session

Biographies of Speakers:

Professor Crispin Coombs was a member of the Business and Management Studies sub-panel for the assessment phase of the United Kingdom's Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2021. He is an experienced and successful leader at Loughborough University's Business School, where he has held various senior management roles. Currently, he serves as the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation. His research expertise lies in Information Systems, with a particular focus on the effective management of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics to deliver business benefits. He is a Senior Editor for the European Journal of Information Systems, which is one of the top Information Systems journals of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), and a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information Management and the International Journal of Project Management. Professor Coombs was elected to the Board of the UK Academy of Information Systems (UKAIS) in 2015, where he served as Vice-President from 2018-2020.

Professor David Parker spent over fifty years living in the North-East of England. He graduated with a First Class degree in Chemistry from Oxford University in 1978, gained a D.Phil. in 1980, working with John M Brown FRS in the Dyson Perrins Laboratory on mechanistic studies in asymmetric catalysis. In the autumn of 1980, he took up a NATO Fellowship to study with Jean-Marie Lehn in Strasbourg. He returned to Durham in January 1982 to a Lectureship in Chemistry and was promoted to a Chair in 1992. He enjoyed a 40-year academic career at Durham, serving as the Chairman of Durham Chemistry on two occasions, and was on the UK RAE Panel in 2008. Today, 35 of his former PhDs and post-doctoral assistants hold leading academic positions around the world. He has advised many Departments in the UK and Hong Kong over their RAE submissions (Poly-U, City-U and HKBU). In the 2014 UK RSAE exercise he was at the heart of a 4* Impact case Study. In 2022 he came to HKBU as a Global STEM Chair Professor in Chemistry, where he leads the JC STEM Lab of ChemProbes. 

Laura Tucker founded Hivve (formerly Vertigo Ventures) in 2009 to address the growing need for universities and research institutions to be able to demonstrate the impact of their work. Since then she has spearheaded the company’s international expansion, helping cross-disciplinary stakeholders from Europe through Asia to Oceania to better understand, collaborate on and showcase their research impact. Laura directs the overall direction of the company’s ImpactEcosystem, a family of cloud-based software products that help organisations embark on their impact journey. Drawing on the team’s experience, Laura led the development of the methodology behind the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings, which provided a framework for demonstrating universities’ contributions to the UN’s SDGs for the first time. She now sits on the Steering Committee for these annual rankings where over 1400 universities from over 100 countries participate. She is a regular speaker and published author on the subject of research impact and continues to work closely with policy makers and customers to help maximise the social, economic and environmental impact of their work.