PhD Stage 2 Seminar: Yuveena Gopalan – Researchers’ Perceptions on Becoming a Better Researcher

Registration

This is a hybrid event and registration is required. Please register for face-to-face attendance by contacting us here or you may attend via Zoom here (https://utsmeet.zoom.us/j/87096621402?from=addon).

Thesis Title: Researchers’ Perceptions on Becoming a Better Researcher

PhD candidate: Yuveena Gopalan

Please note that this is an open Stage 2 PhD seminar. Your support and constructive feedback are most welcome!

Abstract

Professional development is vital and necessary to sustain continual learning of any workforce. Researcher development strategies and support are largely informed through institutional strategies, often conceived and deployed without the active participation of researchers. A number of studies recognise the limitations of this approach and note the importance of understanding researchers’ perspectives on their own development. This study reports the perspectives of successful researchers on how they have learnt to become better researchers. Interviews with early/mid/senior career stage researchers identified four main themes: ‘establishing expertise’, ‘pursuing passion’, ‘coping with challenge and change’, and ‘building belonging’, with an overarching interrelationship between social and personal dimensions to learning. The findings are in line with workplace learning theories, where learning occurs predominantly through informal means and is contingent on practice needs. Personal disposition and a supportive environment were found to be essential to the success of these researchers. Engaging key institutional and wider groups of researchers with these insights could facilitate better alignment between top-down and bottom-up perspectives on how best to empower researchers. 

Bio

Yuveena Gopalan is a PhD student at the Connected Intelligence Centre, UTS and is a Research Data Insights Analyst with UTS’s Research Office. In her current role within the Research Office, she has been exploring institutional research data in developing tools towards demonstrating institutional research capabilities and sector based funding opportunities for UTS. She has worked on education based data science projects with NSW government Data Analytics Centre and with CSIRO on predicting water pipeline asset failure. Her research is focussed on tackling the challenge of designing Researcher Professional Learning Analytics, that is, the use of data-informed tools and visualisation to support academics develop their careers.   

PhD Supervisors: Simon Buckingham Shum and David Boud