Partnership Delivery Team

Professor Rebecca (Bec) Riley is Co-Director of City-REDI, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Regional Engagement, Director of the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Hub, and Professor of Enterprise, Engagement, and Impact at the University of Birmingham’s Business School.

Bec joined the University of Birmingham nine years ago to set up City-REDI, with an aim to build a distinctive local, regional, national and international research platform through the development of a Birmingham approach to understanding and facilitating growth in city regions. This systemic approach in identifying and conceptualising the inter-dependencies within and between regional economies has provided new opportunities for understanding, conceptualising, modelling, evaluating and comparing economic activity and business trends at the city-region level.

As the newly announced Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Regional Engagement, Bec will lead on setting the civic and regional vision for the University, while building on the work she has been doing with the University’s Regional Engagement Group. Alongside her new role, Bec remains the Principal Investigator (PI) and Director of the (LPIP) Hub, addressing nationwide issues through local partnership and place.

Bec’s research interests focus on regional economic development, including research to develop policy and regional strategies, monitoring frameworks, economic forecasting, skills and labour market analysis, and strategic business cases and project evaluation. She applies a mixed methods approach in her research, with a strong focus and record of impactful policy-relevant applied research and stakeholder engagement. She is an experienced lead on research projects, with over 200 research projects carried out across academia, policy, and consultancy roles. 

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Liz has worked at the University of Birmingham for 16 years, joining City-REDI as Programme Manager in May 2021.

Liz joined the team from the University of Birmingham ESRC IAA account, where she was a project manager. In her current role within City-REDI, Liz woks across 30+ projects within the research centre, providing milestone tracking, stakeholder management, risk management and the review and audit of projects to improve effectiveness and efficiency of key performance indicators. Alongside her role of managing current projects, Liz also supports all funding bids across the team.

Liz has also held several other roles at the University, including being a central member of the team responsible for the Research Excellence Framework Assessment in both 2014 and 2021 submissions and as Executive Assistant to various members of the Strategic Planning Office Senior Management Team. Liz is a PRINCE 2 Practitioner, a PMI Project Management Professional and holds a Master’s Degree in Project Management and Organisational Communications.

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Annette Boaz is a Professor of Health and Social Care at King's College London.

She has more than 25 years of experience in supporting the use of evidence across a range of policy domains. She was part of one of the largest UK investments in the evidence use landscape, the ESRC Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice and a Founding Editor of the Journal Evidence & Policy.

She has undertaken an international leadership role in promoting the use of evidence, recently publishing a new book on evidence use ‘What Works Now’.  She has a particular research interest in stakeholder involvement, the role of partnerships in promoting research use and implementation science.

Annette is a fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. She has completed a fellowship  Government Office for Science and is leading a large NIHR project setting up and evaluating research practice partnerships in care homes.

James' work is focused on the regional impacts of creative clusters, with particular interest given to the interactions between the clusters themselves, and higher education institutions both in and around them. The project aims to use the creative clusters in the West Midlands and Cardiff City Region as a basis for comparison. His research interests centre around the Creative and Cultural Industries, including creative industry employment and recruitment, organisational change and fragmentation, negotiation of industrial boundaries and processes of recruitment.

James completed his PhD in labour market entry in the UK TV industry at Cardiff University in 2021. His research, funded by an ESRC scholarship, explores the patterns of recruitment and labour market entry through the accounts of young and recent freelance workers in UK TV. James has an MSc, also from Cardiff University, in which he explored the viability of crowdfunding business models for artists in the music industry, from the perspective of those who contributed. Additionally, James taught undergraduate tutorials in Cardiff Business School on the institution’s Business and Management course.

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Abigail joined the University of Manchester in 2009 following a five-year role outside of Higher Education as founding Director of a regional Culture Observatory working within local government, the arts and cultural sector and regional agencies across the North West of England.

She has been researching cultural policy and place for over twenty-five years, beginning with a PhD on urban cultural policy and popular music, followed by postdoctoral research on local music industries, national ‘grand projets’, such as the Millennium Dome, and local cultural strategies. She has published widely in international cultural policy and cultural studies journals and co-edited volumes with a focus on local cultural policies and place governance; her recent monograph on cultural policy and municipal public parks.

Large funded projects include AHRC Connected Communities Understanding Everyday Participation - Articulating Cultural Value (2012-2018) and the AHRC Policy and Evidence Centre for Creative Industries (2018 – 2023).

As a UKRI Policy Fellow with the Department for Cultural, Media and Sport (2023-2025) Abi is developing place-based frameworks for sustaining equitable cultural infrastructure. She has recently led the ‘Beyond the Creative City’ with colleagues at University of Manchester, University of Toronto and University of Melbourne leading to an international network on cultural districts and place-based policy.  

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Anne Green joined the University of Birmingham as Professor of Regional Economic Development in June 2017. Her research interests span employment, non-employment, regional and local labour market issues, skills strategies, urban and rural development, migration and commuting, associated policy issues and evaluation.

She has published in high profile journals and has written numerous reports for UK Government Departments and agencies. Anne is experienced in disseminating the results of her research to academic, policy and practitioner audiences.

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Professor Kathryn Higgins (PhD) is a Professor of Social Science and Health at QUB. Kathy is the founder and Director of QCAP. She has published widely in the areas of adolescent development as well as programme evaluation/implementation science and methodological innovation.

She is an experienced research leader having directed two multi-disciplinary research centres at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) - the Institute of Childcare Research (2007-2019) and the Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation (2019-2021).

Her recent appointment as Director of ‘Queen’s Communities and Place’ consolidates her extensive experience in leading research consortiums around community health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations, particularly children and young people.

She has attracted funding from prestigious sources such as the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Northern Ireland Public Health Agency (PHA) and the Northern Ireland Executive and individual Ministerial Departments of the Executive.

She has led the longitudinal Belfast Youth Development Study (BYDS) over the past two decades, tracking the development of young people’s substance use, alongside mental health, educational outcomes, family and peer relationships and criminal behaviour.

She is a member of several policy advisory committees such as the North South Advisory Committee on alcohol she is currently appointed as co-opted member if the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) Young People’s Recovery Committee advising on young people’s drug use and treatment across the UK.

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Sarah leads CLES, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, the National Organisation for local economies and based in Manchester.   She is an expert in regional and local economic development and argues for economic and social justice and the creation of places which enable people to live good lives.

Before joining CLES in 2021, Sarah was Director of IPPR North, the dedicated think tank for the North of England.  She previously worked for CLES until 2011 and began her career in local government, working in County Durham and North Yorkshire.  She has a PhD in Urban Studies from the University of Glasgow.

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Paul Manners is Associate Professor in Public Engagement at UWE Bristol and founding director of the UK’s National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). 

The NCCPE was established in 2008 to support universities to embed innovative approaches to involving the public in their work.  The NCCPE is widely recognised for its expertise in supporting organisational change, partnership working, impact assessment and innovation in engagement. 

The NCCPE is also a founding partner of the UK’s Civic University Network. Paul trained as an English teacher before working at the BBC for 18 years, responsible for a number of broadcast-led public engagement campaigns.  He was chair of the National Trust’s advisory group on Collections and Interpretation from 2007 to 2023.    

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Jeffrey Matsu is Chief Economist at the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) and a Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

With extensive experience in connecting policy with practice through evidence-based research, he works with partner governments, accountancy bodies and the public sector around the world to advance public finance and support better public services.

Previously, Jeff was responsible for market analysis and thought leadership at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and co-led the economy theme at the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE).

He was also a senior economist at Morgan Stanley and served on the research staff at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington DC.

Jeff holds degrees in economics from the University of Washington and Johns Hopkins University.

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Kathryn is Professor of Evidence and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London. Her work focuses on the use of evidence in policy environments, particularly looking at formal and informal science advisory mechanism, and on the different interventions and approaches used by government, funders and academia to catalyse knowledge exchange. Her projects have focused on initiatives in the US, the EU and the UK, working predominantly with national and local governmental partners. She is – with Annette Boaz – the co-Director of Transforming Evidence, an international collaborative aiming to bring together the interdisciplinary communities which study the production and use of evidence.

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Jamie Ounan is a founding Director of Inner Circle Consulting. He has over 20 years of public service leadership and consulting experience in city planning and development, service design from strategy to delivery, and a track record of building teams that provide innovative and effective solutions to complex challenges in the public sector. Currently Jamie leads the Inner Circle team in their mission to create prosperous places and transformed public services to unlock a better future for all.

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Professor Trehan is an internationally recognised scholar in knowledge exchange, engagement and impact. Her research specialises in how diversity and inequality is experienced by minority groups; she has longstanding research experience of the key issues affecting minorities in business and communities and has led an extensive number of ESRC and AHRC funded research activities which are distinguished by user engagement, innovation, and community orientation.

Professor Trehan work has helped cast new light on academic debate, the research findings have been influential in shaping national and European policy including the OECD, as well regional communities. She has studied and led engagement and impact projects across a range of contexts and disciplines to illuminate what works and why. Her work on how engagement and knowledge transfer has been leveraged to generate deep and sustainable change through the research, developed evidenced based tools to ensure research impact changes the way we generate and share knowledge that facilitates purposeful and beneficial change. Through robust, evidenced led research her work has developed new approaches to the use of research in supporting and delivering policy and practitioner engagement, learning and impact.

As a Co-Investigator Professor Trehan Chairs the National Engagement Group (NEG) for the ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre. The purpose of the NEG is to support national policy engagement, provide advice on policy, practice and research developments and opportunities, and ensure effective connections between the ESRC Centre and relevant national stakeholders and user groups. The NEG will also serve to support and enhance the dissemination and application of the research and innovation, with a particular remit to support the Centre’s impact and engagement strategy. It is intended that the NEG will facilitate and foster strategic discussions and help initiate system-level thinking and new multi-sectoral working to support and advance the Centre’s aims. The National Engagement Group fulfils the ESRC-described role of ‘advisory board’.

As such it has responsibility for overseeing the activities of the Centre and the development of the ESRC Grant's strategy and programme of work.

Carly is the Head of Capacity Building at Involve. She leads a variety of projects inside and outside of public institutions that aim to build capacity to embed the processes, skills, structures and cultures needed for effective public participation in decision-making. In practice, this includes developing and delivering training and mentoring programmes, providing strategic guidance and support to decision-makers and organisations, creating and sustaining networks, and developing good practice resources and thought leadership.

Carly is also a freelance trainer and practitioner in non-formal education, specialising in inclusion and intersectionality. She has an MSc in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and has written and edited several educational publications on topics such as sexuality and gender, the inclusion of refugees and migrants, and inclusive sex education. Outside of Involve, Carly is the Chair of the Riverside Community Health Project, a local organisation in the West End of Newcastle that works to challenge poverty and systemic inequalities. 

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Vicky Ward is Reader in Management at the University of St Andrews, Director of the Research Unit for Research Utilisation (RURU) and Chair of the UK Knowledge Mobilisation Forum. 

She has spent the last 15 years researching aspects of knowledge mobilisation and knowledge sharing across the health and social care and other sectors, with a particular focus on how diverse groups of people (practitioners, academics, communities) create and share knowledge with each other. She has a particular interest in knowledge mobilisation frameworks, knowledge brokering, knowledge co-production and embedded research and has published a range of peer-reviewed papers focusing on her original research in these areas.

For the past 2 years she has held a Parliamentary Academic Fellowship with the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology to study how parliaments across the world access and harness academic research.

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Jane Wills is Honorary Professor of Geography at the University of Exeter, Cornwall. She has long-standing research interests in the changing geography of employment, labour supply and collective organisation. She is well-known for charting the development of community organising and living wage campaigns. Recent books cover the geography of political institutions and their implications for democratic engagement (in Locating Localism, 2016) as well as the social processes of knowledge production (in The Power of Pragmatism, 2020). Her most recent research has explored localising and democratising goal-based democracy for sustainability. She is a fellow of the British Academy and has supported the BA project 'Where we Live Next' that advocates for place-sensitivity in policy making and practice. At the end of 2024, she stopped working for the University of Exeter and is now connected through a voluntary (Honorary) position.

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