My role at the IAD is to design, develop and implement training and support for Principal Investigators (PI) and Research Managers, which is a new role in the IAD. The first thing I need to do is define who my target audience is. When you consider a PI you might think of the lead person on a funded research project, most often leading a team of researchers. However, on closer inspection the term PI is not always as easily defined. Therefore, my first task in this new job is to answer the question, who is a PI?
How we define and what language we use to define a group of people is important, as it sets the boundaries for who has access to the training and what the expectations, roles and responsibilities are of this group of people. This blog offers some of the common definitions of a PI and discusses their pros and cons for the development of training and support for this group of people. Finally, I give my working definition of a PI and consider some of the possible limitations of this approach.
The funding definition
The term ‘Principal Investigator’ is commonly associated with funding and is often used to define the role of the person who is the lead on a research proposal and project. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) defines a PI as “Someone who is responsible for the intellectual leadership and overall management of a research project.” In the UK, however, there are various terms for people with these responsibilities in the funding landscape. The UKRI refers to the PI as the ‘Project lead’ under their new UKRI Funding Service roles and responsibilities. The NHS Health Research Authority instead refers to the ‘Chief Investigator (CI)’ for someone who has responsibility for the overall management of a research project and uses the term PI to mean someone with overall responsibilities for the research at a specific site, so there may be several PIs but only one CI on a project. The UKRI also defines a Fellow as “someone who is responsible for the intellectual leadership and overall management of a research project”, and the distinction between a Fellow and a PI is not clear.
If I adopt a purely funding definition of a PI based on funding roles and responsibilities only, then the definition of a PI is dependent on certain assumptions and will potentially exclude certain groups. For example, it assumes the research project is funded and would exclude pre-award activities and people (e.g. aspiring PIs) from the training, and those not eligible to apply for funding as a PI. It may also exclude certain disciplines where funding for research is less common or not required or exclude fellows who might not have a team yet. However, the advantages of the funding definition are that it is in line with the common understanding of what a PI is in the UK, and it makes it clear that it is post-award activities that are the focus, which help to narrow down the scope of the training and avoid overlap with other research services in the University.
The career stage or independence definition
Alternatively, I could base the definition on the career stage or independence of the researcher. ‘Independence’ is a commonly used term, meaning a researcher who has intellectual leadership and ownership of their research or who is financially independent to be able to pursue their own research agenda. Other terms such as mid-career or senior researcher might also be used to define researchers and are often linked to an expectation that the researcher has a certain level of research experience and skills. Many funders (e.g. the European Research Council Starting Grant) will use career stages or independence in their eligible criteria and may base it on the years after completion of a PhD. Therefore, in the funding landscape the use of career stages is used as a measure or proxy of someone’s experience and their ability to meet the responsibilities that are expected of someone who leads a funded research project and is appropriate if the eligibility criteria are made clear.
However, when it comes to researcher development, using a career stage or an independence definition has some limitations. The concept of ‘independence’ is difficult to define in terms of the skills that someone is meant to have to be independent, and will include several skills and qualities, such as self-efficacy, accountability, agency, etc. Researcher developers are more likely to refer to these skills as leadership skills. The career stage is also problematic as there is no common definition of what a mid-career researcher is, and it is often ambiguous as to who would be considered early, mid or late-career. A recent survey of mid-career researchers in the UK found that almost 99% of academics felt mid-career was not clearly defined by universities, leading to assumptions that researchers are aware of their own career stage and what their duties and success criteria are. Using criteria such as time since completion of a PhD to define career stages also has issues around excluding those who have had a less than typical academic career track since PhD completion, such as having industry experience or similar. The concept of independence or career-stage can also mean it’s difficult to know when you have reached ‘it’ and may even stop people from pursuing opportunities if they don’t feel they have reached independence or a particular career stage yet.
Who is a PI or a Research Manager?
Given the above considerations, and the need to keep the definition as inclusive as possible for the range of possibilities of who might consider themselves a PI or a Research Manager, I will be adopting a definition that relates to their core responsibilities and roles rather than their career stage. Therefore, the working definition of a PI or Research Manager that I will adopt will be:
A Principal Investigator, Research Manager, or Project Lead is a staff member who is responsible for the intellectual leadership and overall management of a research project.
The above working definition will not exclude those who are not funded or those who may not have teams yet. However, it does specify they must be staff to ensure a distinction from what might also apply to a PhD student who is pursuing a research project, for example. The inclusion of research managers or project lead in the definition of a PI is to allow for the possibility that not everyone will identify with the title of PI, but who may have identical or very similar roles and responsibilities. It also adopts the new terminology of Project Lead that UKRI will be introducing in their new funding service. Therefore, I will take the viewpoint that PIs, Research Managers or Project Leads are not different from each other in terms of their overall roles and responsibilities.
The remit of the IAD is to provide training and support for academic staff, which would require the exclusion of professional services staff from the working definition above. The exclusion of professional services staff does not discount the fact that these staff members may also have similar roles and responsibilities for leading research projects or managing research. Most of the training I produce will be openly available to anyone who needs it but will be tailored toward academic staff members.
Next steps
The next step will be to consider in more detail who the target audience is by using semi-structured interviews to speak to PIs about what their priorities are, and their experiences and responsibilities as a PI. This will also enable me to create a set of personas, which are character profiles created based on user research to classify different user types to understand the users’ needs, behavior, and expectations. The use of personas also helps illustrate to others who the training may be relevant for, recognising the diversity and complexity of who might be a PI. The user research will help me design the most appropriate training and support programme that best serves the diverse needs of the target audience. If anyone would like to discuss PI training and support with me, whether you are a PI or not, please do get in touch!
