Steering Group: 

His responsibilities include cross-funder partnership working; facilitation and management of Welsh involvement in UK programmes; and overall management of the Health and Care Research Wales grant schemes and research development infrastructure.

Michael has seven years of active research experience as a behavioural psychologist in the School of Psychology, Bangor University, and has worked with children with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour in care, play and educational settings.

Prior to joining Research and Development Division, Michael worked as a Media Officer in the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, with responsibility for both media relations and the management of the Chief Medical Officer’s website. He also has experience of crisis management, through secondments to the Welsh Government’s Agriculture Department and Foot and Mouth Inquiries Team.

Anne PhD, MSc Bus Practice has a background in cell biology and spent ten years as a researcher in Germany and Ireland. She has been working with the Health Research Board in a variety of roles for 20 years. During this time, she has gained experience across a wide spectrum of health research and funding instruments from infrastructures over health research careers to knowledge translation awards and worked with many co-funders.

Anne is currently responsible for the HRB’s Investigator-led Grants, Research Careers and Enablers. She has been the driver behind the HRB’s systems approach to Public, Patient and Carer Involvement (PPI). She has been actively involved in tackling unconscious bias, has initiated transparency initiatives and has led a self-audit assessing the HRB’s performance against recommendations to maximising research value. This has led her together with Kelly Dunham from PCORI to develop a self-assessment tool specifically directed at funders, which is available to EViR member organisations.

She is responsible for ZonMw’s implementation policies and leads the ZonMw implementation team. She has written reports on cost saving interventions, Choosing Wisely, and Strengthening Impact and publications on implementation and innovation in research. In 2017 she became co-convener of the international Ensuring Value in Research (EViR) Health Funders Forum on behalf of ZonMw. She leads the EViR working group on Dissemination and Implementation. Barbara is one of the initiators of the Netherlands Implementation Collective (NIC).

She has a key role in ensuring transparency and open research across the NIHR, leading the development of the Clinical Trial registration and dissemination of results and is currently implementing data sharing mechanisms across the NIHR. Before working with the NIHR, she had 15 years’ experience in local government policy development and community engagement.

As part of PCORI’s efforts to maximize the impact of research, she represents the organization in the Ensuring Value in Research (EViR) Funders’ Forum, a collaborative effort with other US and international funders to improve efficiency in biomedical research. Dunham received a BA in anthropology from Indiana University and an MPP from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Currently, Staffan is the Program Manager for Forte´s National Program on Implementation Research and the vice Program Manager for Forte´s National Program on “Applied Welfare Research”, which specifically targets the social care services. Staffan is also one of Sweden´s experts in the Health Cluster of Horizon Europe and he leads the work in Sweden with the partnership programme “Transforming Health and Care Systems”.