RoRI welcomes nine new researchers

As the new academic year gets underway, RoRI has boosted its research team with nine colleagues joining us at UCL and CWTS (Leiden University). These additions to RoRI’s team strengthen our expertise across metascience, AI, research assessment, and science policy. Their diverse experience will contribute to RoRI’s mission of improving research systems through evidence, data and experimentation. Welcome on board to all new members of the team!

Research Fellows in Metascience 

Josie Coburn and Seunghyun Lee join us as Research Fellows in Metascience at UCL.

Previously at the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), Josie Coburn brings an interdisciplinary background in metascience, research funding, and science policy, with expertise spanning health, energy, sustainability, and AI. She will contribute to RoRI’s AFIRE project, supporting experiments in research funding and evaluation. 

Seunghyun Lee brings experience in STI policy, research assessment, and institutional strategy, having previously worked with the OECD and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Evaluation and Planning (KISTEP). At RoRI, she will focus on the AGORRA project, contributing to efforts to reform research assessment and strengthen the role of research in society.

UKRI Metascience AI Early Career Fellows

RoRI is delighted to be hosting two UKRI AI Metascience Early Career Fellows: Youyou Wu and Basil Mahfouz. The UKRI AI Metascience Fellowship supports early career researchers at the intersection of AI and metascience, in order to build our understanding of how the growing adoption of AI is changing the research landscape, and how governments, industry, and funding organisations should respond.

Youyou Wu, an Associate Professor of Psychology at UCL, has been part of RoRI since 2024 through the GRAIL project, developing best practices for AI in research funding, and contributing to the AFIRE project. Her fellowship will investigate whether generative AI is reinventing the language of science in research publications, and the implications for peer review. She will collaborate with the UK Metascience Unit to translate insights from her research into policy recommendations. 

As Youyou describes:“This fellowship will allow me to explore how generative AI influences the language of science and the implications for peer review. The words scientists use matter because AI is starting to be used to make funding and publication decisions based on scientific text. It is a trend I observed through the GRAIL project at RoRI.”

Basil Mahfouz investigates how AI systems will transform the way science reaches policymakers, building on his PhD at UCL, where he developed machine learning approaches to study how governments access and use research. 

Basil explains: “My previous research revealed that policymakers draw from remarkably narrow sources of evidence despite abundant relevant research being available. A small group of researchers disproportionately influences policy, while equally valuable evidence remains overlooked. AI may disrupt this system and bridge the science-policy divide, or it could amplify existing voices and further narrow the evidence base. My fellowship aims to understand how AI will reshape this landscape and develop practical frameworks for responsible implementation.

Most importantly, I’m building tools for universities and funders to identify overlooked researchers whose work has high policy relevance but remains invisible in current systems, and ways to support them. Ultimately, the goal is to lay the foundation for developing tools that help policy makers source evidence more effectively, and for universities to augment the societal impact of their research.”

New research fellows at CWTS

Three research fellows – Nees Jan van Eck, Rodrigo Costas, and Jeroen van Honk – have recently joined RoRI, from our partner institution CWTS (Centre for Science and Technology Studies) at Leiden University.

Nees Jan van Eck is a senior research fellow and head of data science at CWTS, leading data infrastructure projects and developing open, transparent tools for research assessment and scholarly communication, including the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition and VOSviewer.

Rodrigo Costas is a senior research fellow at CWTS, bringing expertise in scientometrics, information science, and social media metrics, focusing on global researcher mobility, funding flows, and science-society interactions. 

Jeroen van Honk is a researcher at CWTS, active across both research projects and data services. He brings expertise in bibliometrics and research information systems, with a particular focus on funding data and author disambiguation. He also serves as Managing Editor of RoRI’s MetaROR open review platform. 

Visiting fellows

Joining RoRI as new visiting fellows are Amanda Jane Blatch-Jones, a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Health and Care Research, and Tom Kelsey, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

Amanda Jane Blatch-Jones brings over 15 years of experience in research on research, with a focus on open research practices, transparency, and enhancing research funding practices. 

Tom Kelsey combines expertise in policy and academia, exploring governance, productivity, and industrial strategy, and has previously worked on UK tech policy and political analysis.

Both will contribute their expertise to RoRI’s ongoing projects and help expand the institute’s research and policy engagement.