Good Practice Guide on the Research Funding Process

EDICa’s recommendations for good practice on the reach and support of a diverse range of applicants; the peer review process; providing feedback; and conducting inclusive peer review.

Published : 24/06/2026

Peer Review

Funding

Report

Home » Good Practice Guide on the Research Funding Process

EDICa’s Workstream 2 set out to determine how EDI (equality/equity, diversity and inclusion) can be embedded in the research process and impact those career-defining decisions, like funding and publications. What works, in what context, and why?

“This guide is a living document that seeks to highlight barriers to equitable funding outcomes and various approaches of good practices to overcome these. Research funding is allocated in many different ways and this guide suggests a range of practices which are based on EDICa’s evidence-based research. These practices are drawn together into a single resource and not all of the practices presented here will be relevant to, or feasible in, every circumstance. We would be delighted to hear examples of initiatives that you have in place and which tackle the barriers discussed in this guide.” edicaucus@hw.ac.uk

Stages of the Research Process

Other resources

EDICa has a library of resources of equality, diversity & inclusion practices in research & innovation.

Screenshot of the comic strip behind a banner saying EDICa Resource. Full alt text of comic is within the link.

Comic- Peer Review Panels

Date: 25th May 2026 –

A two-page comic depicting a peer review panel discussing merits of applicants from research-intensive and modern universities.

Report on peer review bias in the funding process

Date: 4th April 2024

Evidence review on peer review bias in the funding process.

Interventions Seminar – Recording

Date: 22nd May 2024

In May EDICa hosted a panel of funder representatives and researchers to discuss alternative methods of assessing funding applications. Access the recording here.

Dr Anjali Mazumder

AI and Justice and Human Rights Theme Lead

The Turing Institute

Anjali Mazumder is the Theme Lead on AI and Justice & Human Rights. Her work focuses on empowering government and non-profit organisations by co-designing and developing responsible and inclusive data and AI methods, tools and frameworks for safeguarding people from harm – particularly those most vulnerable, building resilient institutions and systems, and accelerating the opportunity for inclusive, fair and just services, systems, economies, and communities. She is passionate about fostering multi-disciplinary collaborations and multi-sector partnerships to co-create pathways for innovation that improves services, policy, and actions to safeguard human rights and address humanitarian challenges. Her research interests are in developing integrated Bayesian decision support systems to manage uncertainty with complex data structures, value of evidence, causal reasoning in the wild; expert judgement; detecting bias and algorithmic fairness; socio-technical solutions to harnessing multiple disparate sources of data whilst enabling responsible and inclusive data and AI principles and practices; communicating uncertainty and risk; and safeguarding rights and the Rule of Law.

She has over 15 years’ experience tackling fundamental statistical problems of societal importance – human rights, justice, security, the Law, education, public health & safety – working at the interface of research, policy and practice in the UK, the US, and Canada, fostering multi-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations. She was appointed to Canada’s National DNA Databank Advisory Committee (2012-2018) and currently serves on the UK Forensic Science Regulator’s fingerprint interpretation subgroup, and the senior management board of the UK’s Policy and Evidence Centre for Modern Slavery and Human Rights. She has also served the Royal Statistical Society in a variety of ways, most recently appointed to the Statistics & Law Section and the Data Science Section committees. She holds a doctorate in Statistics from the University of Oxford and two masters’ degrees in Measurement and Evaluation, and Statistics from the University of Toronto.

Dr Jenny Douglas

Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion
Faculty of Wellbeing, Education & Language Studies

Dr Jenny Douglas is passionate about the health and wellbeing of black women as evidenced through her research and public engagement. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies and completed her doctoral thesis on cigarette smoking and identity among African-Caribbean young women in contemporary British society. This research brought together two divergent research traditions: medical public health and health promotion approaches with sociological approaches to researching cigarette smoking. This interdisciplinary research approach brings together sociology, public health and women’s studies. Her commitment to comparative approaches finds expression not only in working across disciplinary and national boundaries, but also across theoretical and methodological traditions. Her research is both varied and wide ranging spanning 30 years on issues of race, health, gender and ethnicity. The key theme unifying her research and activism is intersectionality – exploring how ‘race’, class and gender affect particular aspects of African – Caribbean women’s health.

Jenny Douglas established and chairs the Black Women’s Health and Wellbeing Research Network. (www.open.ac.uk/black-womens-health-and-wellbeing) and her ambition is to establish a research institute on the health and wellbeing of black women. She is a contributing author to ‘Inside the Ivory Tower’.

Jenny Douglas is a Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at the Open University. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of York, an MA in Sociological Research in Health Care from the University of Warwick, an MSc in Environmental Pollution Control from the University of Leeds and a BSc (Hons) in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick. She is module lead of the K311 – ‘Promoting Public Health’, is an honorary member of the Faculty of Public Health and is a director of the UK Public Health Register.

Jenny is a Research Affiliate of the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychology at The George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA.

Comic- Peer Review Panels

Report on peer review bias in the funding process

Interventions Seminar – Recording

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