Our Women’s Pilot Project is dedicated to supporting women in academia, who work in the broad electronic systems space.
Our flagship Women’s Pilot Project has been co-designed with the women it aims to support.
It aims to build a strong and supportive peer community of practice.
We hope to create opportunities for professional growth and support women working in this environment.
The pilot is also designed to close the funding gap.
“Underrepresentation of women in the engineering and physical sciences remains one of EPSRC’s largest equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) challenges, and is a well-known issue in the engineering and physical sciences community, with gender diversity in our large grant portfolio an area of particular concern.”
-ESPRC
Our pilot cohort is undertaking 1:1 career coaching with an expert careers coach, who specialises in supporting C-suite and industry leaders.
Designed to provide bespoke guidance for individuals, our coaching series has helped the participants to navigate career and workplace challenges, identify paths forward, reframe issues, and enhance their career trajectories.
The coaching program is set to run throughout 2024–2025, with each participant receiving four individual coaching sessions.
A key offer within Women’s Pilot are intensive multi-day writing retreats, designed to address one of the EPSRC’s most pressing EDI challenges: the underrepresentation of women applying for grants in engineering and physical sciences research.
Our first retreat was held in Co. Fermanagh in January 2025, with the long-term goal of increasing the participation of women project leads in EPSRC’s research grant portfolio; and boosting the number of applications submitted by women for larger grants.
This pilot retreat fostered a supportive and collaborative environment, allowing participants to focus on their own proposal writing, as well as engaging in meaningful peer interactions and structured experiences, curated to foster new research collaborations.
Watch our short video for some of our retreat participants’ feedback.
In November 2025, eFutures hosted the second Women’s Pilot Writing Retreat at Slieve Donard in Northern Ireland. The multi-day retreat provided participants with dedicated time away from their usual academic responsibilities to focus on developing research ideas, progressing funding proposals and exploring opportunities for future collaboration.
Alongside protected writing time, the retreat created an informal and supportive environment for participants to build stronger connections, expand their professional networks and share expertise across different areas of electronics research.
“As a woman working in engineering, participating in this women’s retreat was transformative. It gave me the opportunity to share my experience with other women facing the same challenges, and gave me the space for focus and concentrated writing.”
Daniela Iacopino, Tyndall National Institute
eFutures hosted a further Women’s Pilot Writing Retreat in Portugal, bringing the cohort together again to develop their research ideas, work on future proposals and explore opportunities for collaboration. The retreat gave the women dedicated time to focus on their work, while also creating space to share ideas, get feedback from each other and build on the connections they have made throughout the programme.
It was also a great opportunity to hear how far the women had come since the first retreat. Some spoke about how, when they first joined the programme, finding dedicated time to write and develop funding proposals was a real challenge. Since then, members of the cohort have progressed their ideas, submitted proposals and successfully secured funding. Being able to share these successes with the group highlighted the progress being made through the Women’s Pilot and the value of giving women the time, support and network to take their research ideas forward.
“During the retreats, I was able to develop several major funding and commercialisation initiatives, benefiting not only from dedicated writing time but also from peer support, accountability, and discussions with other ambitious women balancing research, leadership and entrepreneurship. One direct outcome was the development of work that contributed to securing an EPSRC-funded project, GlucoBrain (£500,000), which is developing a novel organ-on-chip platform to investigate the relationship between diabetes and dementia. The retreats also provided the environment to refine the business plan for my startup, which subsequently led to my selection to pitch at the South West of England London Showcase on 9 June.”
Dr Despina Moschou, University of Bath
This initial meeting of the Women’s Pilot project scoped the support gaps existing for women working in electronic systems research; and began to co-design potential impactful solutions to these. It also enabled the participants to get to know each other; and provided facilitated networking session to share each other’s’ research interests and ambitions.
Our leadership development workshop (January 2024) was delivered by Fiona Reith and designed to support participants to gain clarity and direction in their professional and personal lives, and develop agency to change their trajectories.
The two-day intensive workshop provided a structured platform for the attendees to explore challenges, delve deeper into career motivations, align values with research, and develop actionable strategies for growth.
If you’re interested in getting involved, please contact Natalie Magill at natalie.magill@qub.ac.uk.
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