Our Engaged Approach
Our people are creative in their thinking and collaborative in their approach
Our research community pursue enquiry as an intrinsic good, share insights locally and globally as a public good, and ensures research has impact for all our communities of engagement. This open approach has led to pioneering and creative initiatives which take engagement deeper and improve research practice.
Engaged Research
Engaged Research describes a wide range of rigorous research approaches and methodologies that share a common interest in collaborative engagement with the community. It aims to improve, understand, or investigate an issue of public interest or concern, including societal challenges. Engaged research is advanced with partners rather than for them, and refers to a range of public research stakeholders, including public or professional service and product users, policymakers, civil and civic society organisations (CSOs) and actors.
There is a strong ethos of engagement across our research and innovation ecosystem. Read below for some examples of this.
Collaborating with community groups and NGOs
At the heart of our research, informing what we do, are our stakeholders. Quite often this can be community groups and non-governmental agencies or charities.
Many of the research projects from the Institute for Lifecourse and Society prioritise the voices of marginalised people and communities, identifying new ways of including these individuals as co-producers of knowledge. An essential part of such projects is also to explore the ethical and methodological issues concerning such approaches.
The Ryan Institute works with stakeholders - from sectors such as farming, fishing, tourism and energy - to inform and shape research.
Public Patient Involvement
Our university is leading the PPI Ignite Network, a new national programme to bring the public into the heart of research initiatives. The Network helps research institutions advance the involvement of the public, patients and carers in health and social care research, drawing on their lived experience to influence research from ideation to the delivery of results. Supported by the Health Research Board and the Irish Research Council, the Network grows and consolidates the work begun during the initial PPI Ignite programme.
Exemplars of PPI excellence at our university include the COB-MS study, which has brought people living with multiple sclerosis (MS) into the driving seat in terms of developing a health intervention that meets their particular needs, and the PPI group operating within the HRB Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland, working with primary care researchers across Ireland.
PPI is now firmly embedded in our BioInnovate Programme, and informs practice in our Institute for Clinical Trials and Institute for Health Discovery and Innovation.
Collaborating with industry
This focus on engagement with community is complemented by the work of the Innovation Office team who support linkages between our research community and industry. The Innovation Office also empowers start-ups and spin-outs, with over 30 based on campus at a time.
CÚRAM, the Research Ireland centre for medical devices based at the University of Galway has a portfolio of academic–industry–clinician driven projects. In the last decade, benefits to the sector include collaborative projects with 47 innovative companies and 2,547 jobs supported.
Insight, through the Research Ireland Centres programme, offers unprecedented opportunities for industry, government and other institutions to collaborate with leading researchers in the data analytics and AI ecosystems in Ireland and Europe.
Policy Makers
We work closely with policymakers and government departments to help shape evidence-based policies that address complex societal challenges. Just as importantly, we actively engage with the public—sharing knowledge, fostering dialogue, and ensuring that diverse perspectives contribute to the policymaking process.
For example, a team of researchers at the UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre recently completed a set of groundbreaking evaluations of 24 alternative education and youth mental health projects. This six-year project was the largest of its kind conducted in Ireland to date, and was funded by Rethink Ireland through their Education & Youth Mental Health Funds 2017-2022.
The Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) survey is a WHO collaborative cross-national study that monitors the health behaviours, health outcomes and social environments of school-aged children every four years. HBSC Ireland surveys school-going children aged 9-18 years. The study is conducted by the HBSC Ireland team, based at the Health Promotion Research Centre, University of Galway.
The JPI Solstice funded Challenging the Climate Crisis: Children’s Agency to Tackle Policy Underpinned by Learning for Transformation (CCC-CATAPULT) project involves young people (15–18-year-olds) as researchers working with academics to examine young people’s experiences of and learning around the climate crisis.
Ground-breaking research at University of Galway on domestic violence as an economic issue has had a fundamental role in shaping legislation and policy in countries around the world. University of Galway introduced its own domestic violence leave policy in 2021 with the support of Dr Nata Duvvury, and her research went on to inform national legislation in Ireland.
Public engagement and outreach
We have a long history of public engagement and education outreach initiatives, bringing our research to schools and communities - and, in turn, learning and growing from those interactions. Many pioneering initiatives have stemmed from our university with some now established nationally. For example, Cell EXPLORERS, led by Dr Muriel Grenon, has reached more than 41,000 members of the public since its creation in 2012. Read the full case study here.
Meanwhile, Dr Enda O’Connell and the ReelLIFE SCIENCE project has enabled more than 16,000 young people engage with STEM through video creation.
See below a list of some of our current public engagement activities in which our research community play a central role.
