Submitted by James Cantwell on Mon, 08/06/2026 - 10:54
We are delighted to share that Dr Robbie Duschinsky received the joint highest number of nominations across the University of Cambridge in this year’s Research Culture Celebration.
At an event marking the celebration, following remarks from the Vice-Chancellor, Robbie spoke about what research culture means in practice and why it matters.
“For me, research culture is about how a research environment is organised so that it is not left to chance whether people feel supported, valued, and able to develop. I do not think good culture comes from anyone being endlessly available or getting everything right. It comes from deliberately building shared expectations and ordinary practices so that people do not have to rely on private courage, hidden knowledge, or the confidence to ask in exactly the right way.
Academia often expects people to navigate its pressures privately. And that protection often takes the form of adjustment: carrying uncertainty quietly, absorbing extra work, and making oneself look fine because the work matters. So certainty, polish, and defensiveness are ways people protect their work, their credibility, and sometimes their futures when mistakes feel costly and recognition is uneven. This is especially true for people who have been made to feel, by the wider world or by academic life itself, that their place here is less secure.
But when everyone has to adjust and stay protected all the time, something narrows: people bring the finished version, not the live difficulty; uncertainty becomes private; help isn’t asked for; exhaustion begins to look like evidence of commitment. A good culture does not shame those protections. It tries to make some of them less necessary.
Academic structures give people standards, orientation, accountability, and protection. That is why people rely on them. But the same tracks that help movement can also make it harder to notice when another route is needed. They can quietly teach people to treat exclusion, overwork, opacity, and precarity as the normal price of belonging, unless we stop and ask where they are taking us.
So part of leadership is pausing over the ordinary ways a group is organised: whether support can be provided before crisis; whether people are valued not only for outputs, but as thinkers, collaborators, and people with lives and futures beyond the current project; whether development is linked to the person’s future, not only the group’s immediate needs.
Those questions are not only about what a leader provides. They are about what team members learn to expect from their ordinary life together: how capacity can be named, how contribution is noticed, how opportunity circulates, and how people help make room for one another’s development. In other words, whether the ordinary organisation of work is helping people develop and thrive, or merely helping them endure.
Those questions become practical through routines that make support less private and more shared. First, by making workload, capacity, and wellbeing normal things to discuss in supervision and between team members, rather than private problems that only appear in crisis. Second, by making the terms of collaboration and responsibility explicit, so people do not have to wonder whether their work counts, or wait until resentment forms. And third, by supporting and celebrating development beyond the immediate needs of my projects: helping people build networks, pursue opportunities, and develop plans that serve the kind of researcher they are becoming.
The point is not that every form of support has to pass through me. It is that the group develops shared expectations: capacity can be named, contribution noticed, opportunities opened for others, and people’s development treated as part of the common work. In this way uncertainty, pressure, and ambition become things people can think through together, rather than things they have to carry privately.
The benefit is not that difficulty disappears, or that people become effortlessly confident. It is that difficulty has somewhere to go earlier, before it settles into loneliness, resentment, shame, or exhaustion. People can ask for help before crisis. Questions about workload, authorship, capacity, or direction can be raised before they become injuries. Colleagues can take intellectual risks without every uncertainty feeling like exposure. Collectively, this changes the work. Collaboration becomes less competitive, ambition becomes less tied to overextension, and there is more room for the pleasures of research itself: intellectual friendship, shared purpose, and the excitement of discovering something together.
Over time, I want people to gain more than outputs: more room to think, more capacity to contribute to a culture where others are supported too, a stronger sense of the kind of researcher they can become, and a stronger sense that when the work has impact in policy or practice, this is not one person’s achievement but a shared win, made possible by many forms of contribution. So the outcome I care about most is not a frictionless group, or a simply happy one. It is a group where ambitious work can be shared without being carried privately; where support is something people receive, help sustain, and help remake.
Good research culture is never finished, and it cannot depend on one person’s goodwill or energy alone. It has to become part of the ordinary way an academic environment works: in shared expectations, shared support, explicit conversations about responsibility, and a collective sense that everyone’s contribution helps make the work possible. That, for me, is central to the work of research itself.”
Read more of Dr Robbie Duschinsky's research on his profile and on the Child Health & Development Group (CHiLD) research group page.