The OUCRU grants management team supports, on average, 60 new grant applications per year, with a 52% success rate under Katrina’s leadership as Grants Manager. In her work with the OUCRU grants team, she focuses on building local grants management capacity and supporting researchers across the OUCRU programme. Bridging with her work in communications and policy engagement, Katrina has a special interest in research impact. She also contributes to global research management and communication projects such as the Indian Research Management Initiative and the Journal for Research Management and Governance.  

In her role as Communications Manager, Katrina leads the corporate communications programme for OUCRU, which encompasses external or public-facing communications, internal communications and policy engagement.  

The strategic objective of OUCRU’s public-facing communications activities is to increase our impact by sharing timely, relevant, and evidence-based information about our research with our key stakeholders – including policymakers, the press, and the wider public. Katrina leads a dynamic team of communications officers in Vietnam, Indonesia and Nepal to support this goal, and together, they produce a comprehensive portfolio of communications products, including the OUCRU website and social media accounts, press engagement, photography and video projects and other creative communications products.   

The strategic objective of OUCRU’s internal communications activities is to build a healthy, supportive, and inclusive working environment and foster a strong research culture. Under Katrina’s leadership, the internal communications team worked to bring OUCRU’s diverse researchers, staff and students together. Internal communications for a programme that is spread across multiple countries is challenging but incredibly important for building a research culture that supports equity and inclusion.  

In order to strengthen OUCRU’s capacity to communicate and engage with the policy community, Katrina has built a team of skilled policy engagement and communications staff at OUCRU. This work was partially funded by her Wellcome grant: Establishing Systemic Policy Engagement at OUCRU: a pilot project.  

Under Katrina’s leadership, the communications and policy team also contributed to a number of strategic projects at OUCRU, including the LEAF study (PI: Bridget Wills, to investigate the legal and ethical frameworks that would need to be in place to support controlled human infection studies in Vietnam), a major initiative towards developing and implementing affordable technology solutions for intensive care unit in LMICs (Vital.oucru.org), and the OUCRU core 10-year project to have a local, regional and global impact on health by leading a locally driven research programme on infectious diseases in Southeast Asia. 

Katrina has strong relationships with Wellcome as a key funder, including being a member of the Wellcome Policy Network and Wellcome Communications Forum. Katrina is committed to developing the capacity for research management and research uptake in Viet Nam and regionally in Southeast Asia.