Research Fellow - United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Nowadays, in many universities this position is the first career grade of a Research Career Pathway and may be open-ended, subject to normal probation regulations. Within such a path, the next two higher career grades are usually senior research fellow and professorial fellow. Although similar to the position of a research fellow, these two positions are research only posts, with the rise of the career grade there will normally be a formal requirement of a moderate amount of teaching and/or supervision (often at postgraduate level). These positions are for researchers with a proven track record of generating research income to fund themselves and producing high quality research output that is internationally recognised.

In some universities, research career grades roughly correspond to the grades of the Teaching and Scholarship Career Pathways in the following way: research fellow - lecturer, professorial fellow - professor, whereas senior research fellow somewhere between a reader and a senior lecturer. However, at some top universities, a senior research fellow may be a position of comparable academic standing to a full professorship at these universities, without any teaching requirements.

In some universities in the UK (e.g. the University of Oxford, the University of Leeds), the position research fellow has replaced the position of research associate, thereby broadening the appointment grade for research fellows.

In the past, the term research fellow often referred to a junior researcher, who worked on a specific project on a temporary basis. Research fellows tended to be paid either from central university funds or by an outside organisation such as a charity or company, or through an external grant-awarding body such as a research council or a royal society. Particularly in Oxbridge style colleges, research fellows appointed as fellows of a college tended to, or still do, partially receive remuneration in form of college housing and subsistence. Colleges may award junior research fellowships as the equivalent of post-doctoral research posts, lasting for three or four years. In contrast, senior research fellows tended to be established academics, often a professor on sabbatical from another institution, conducting temporally research elsewhere.