Description ABOUT THE ROLE Northumbria University’s School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries is seeking a Research Fellow (Service Design) to support an innovative project focused on co-production and co-design with health and social care teams. This exciting role offers the chance to shape real-world change and improvements in collaboration with staff, service users, and stakeholders, influencing policy and practice at regional and national levels. The Research Fellow (Service Design) post, will support the application of co-design approaches with a range of health and care delivery teams, identifying, defining and prototyping potential service-delivery insights as a key element of the Partnership for Workforce Sustainability. The Partnership is a new venture, funded by the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme, aimed at addressing workforce sustainability challenges in key areas of the NHS. The partnership brings together researchers across five universities, and will work with policymakers, healthcare professionals and system leaders to generate high-quality evidence and develop actionable solutions to workforce challenges. Working closely with the academic Design Lead, wider research team, external partners, and funding bodies, the postholder will work directly with partner organisations in the UK Health and Care Services sector. This will require excellent communication skills suited to co-design workshop settings, confident visual design communication skills (e.g. using Adobe Creative Suite) and experience writing-up design research for reporting and academic publication. The post is offered at 0.6FTE over a period of initially 3-years, (with the potential for this to be extended to 5-years as the Partnership programme progresses). ABOUT THE TEAM This Research Project is being delivered across departments at Northumbria University, with key disciplines including Design, Healthcare, Social Work, Psychology and more. The post holder will be based within the School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries at Northumbria University. The School is a vibrant community with the Design programmes having 1400 students including Masters and 40 PhD candidates. Northumbria University ranked 4th in the UK for research power in Art and Design in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and our research environment is rated 100% work leading. In this role, the appointed candidate will also benefit from working alongside prestigious funders and project partners (NIHR, NHS, Newcastle University, Oxford University and more) and will be a key member of the team affecting real change in NHS health and care services. ABOUT YOU Applicants should hold a PhD (or equivalent experience) in service design, co-design or closely related discipline and have significant experience of conducting research in social settings, and of working with stakeholders through a practice-based approach, delivering a full design process (from research, through inception to implementation) This role is ideal for someone with a background in participatory research and/or practice-based service design using co-design approaches. If you are passionate about using design to tackle complex societal challenges, join our team to make a tangible difference and develop your career in a supportive environment, committed to research excellence and societal impact. Further information about the requirements of the role is available in the person specification. If you would like an informal discussion about the role, please contact the Design Lead matthew.lievesleynorthumbria.ac.uk To apply for this vacancy please click 'Apply Now'. Your application should include a covering letter and a CV. If you have examples of relevant previous projects online, please provide a link via your CV. We welcome applications from the UK and across the world. Visit our web pages for details about Relocation Assistance. ABOUT US Northumbria University is a research-intensive university that unlocks potential for all. We change lives regionally, nationally, and internationally through education and research, tackling the global challenges of our age to transform society and the economy. Find out why we were named Times Higher Education’s University of the Year in 2022 and Modern University of the Year in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2025. Northumbria recorded the biggest rise of any UK university for research power in the Research Excellence Framework for the second time in 2021 and is now ranked top 25 in the UK for this measure. One of the largest universities in the UK with over 37,000 students from more than 140 countries, filled with world-leading research, award-winning partnerships, and students at the heart of an outstanding experience. Discover more about us. Northumbria University is a great place to work. We empower our exceptional people to achieve shared ambitions and promote a positive work life balance. We offer a wide range of benefits including excellent pension schemes, flexible working, a generous holiday entitlement, continued commitment to your learning and development and more. Our Northumbria Values are guiding principles that define who we are, what we do and what is important to us. Our Values are: Academic Excellence ; Innovation ; Inclusivity ; Collaboration ; and Ambition. Our Behaviours describe how we do things and how we work together at Northumbria, reflecting our culture and our decision-making. Our Behaviours are: We listen and learn, we support one another to success, we respect everyone and their contributions, we trust in ourselves and each other and we are bold. Our Values and Behaviours were co-created by colleagues from a range of roles across the University, who worked collaboratively to consider what it feels like to work for Northumbria, and where we need to continue to transform together to achieve what’s important to us. Please visit Our Values and Behaviours page to find out more. We are an on-campus organisation where colleagues work regular patterns of hours and on campus, with some flexibility on the timing of their hours and the location of their work in discussion with their manager. Our campus locations include our City and Coach Lane Campuses in Newcastle upon Tyne and our London campus. Northumbria University is committed to creating an inclusive culture where we take pride in, and value, the diversity of our staff. We encourage and welcome applications from all members of the community. The University holds bronze Athena Swan and Race Equality Charter awards in recognition of our commitment to advancing gender and race equality, we are a Disability Confident Leader and are participating in the Stonewall Diversity Champion Programme. We also hold the HR Excellence in Research award for implementing the concordat supporting the career Development of Researchers and are members of the Euraxess initiative to deliver information and support to professional researchers. The University has implemented a range of flexible working arrangements, and we are happy to explore candidate requirements as part of the recruitment process. We are committed to keeping your data safe so it's important for you to know how we use any personal data you give us. For more detailed information, access our .