Our Culture
The mission of the Franklin is to accelerate future Life Science discovery to improve human health, through the creation of innovative technologies. This mission will be driven by and delivered by our people working together. Every member of our team – staff and students – has an important role to play in our success.
“Working at the Franklin is different to being at a university because of the way our performance is assessed. Our contributions to improving data infrastructure, our work to support other researchers to be more efficient, and our public engagement is just as important as research papers. This changes how we work and spend our time, which benefits everyone in the long run.”
Our values
Our values guide every aspect of our work, shaping how we collaborate, evaluate projects, and operate both internally and externally.
Adventure
Our projects, by their nature, carry significant risk, combined with significant pay-off in scientific, economic, and patient benefits if successful. Risk is mitigated by engaging experts from across disciplines and working together to approach large challenges.
“At the Franklin we are surrounded by researchers with different expertise to our own who don’t share the same assumptions as us. Someone might ask you if a technology can do something different. Your first reaction is that isn’t possible, but the question makes you start to question whether you could achieve the impossible. The whole environment is designed to encourage exchange of ideas and generation of new projects and approaches.”
Engagement
Our projects are not conceived of or delivered by one organisation alone, they engage multiple partners across academia and industry and there is demonstrable support for their development by these communities.
“Our work is highly collaborative. To give just one example, my research to better understand pregnancy outcomes by studying the placenta involves close working with a clinic for women with high risk pregnancies, multiple universities and colleagues at Diamond Light Source.”
“By embedding ourselves in the communities that will use the technologies we develop, we won’t just further biological research, we stand a better chance of improving health.”
Novelty
Our technologies will be novel in their application and design, offering tools to the academic and industrial communities which enable significant new research potential and economic benefit.
“We work closely with industry manufacturers to design innovative scientific instruments to help answer important questions in life sciences. An instrument which started out as a discussion between our scientists and industry with a sketch on a whiteboard in Tokyo in 2016, will be delivered in spring and will be the first of its kind anywhere in the world. We work with research communities across the UK to refine the instruments to be the most useful for a wide range of applications, with the hope that the instrument developments will be available commercially to use in laboratories of the future.”
Utility
Our technologies will be sought after by both academic and industrial communities, and access will be opened to as wide as possible, ensuring that the research benefits are maximised.
“We want to make the data that we generate in our challenges as open and accessible to other researchers as possible. This will allow the research community to do their own research on our data in the near term, while also benefitting from the technologies and techniques we develop.”
Our behaviours
To achieve our mission, we must all stretch and set high expectations for ourselves.
Working in the way that we do requires strong interpersonal and communication skills. We encourage open, clear and respectful communication with one another. Staff and students are encouraged to share their ideas, thoughts and feedback on a regular basis.
We recognise the skills and contributions of all staff and students, showing mutual respect regardless of background or level within the organisation. We celebrate the diversity of voices we have at the Franklin and promote inclusivity.
We expect staff to be proactive, positive and take ownership of their behaviour and work responsibilities. We encourage staff to be continuously growing and developing and are supportive to helping our staff to reach their career aspirations.