Bringing Meaning and Authenticity to Collaboration

In this Academic Seminar, Professor Nicola Wilson shares her passion and insights for collaboration, built up over the course of her career. From her earliest experiences of building collaborative relationships to create new referral pathways, through navigating the geopolitical landscape of trans-European research collaboration and into more recent years of interdisciplinary and interorganisational collaboration, she will share anecdotes and her insights; including

- How the term ‘networking’ has become lost in translation

- The value of emotional intelligence when building lasting professional relationships and collaborations

- How the benefits of collaborating outweigh going it alone

- The various roles within collaboration, and how ‘the convenor’ and ‘the lead’ are not necessarily synonymous.

In a world where we are all too often tempted by the desire for recognition as an individual, Nicola will seek to make the case for how amazing things can happen when you bring together like minds.

“You can't whistle a symphony; it takes an orchestra to play it.” Halford Edward Luccock (1885 – 1961)

Speaker Bio

Professor Nicola Wilson

WRIHW Professor in Practice in association with the Psychology Department 

Deputy Chief Executive at the Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA) 

Nicola’s early career began as a CBT therapist in adult mental health psychological services, with an initial 15 years’ experience of service design and strategic leadership of mental health and wellbeing services within the NHS and higher education sectors and programme leadership of undergraduate and postgraduate study pathways in mental health and wider applications of CBT. After leaving the University sector - from 2012 until 2015 - Nicola went on to lead a team of health professionals hosted within the NHS to build engagement, knowledge exchange and research  collaboration between the North of England and regions across Europe, brokering European health and life-sciences project partnerships, building consortia, facilitating valuable knowledge exchange opportunities and creating informal, trans-European networks of clinical and research excellence.