People

Present

All the workshops, coaching and consultancy are delivered by Andrew Derrington, the sole director of Parker Derrington Ltd.

P1040099Reduced

Andrew has in-depth experience of the research funding process. His first research grant was a Beit Memorial Fellowship for Medical Research, which he obtained in the year he finished his PhD. His research was continuously funded by fellowships, project and programme grants, awarded for applications that he wrote himself, for the next 30 years.

He served on research grant committees for several UK research councils and the Wellcome Trust. He has participated in committee decisions on several thousand grant applications. The approach to grant writing that he teaches is based on his analysis of those decisions.

Andrew’s management experience extended from leading half a dozen research associates in his research group to managing a faculty of over 400 academics. He held management positions in the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. He was head of the Department of Psychology and the School of Biology at Newcastle University. He then spent three years as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Kent and three more as Pro Vice Chancellor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Liverpool.

Andrew has also worked as a journalist. He won a Science Media Fellowship, which enabled him to work full-time at the Financial Times for 3 months.  Then, for several years he wrote fortnightly columns in the Financial Times. The Nature of Things was about science – from astrophysics to zoology. Psych Yourself Up was a guide to the different kinds of psychotherapy available in the UK.

Past

DSCF3326

Amanda Parker was a founding director of the company when it was established in 2013. She had also had a successful career as an academic researcher, specialising in the neuroscience of memory and emotion. She had been a research fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda before taking a teaching and research position at Nottingham University where she was promoted to Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience, and at Newcastle University. Amanda was also experienced in grants’ committee work, having served four years on the BBSRC Animal Sciences Committee.

Amanda was managing director of Parker Derrington Ltd until her untimely death from cancer in July 2020.

Click here for information about the company.