Zain Ul Abidin joined the InFrame team in 2024 as a Community Knowledge Analyst, contributing to a £3 million Wellcome-funded research culture initiative spanning the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews. His work sits at the intersection of funding reform, evaluation and institutional learning, with a focus on embedding inclusive and collegial research leadership into the structures that shape how research is supported, assessed and rewarded.

Within InFrame, he works across the full lifecycle of culture change initiatives, from shaping funding calls and governance processes to advising on evaluation design, ethics and community engagement. He plays a central role in the Culture Catalyst Fund, supporting inclusive funding practices, structured pre-award development and cross-institutional learning. He also contributes to the development of the Collegial Research Leadership Framework and leads analytical and learning components of the People Make Research recognition campaign, using evidence and network insights to surface often-unseen contributions across research roles. Alongside this, he co-develops the Community Knowledge Hub, strengthening the infrastructure that sustains research culture beyond individual projects.

Zain first joined the University of Glasgow in 2022 through the Erasmus Mundus GLOBED programme in Education Policies for Global Development. During this period, he supported Research and Innovation Services in producing a large-scale Equality, Diversity and Inclusion analysis of research funding, contributing to the University’s Equality Impact Assessment and sector benchmarking work.

Before moving to the UK, he led multi-donor education and policy initiatives across South Asia, working at the interface of research, programme design and government adoption. His work focused on out-of-school children, foundational learning and system-level reform. One programme was recognised in HundrED’s Top 100 Global Education Innovations (2022) and informed wider conversations on scale, equity and delivery in low-resource settings.

Alongside institutional work, he contributes to sector-facing communities of practice, including the University of Glasgow Research Professional Staff Network and the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), supporting professional development, peer learning and cross-sector dialogue on research management, leadership and inclusive practice.

Across contexts, his work centres on strengthening the conditions that enable inclusive participation in knowledge production, aligning funding design, evidence generation and institutional practice so that research systems are more equitable, collaborative and future-facing.

Zain’s research interests lie at the intersection of research systems, education reform and institutional transformation. His work examines how learning environments, funding architectures and governance frameworks can be redesigned to centre equity, collaboration and long-term sustainability.

Key areas of interest include:

• Institutional strategy and systems transformation — examining how governance models, funding architectures, learning frameworks and organisational design shape participation, performance and long-term sustainability within higher education and research environments.

• Inclusive research leadership and culture change — analysing how funding structures, review processes and recognition systems influence who participates in knowledge production, whose contributions are valued, and how distributed, collegial leadership can be embedded across academic and professional roles.

• Learning and teaching reform in complex institutions — exploring how curriculum design, assessment strategy, digital learning environments and quality processes align with institutional priorities and improve equity of access, progression and student experience.

• Relational infrastructure and networked collaboration — applying social network analysis to surface collaboration patterns, hidden labour and structural bottlenecks within academic and policy ecosystems.

• Global systems reform and public policy implementation — studying how research, evidence and financing interact in low-resource and high-constraint contexts, with attention to scalability, adaptive delivery and cross-sector partnership.

• Strategic evaluation and institutional learning — developing proportionate, equity-sensitive evaluation approaches that inform funding decisions, programme design and organisational improvement.

These interests are grounded in over a decade of applied work across higher education and international development. They are supported by expertise in mixed methods research, randomised controlled trials, impact evaluation and large-scale data analysis, using tools such as R, Python, SPSS, Power BI and UCINET to generate insight that informs strategy and reform.

Prior publications