Photo: Karen Stroobants 

Dr Karen Stroobants is a Director at CultureBase, a consultancy that supports research organisations to improve how research is done. She specialises in research culture and research assessment, with recent projects including the co-development with the UK research and innovation community of good practice exchange models towards improving research culture in the UK, a review of studies and funder evaluations of narrative CV implementation, and an evaluation of the Swiss National Science Foundation's unified evaluation procedure and narrative CV. 

Karen was the penholder for drafting the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, and has been Vice-Chair of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) since 2022. She is a member of the external advisory boards of the University of Cambridge ‘Action Research on Research Culture’ project and the UK Reproducibility Network ‘Open and Responsible Researcher Reward and Recognition’ project.

Karen previously held policy and research roles at the Royal Society of Chemistry, RAND Europe and the Royal Society. She led the development of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s science culture vision in 2023 and co-delivered the Royal Society’s research culture programme in 2018. Prior to this, she completed a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, UK. She trained as a chemist at KU Leuven in Belgium, where she obtained her PhD in chemistry in 2014.