We recently sat down with Laura Williams, Research Data Capability Lead at GSK, ahead of her appearance at Lab of the Future Congress Europe this September. Laura shared powerful insights into how she’s leading efforts to transform research culture at GSK, placing data reuse and behaviour change at the heart of innovation.
Q1. What are you currently working on?
I am developing a strategy to bring about culture change in the research department at GSK so that we can have everybody in the organization thinking about how their data might be reused, how they might make it model-ready, and how we might be able to move to predictive-first wherever we can, so that we can enable more in silico prediction. That's a big culture change focus because we already have the IT systems that allow us to do that but it's more about people being good data citizens and encouraging them to do so.
Q2. What’s the focus of your talk at the event?
I'll be covering topics such as change management, how we recruit champions, and how we get senior leader buy-in for this. As always, the big challenge is on the people front so we're looking at ways to help encourage behaviour change.
Q3. What’s the biggest challenge in encouraging a new way of work?
One of the biggest challenges we find when asking anyone to work differently is that people find change difficult. There are many reasons for this, we're all under pressure to do the day job as quickly and efficiently as possible and introducing change to that can be quite hard.
I think this is especially true in areas like research, where we very intentionally hire people who are super creative and innovative, and who want to look for different ways of doing things. They don’t necessarily want to follow what seems like a rigid set of rules because it can feel like we’re just being bureaucratic for the sake of it.
One of the things I like to talk about is how we persuade and teach people about why we’re asking them to do this, so we can get them on board and help them believe in it. Then the culture change we need comes naturally, rather than feeling like something that must be imposed. It's so important to win both the hearts and minds!
Q4. Why do you attend the Lab of the Future Conference?
I've been at most of the Lab of the Future events since they started. I particularly like Lab of the Future because of the format with lots of talks, panel sessions, and opportunities to network.
I find it to be the best conference I go to from the point of view of the connections I make and the interesting content I hear. I'm really excited to be at this one!
To hear more from our 2025 speakers check out the interviews here.
Laura Williams, Research Data Capability Lead at GSK will be presenting at Lab of the Future Congress Europe on the 30th September & 1st October at the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam.