Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Happy New Year everyone! We hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas and managed to have a bit of a break from everything. But we appreciate too that not everyone will have had the same experience over Christmas, perhaps because of being ill, feeling lonely or working to deadlines early in the New Year so we hope that if this is how it was for you that you are able to reach out and find support. And please know that we are a supportive bunch so if you are struggling with your studies or work, have just got stuck on something or need a friendly chat with someone who is going through something similar please do message us. And, of course, sign up for our forthcoming researcher wellbeing event later in the newsletter.

You will notice that whilst the broad theme of this newsletter is 'knowledge exchange', our research spotlights and 'in conversation' pieces have a more specific research theme of 'nuclear weapons' so we hope you enjoy reading some fascinating insights into a new area as well as learning a bit more about some of the researcher's in our community. Thank you so much to Laura Rose Brown, Emily Faux and Dr Laura Considine for their contributions to the newsletter.

We are excited to share our plans for this year's programme later on too and would love to hear from you if you have any ideas you would like to work with us on. We have made it our mission to try and connect with different networks and organisations so if you are part of one we haven't been in touch with then do give us a shout, we would love to have a chat and share what you do with our network. And if you think that you would be interested in being more involved with the DRN then we are always on the look out for new committee members both to share the workload but also to make new friends.

And we have the fantastic news to share that we now have a readership of over 400 for our newsletter (and we tweet the content to our 3400 followers too). This is great news for all of you too because it means we have a platform to share your research to an interested audience and we know from the responses we receive that it is read far beyond the ECR community. So please don't forget to share your publications (we love to promote these!), calls for papers, events and anything else you have been up to (from reviews of events, books, podcasts).  

All the best for a refreshed start to 2023!

Hannah West and Lucy Wray
Co-Chairs of the Defence Research Network

See the full newsletter here: Knowledge Exchange

Visit the Newsletter Catalogue to catch up on all our past issues!