ELEAD delivered. Now what?

Leadership within large, distributed research infrastructures frequently occurs without formal authority and spans institutional and national boundaries. Within ELIXIR, men predominantly occupy senior decision-making roles, whereas women are more often positioned in coordination-focused roles with limited formal authority. The ELIXIR Leadership And Diversity mentoring programme (ELEAD) was established to address these disparities by supporting organisational development and enhancing women’s leadership capacity within ELIXIR. This poster presents qualitative evidence from the ELEAD pilot cohort (2023–2025) demonstrating that targeted investment in women’s leadership yields measurable organisational change. By mapping participant experiences from the ELIXIR Hub, EMBL-EBI, ELIXIR Spain, and ELIXIR Ireland across four impact domains – human capital, relationship capital, resource uptake and legacy, and research efficiency – the study reveals transformative outcomes. Key outcomes include significant career advancement, with participants progressing into faculty-level Team Lead and Programme Manager roles, obtaining senior management positions, and receiving first-time appointments as Principal Investigators on competitive grants. Across all four case studies, the programme cultivated vital "relationship capital" through peer mentoring, identified as the most effective mechanism for fostering trust and cross-Node relationships. Beyond individual promotions, the case study reveals early signs of culture change in ELIXIR: participants are embedding ELEAD's peer mentoring model within their own organisations and returning as mentors, seeding the leadership pipeline they themselves benefited from. The ELEAD programme schema seeks to drive a cultural shift across institutions, Nodes and RIs to implement similar initiatives. It has made available a wealth of material and personal experience to support this within ELIXIR and beyond. This framework serves as a scalable model for other RIs seeking to foster a more equitable scientific leadership landscape.