LJMU Profiles

Use the homepage to search LJMU staff and research students by name, research interest, or tag-based keyword.

If your search returns more than one result, use the filter schemes to refine your search by Department, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, Research Centre or Institute membership, and Availability.

When viewing your search results, select a person’s name to see their public profile, which will include professional information about their expertise and activities.

See our interdisciplinary research culture by using the collaboration map to explore networks of LJMU co-authors, accessible through each profile.

All staff and postgraduate research students can have a profile. This includes all professional, technical, and honorary staff. You do not need to request a profile. It is automatically available to you through logging into Symplectic Elements.

All academic staff profiles are automatically set to public view. All non-academic staff and postgraduate research student profiles are set to internal by default but can be made public in the Edit My Profile area of Symplectic Elements.

Please note:
Undergraduate or postgraduate taught students do not have access to create or publish an LJMU Profile.

You edit your LJMU Profile using Symplectic Elements. You will need to use Single Sign On for access.

When you log into Symplectic Elements, from the homepage, you can edit your profile by selecting the Edit My Profile option on the right-hand side of the screen underneath your name.

If your LJMU Profile is publicly visible, you can access the edit function from within LJMU Profiles. Go to your profile, then select the Edit Your Profile button found at the bottom of the dark blue bar on the left-hand side of your profile page. This button will open a new tab that takes you into the Symplectic Elements system. When you are in Symplectic Elements, select the Edit Mode button at the top of the page to begin editing your LJMU Profile.

All academic staff profiles are set to public view. This setting cannot be changed.

Non-academic staff and postgraduate research students can choose to make their profile public. To do this, log in to Symplectic Elements, select the Edit My Profile’ button to navigate to the Edit Mode page, and then use the ‘Profile Privacy button menu at the top right to toggle your profile from Internal to Public.

A profile set to Internal will be visible to other users of Symplectic Elements but will not be displayed publicly.

Academic staff, non-academic-staff, and postgraduate students can select individual components of the profile to be set as either Public or Internal.

Each component that offers this function will have an associated drop-down privacy settings menu in Symplectic Elements adjacent to its data entry interface.

Individual records for Publications, Professional Activities, and Teaching Activities can be set as either Public or Internal.

Please note:
Where available, we do not advise you to select Private. This setting may stop some internal users from viewing important data.

We recommend you use the desktop version of LJMU Profiles and Symplectic Elements to complete your profile.

LJMU encourages everyone with a public profile to provide a professional profile photo. We arrange professional photography sessions throughout the academic year across LJMU, with details circulated by Faculty Operations Managers.

If you had a profile photo in the pre-2025 staff profiles system, it will have been imported into LJMU Profiles. However, it will now be displayed within a circular frame in LJMU Profiles.

To change or import your profile photo, use Edit Mode in Symplectic Elements. The relevant option is Manage Photo. This option will allow you to position your image within the circular frame. You will need to select Save to confirm. Your photo will appear on your profile within Symplectic Elements and on LJMU Profiles within minutes.

Please note:
Symplectic Elements has a maximum file size of 6MB for profile images.

LJMU Profiles displays the Overview text from your Symplectic Elements profile in the About tab’s section titled Biography. If you had entered text into the Biography section of a pre-2025 profile it will have been automatically imported into your LJMU Profile.

This text will be a reader’s first introduction to your profile. Think about the audience you are writing for and how to present your achievements to a reader who may not be familiar with your expert area.

Write in the third person if possible and provide a concise account of key professional highlights, aiming for a length of 200 to 300 words.

LJMU Profiles provides dedicated tabs for describing your research interests, teaching activities, and your research impact; you can present that information in the dedicated tabs rather than repeating it in the professional biography.

You can employ rich text, including bold, underline, and italic type. You can insert links into the text. You must make sure the reader understands where the link will take them.

Consult the LJMU guidance on writing for the web to make sure your profile is in line with the University’s expectations for online content.

If your title is incorrect, please contact Human Resources with information about the change you are requesting. The Human Resources data system will need to be updated with the new information, which will then feed into Symplectic Elements and LJMU Profiles.

Your LJMU email address will be displayed automatically on the About tab. You do not need to add it to your profile manually.

You can add web addresses to your profile in the Addresses section of Edit Mode. You are encouraged to add other professional web addresses, including professional social media.

LJMU Profiles allows you to write a statement about your research interests. You can use this section to describe the topics and methods you focus on, your important projects and funding, and research student supervision. The statement will display in the Research Interests tab. The tab will only be generated once you have written and saved the statement by using the Research Interests text entry box in Edit Mode in Symplectic Elements and selecting Save at the bottom of the section.

You can add a summary of your LJMU teaching activities to your LJMU Profile. Doing so will generate a new tab in your LJMU profile titled Teaching.

You can give a written statement of your teaching interests, research student supervision, and research-informed teaching achievements by writing in the Teaching Interests text entry box in Edit Mode in Symplectic Elements. Once you have written your statement ensure you select save at the bottom of the About section.

You can also insert records of your teaching activities from the Symplectic Elements Homepage. In the Teaching Activities box in the centre of the page, select +Add New to begin. You can select from different types of records to add them to your profile:

• Research degree supervision or completion.
• Post-doctoral researcher or mentoring.
• Course developed.
• Course taught.
• Graduate examination.

You can add a summary of your research impact aims, activities, and achievements to your LJMU Profile. Doing so will generate a new tab in your LJMU profile titled Impact. The tab will only be generated once you have written and saved the statement using the Impact Summary text entry box in Edit Mode in Symplectic Elements and selecting save at the bottom of the About section.

The Research and Innovation Services Impact and Engagement Team has provided advice for completing this section:

• If you have led public engagement activities, you can describe them in this tab.
• Impact and engagement are identified with your research rather than you as an individual.
• Impact is about making a beneficial change beyond academia. You can describe the activities that led to the change, but the focus is on the change and the benefits associated with it.
• If you have multiple impact and engagement projects, or an overall impact program, you can describe the work in outline rather than aiming for fine detail.
• If your impact work involves sensitive information, please do not include that information in your profile.

LJMU Profiles allows you to display your professional activities and write a statement about them. The information will display in the Professional Activities tab.

The tab will only be generated when you have entered a professional activity record in Symplectic Elements or written and saved the statement using the Professional Activities text entry box in Edit Mode in Symplectic Elements. If you include a statement, remember to select Save at the bottom of the About section.

Any professional activity records from a pre-2025 profile will have migrated to this tab of your LJMU Profile automatically.

The professional activities tab includes a record type, Research Grants Awarded. You will need to be careful to only include grants that have been awarded to you as P-I or Co-I, and to not include in-progress or unsuccessful grant applications.

LJMU Profiles allow you to attach labels to your profile to represent your research interests and activities. You can select the labels from controlled vocabularies. The labels power the filtering function in search. They will also display on your LJMU Profile.

You can add labels for your Fields of Research, UN Sustainable Development Goals Research Centre and Institute membership, and Availability. You can add and remove labels in the Symplectic Elements Edit Mode screen by selecting Manage Label next to the appropriate label.

The label schemes for Fields of Research and Sustainable Development Goals were automatically applied to you as a one-time action when LJMU Profiles was activated in April 2025. You can remove or add labels within these schemes.

Fields of Research

Fields of Research (2020) allows research activity to be categorised according to common knowledge domains and methodologies. It is a controlled, structured research categorisation scheme which forms part of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC). This is the 2020 version of the schema.

We advise that you apply up to six Fields of Research labels to your profile.

Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are at the core of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was adopted in September 2015 by all UN Members States as a new plan of action. This label scheme allows you to indicate how your research, teaching, and impact are contributing toward achieving specific goals.

Research Institutes and Centres

You can select labels to represent your membership of LJMU Research Institutes and Centres. You can select multiple labels to show you are a member of more than one Institute or Centre.

To recommend additional labels within this vocabulary, email the Symplectic Help Team.

Availability

You can select labels to represent your availability for activities, both internal and external to LJMU.

The scheme includes the labels Supervision of Research Degrees and Supervision of Taught Course Research Projects. Academic supervisors are strongly encouraged to use these labels as appropriate.

To recommend additional labels within this vocabulary, email the Symplectic Help Team.

The Library has guidance on how to use Symplectic Elements to capture and manage your publications.

You can select publications to be labelled as Featured in LJMU Profiles, where they will then appear at the top of your list of publication on the Publications tab.

From the Symplectic Elements Homepage, under Publications, select the publication type under Claimed (for example 10 Journal Articles). You can then highlight publications by selecting the heart icon next to their individual titles.

You will need to be selective and consider how your highlighted publications reflect your research interests and professional biography.

LJMU research staff are required to deposit articles and conference papers published with an ISSN in LJMU Research Online (LJMU’s publications repository) within three months of it being accepted for publication. You can do this using Symplectic Elements.

The Library has provided guidance on how to use Symplectic Elements to deposit research in the repository (PDF, 384KB).

For more information about what you are required to deposit see the LJMU Open Access Publications Policy.

You can add videos to your profile when they are hosted on YouTube.

In the Edit Mode section of Symplectic Elements, scroll to the end of the page, locate the Media subheading, and select + Add Video. Select YouTube in the dropdown menu. Type the title of the video into the Label field. Use the URL field to paste in the link to the video on YouTube.

You will need to supply an accessible description of the video for screen readers. This will be a text statement that describes the video, including its visual setting.

See My Tutor is a facility that allows tutors to indicate their availability to students, and for students to book time with their tutors. It has been integrated into LJMU Profiles. Each tutor’s public profile will include a link to access See My Tutor.

Changes in Symplectic Elements are published to LJMU Profiles within minutes. This is an improvement over the pre-2025 profile system, which published changes once every 24 hours.

You can contact the Symplectic Help Team by email. The Team endeavours to reply quickly.