1️⃣ First Researcher Starter Pack + 🤖Getting AI Discovery Right

This week: When Research Participants Aren't Who They Say They Are; Getting AI discovery right; First Researcher Starter Pack. Check out our Research Lunch Club member interview from 🇳🇱 Netherlands, our podcast pick on Designing the Career You Actually Want, plus the latest job opportunities in research. And finally - join Research Lunch Club, now live in 33+ cities, before we send out our Fourth round of matches on Monday!

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People of Research
July 17, 2025

🎤 Community Highlights

Fancy meeting new researchers? Building a few bridges over lunch? and growing your research network? 👉️ Join us!

🚀 Research Lunch Club is matching researchers across 30+ cities worldwide this May - connecting members in trios from fields like AI ethics, cognitive science, ethnography, and UX research. Whether you’re in New York or Sao Paulo or Sydney, there’s a seat at the table.

Start next week with lunch with two awesome researchers!  - it’s like networking, but tailored, fun and over lunch!

🔬 Research Lunch Club Member Interview

This week’s interview is from Research Lunch Club - where researchers meet in person for monthly lunches in their city. 🔬 Our Meet Our Members series shares the journeys of researchers across disciplines - so you can get to know who you might be sitting down with over lunch!

Research Lunch Club Meet our Members #11

📰 Article Picks

🔗 When Research Participants Aren't Who They Say They Are: Dr. Maria Panagiotidi explains the growing challenge of fraudulent participants in remote qualitative research, detailing how remote methods and AI tools can make deception easier. She outlines key red flags for identifying fraudulent behavior—such as screener-interview mismatches, vague or polished responses, and evasion of video calls—and provides actionable strategies for prevention and response, including designing smarter screeners, using trusted recruitment channels, and having a clear team plan for when fraud is detected.

🔗 Getting AI discovery right: Dr. Janna Lipenkova provides a guide to ideating, validating, and prioritizing AI use cases, arguing that a structured discovery process is critical to avoid building for the wrong problems. She outlines a three-step approach: Ideation (using frameworks like the AI Opportunity Tree), Specification & Validation (using an AI System Blueprint and iteration), and Prioritization (moving beyond simple matrices to strategic alignment). Lipenkova highlights common anti-patterns, like starting with a model before a use case, and stresses the importance of understanding AI's core benefits and shortcomings to frame discovery effectively.

🔗 First Researcher Starter Pack: Judd Antin offers five counterintuitive rules for succeeding as the first researcher in a company, a role he describes as exciting but challenging. He advises prioritizing building relationships over delivering a single game-changing report, focusing on quick, practical wins to build momentum before tackling deep foundational research, and educating stakeholders through experiential output rather than theoretical presentations. Antin also stresses the importance of scaling oneself with AI from day one and playing the long game by being strategic and patient in a company unaccustomed to research.

🎙️ Podcast Pick

Jennifer Speciale – Designing the Career You Actually Want

Brave UX with Brendan Jarvis 🇺🇦 · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/51wLt9Bd963DrGyD07EvwB

💼 Job Picks

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👋 About us

We’re People of Research & Research Lunch Club - a global hybrid community uniting researchers across the industries, from UX Research to Behavioural Science. We connect, collab and grow. People of Research was created by @faysel.

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