Brunel University London Celebrates Achievements of Women in Innovation with Purple Plaque Unveiling
Staff member Dr Lorna Anguilano and former student Joanna Power were both part of the 50 trailblazing Women in Innovation selected last year by Innovate UK, the government’s innovation agency – and who were each awarded £50,000 to scale up their budding businesses, as well as receiving one-to-one business coaching, and a suite of networking, role-modelling and training opportunities.
Making role models more visible
The Women in Innovation programme was launched in 2016 to address the underrepresentation of women in business innovation and to encourage more women to apply to Innovate UK’s funding opportunities. The aim of the annual awards is to enable brilliant women across the UK to fully achieve their vision for their businesses and change the world.
A purple plaque is awarded to each of the award-winners, one year on, as part of a scheme that seeks to redress the gender imbalance of the older blue plaques scheme: historical markers that commemorate famous people who lived or worked at a specific location, of which only 14% celebrate female figures.
Emma Palmer, the Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Innovate UK, attended the unveiling event on 11 June, and explained the intended impact of the plaques that can now be seen at an increasing number of schools and universities. “These plaques are there to foster a sense of pride with students and educators, making each school a hub for celebrating the contribution of these innovators,” she said.
“Encouraging more girls into STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths] has many benefits, including closing the UK skills gap and boosting the UK’s labour value by over £2 billion. A key part of this is increasing the visibility of role models.
“Recent research tells us that girls interested in STEM careers doubles when they have relatable role models to aspire to, and as innovators and leaders that responsibility sits with all of us. You may have heard of the phrase you cannot be what you do not see. Representation and visibility are important. They matter when we see ourselves reflected.”
‘Hyperacculumulator’ plants that can clean soil
Dr Lorna Anguilano, a senior research fellow at Brunel’s Experimental Techniques Centre, became a Women in Innovation winner because of her game-changing idea to use plants to recover metal from contaminated land. She set up Phyona as a ‘spin-out’ company after her research project showed promise for her idea to be developed as a commercial product, called Lorna’s Seeds, readily available for gardeners and organisations.
Some soils can be contaminated due to a site’s previous use, such as a factory or foundry. Lorna’s Seeds is a combination of common but good-looking plants that can help to clean the soil by safely accumulating the pollutants in their leaves as a response to being stressed. After they’re harvested, the healthy soil is ready for other plants and crops to grow, and the heavy metals – such as copper and chromium – can be recovered and reused, such as for medical devices and electronics. And more broadly, Phyona also runs consultancy and planning active around this method, called phytomining.
“What we have started doing with the Women in Innovation award is our upscaling, by generating regional databases of available plants,” Lorna explained in a lecture leading up to the plaque unveiling. “We are looking at hyperaccumulators available in the UK, in Europe, in Japan and Taiwan, which are the areas where we work in. We want to work with local plants… a very natural technology that can be sustainable. Working with many plants altogether, we also increase biodiversity.”
Lorna added that the award will allow Phyona to upscale and work with bigger gardens, and spoke about two pilot sites of former industrial land in the north of England, in Barnsley and Salford.
Her lecture also covered her excitement about the opportunity to be a role model, and highlighted that Phyona is growing with Brunelians in the team as much as possible.
Washing clothes with recycled shower water
Joanna Power graduated from Brunel in 2021 with a first in Product Design Engineering, and her Women in Innovation award is in recognition of her eco-washing machine that uses recycled shower water to clear clothes. She co-founded and is technical director of Lylo Products Limited, and the funding and support from Innovate UK is helping her company grow.
Her lecture highlighted Environment Agency figures that England is going to run out of fresh water in 25 years, and that as a country we use 2.3% of our energy transporting water back and forth.
“At Lylo, we like to target the water that we use in the home and reuse it at the source, not waste all of this energy transporting it,” explained Joanna. “We take the wealth of shower water that we produce and reuse this ‘grey water’ for laundry.
“Our product is a portable washing machine that raises your shower water by collecting it on portable mat. You’ve got a water tank that you remove from the machine. You place it on your shower floor. You then shower, and it will collect the water. This goes back to the machine, and we have a filtering process that removes the unnecessaries from the grey water, making it safe for laundry – and then you launder your clothes with it.”
The product, developed with fellow Brunel student Paramveer Bhachu, had already won the international Red Bull Basement competition in 2020, and had been featured on several news websites. But additional funding has allowed Lylo to build their first prototype, and conduct tests to prove the water could wash just as well as a commercial washing machine.
“Innovate UK has honestly been instrumental for us,” said Joanna. “Alongside the award, they’ve paired us all together as a group of women, and they have been amazing. The ability to drop them all a message and say ‘I’m having this problem’, and everyone rushes to help. I don’t know what I’ve done without all of you.”
The next step for Lylo is to raise further funding to run their units in a pilot project, such as from an accommodation company.