Queen Mary University of London Celebrates Excellence at 2024 Research and Innovation Awards
“The Awards demonstrate the incredible breadth of Queen Mary’s research excellence and the many profound ways our innovation is changing our world for the better”, said Professor Andrew Livingston, Vice-Principal (Research and Innovation) at Queen Mary University of London. “What sets Queen Mary research apart is our commitment to our communities and our partners, and it’s been such a pleasure to celebrate those values in action.”
The award categories and winners were:
Impact: Culture, Civic, Community and Policy
Winner: Indigenous Exchange and Climate Action, People’s Palace for their cultural exchange programme between indigenous and non-indigenous artists in the Brazilian Amazon, foregrounding indigenous experiences of climate.
Highly commended: N20: Know the Risks, a student-led nitrous oxide public health initiative, and Teach London Computing which has transformed computer science teaching in schools over 20 years.
Vice Principal’s Award for Research Excellence
Winner: Professor Lars Chittka for his work on social insects, including bees, and for his commitment to communicating his findings on how we understand sentience, personhood and ecological citizenship.
Highly commended: Dr Caroline Roney for her work on digital twins and virtual representations of a real-life human organs, and Professor Rachael Mulheron for her research into Damages-Based Agreements reforms (governing no-win, no-fee legal agreements).
Interdisciplinary Team
Winner: Early Career Researchers Alexander Stoffel and Ida Roland Birkvad (LSE), for their work on Trans Theory in International Relations, a new field fusing gender theory and international politics.
Highly commended: The Queen Mary+Emulate Organs-on-Chips Centre, which allows researchers to model organs of their own design for use in experiments; and also PETs4SMEs, a multidisciplinary team which has created a Privacy Starter Pack for small and medium sized enterprises.
Early Career Researcher
Winner: Dr Yuanwei Liu both for his outstanding achievements and strongly inclusive approach. Dr Liu’s research focuses on simultaneous transmission and reflection surfaces, and he is the Principal Investigator of the STAR laboratory, which he founded and is at the forefront of a global RDI agenda.
Highly commended: Dr Colm Murphy for his writing work and strong record of policy and political engagement, and Dr Layli Uddin for her pioneering public histories and community empowerment work in Bangladesh and Tower Hamlets.
Research Support
Winner: Coleen Colechin, Senior Operations Manager (Pre-Award) at the Queen Mary-Barts NHS Trust Joint Research Management Office, for extensive efforts to mentor staff and work developing the Research Operations environment.
Highly commended: the Research Support Team in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for their ambitious, targeted and collegiate approach to research support; and Petra Ungerer, a Technical Facilities Manager in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, for her work establishing a technician career development plan.
Research supervision
Winner: Professor Kimberly Hutchings for her work successfully supervising PhD students through to completion and her commitment to nurturing and developing future research leaders.
Highly commended: Dr Mathieu Barthet for his commitment to engaging industry in PhD training and successfully mentoring his students in applied research, and Dr Nicholas Tsitsianis, for creating a collegiate approach to the supervisory relationship.
Impact: Enterprise and Commercial Innovation
Winner: Dragonfly AI, a successful predictive visual analytics platform which comes out of late Professor Peter McOwan and Dr Hamit Soyel’s ground-breaking research in 2012 and whose clients include GSK, Mitsubishi and Jaguar Land Rover.
Highly commended: The Queen Mary Audio Engineering Research Team, originators of LandR, Nemisindo and many others, for their entrepreneurial research culture, and Accent Bias Britain, a commercial HR consultancy set up by Professor Devyani Sharma and Visiting Professor Erez Levon.
Technician
Winner: Martin Dodel, Research Technician in the Barts Cancer Institute whose outstanding contributions include: research publications, a patent application, and driving the establishment and benchmarking of the TREX method of assessing RNA-proteins interactions, and creating a supportive research culture.
Highly commended: Geography Technical Team for research that underpinned a BBC Panorama on the impact of coastal landfill, and work on an undergraduate prize in Geography; and Sherman Lo, Research Software Engineer in Central ITS for software improvement work.
VP’s Hon Award for Lifetime Contribution
Winner: Dr Helen Jenner who has served as the Chair of Queen Mary’s Ethics of Research Committee since 2017 and retires this year. She chaired a crucial element of our research governance process, one which oversees the wellbeing of researchers and their collaborators as well as reinforces our commitment to academic rigour and excellence.