Celebrating life-changing research at UEA awards

UEA’s Innovation and Impact Awards 2022 at The Assembly House, Norwich (Image: David Kirkham (Fisheye Images))

Winners and finalists were selected following a rigorous judging process. The judging panel included senior UEA staff alongside representatives from partner organisations Airbus, Archant, Aviva, Barclays, Norwich Film Festival, TechEast and Vattenfall.
Prof Fiona Lettice, pro-vice-chancellor for research and innovation, said: “A big congratulations to all this year’s winners and finalists. We were delighted with the high calibre of submissions this year and the awards have really shone a light on some of the innovative, impactful and inspiring work that makes our community so special.”

The UEA's Innovation & Impact Awards 2022 celebrate the remarkable research that is changing lives and helping to shape our understanding of the world (Image: David Kirkham (Fisheye Images))

Prior to the winners being announced, musician, broadcaster and businesswoman Myleene Klass addressed the audience and spoke about her love of the region and the importance of working collaboratively for business success.
The winners were then announced by UEA chancellor Karen Jones CBE.
Myleene said: “These awards are so important, especially for our area, because people can see what’s going on here at UEA and see the talent that we’ve got.”

The UEA's Innovation & Impact Awards 2022 brought together UEA staff, students and graduates, as well as external collaborators and partners (Image: David Kirkham (Fisheye Images))

Student or Graduate Innovation and Enterprise
Winner: Bare Kind – Lucy Jeffrey
Bare Kind’s mission is to save the world’s animals… through socks! The founder, Lucy Jeffrey, saw a gap in the market for socks that have an impact on the world of animal conservation.
Lucy is aiming to have the largest range of animal socks in the world, all contributing to save the species on the sock, with 10pc of the profits from every pair donated to animal conservation and rescue charities.
In 2021, Bare Kind was able to have a global impact through the sock donations; over 1,200 acres of tropical forest protected, 4,300 baby turtles released on a beach in Sumatra.
barekind.co.uk
Finalists:
Greenr – Thomas Panton, Hugo Douglas-Deane and Emma Andrews
Teleport – Jonathan Foo

Outstanding Commercialisation of Research
Winner: UEA Publishing Project Ltd – Nathan Hamilton and Dr Philip Langeskov
UEA Publishing Project was established in 2017 and over the last four years has grown a combined list in excess of 120 publications. These have featured prominently in mainstream press outlets such as BBC Radio 4, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times and The Guardian as well as in the literary press in such places as The London Review of Books, The LA Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement.
UEA Publishing Project has been nominated for several awards and attracted inward investment from organisations around the world.
The project has helped enhance and reinforce UEA’s international reputation as a place where opportunity and literary excellence thrive.
Finalists:
Cellexcel Ltd – Prof G Richard Stephenson
Commercial exploitation of artificial intelligence to enhance and automate seabed mapping – Dr Ben Milner, Dr Wenjia Wang and Dr Danny Websdale

Consultancy Project of the Year
Winner: Improving Animal Nutrition – Prof Charles Brearley and Dr Hayley Whitfield
Phytate in animal feed impairs the growth and sustainable production of poultry. Prof Brearley’s research in this area has impacted the global animal feed industry, via knowledge transfer to AB Vista, a UK animal nutrition technology company.
The research has changed AB Vista’s research and development strategy, know-how, marketing behaviour and technology adoption, enabling AB Vista to become one of the three largest animal feed enzyme suppliers in the world, responsible for approximately 17pc of global production.
Finalists:
Automated Video Identification of Marine Species – Dr Michal Mackiewicz, Dr Mark Fisher and Geoffrey French
2022 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report – Dr Jurgen Grotz, Dr Catherine Jere, Dr Chris Millora and Prof Anna Robinson-pant

Outstanding Social or Cultural Impact
Winner: Paston Footprints – Dr Karen Smyth
Paston Footprints is a cultural partnership programme between UEA, Paston Heritage Society, Norfolk Record Office, Community Action Norfolk and 59 history, church and local Norfolk organisations.
Democratising access to the Pastons’ 15th to 17th century letters, landscapes and landmarks is the main objective of this project.
Empowering community investment in Norfolk’s early history and exploring wellbeing connections with past lives has enabled new audiences to engage with the world’s earliest and largest collection of family letters.
Paston heritage is better experienced with the creation of 10 new Paston heritage trails in Norfolk, available at pastonfootprints.co.uk
Finalists:
Only Love Matters: A Creative, Critical Exploration of Intersex Characters in English Language Films – Dr Kamran Qureshi
Radio Drama as Lifeline: UEA and Audio Drama during the Pandemic – Prof Richard Hand

Outstanding Impact in Health, Wellbeing and Welfare
Winner: CAVA system – a novel diagnostic for dizziness condition to improve the health and wellbeing of patients – Prof Stephen Cox, Dr Jacob Newman and Dr John Phillips
Dizziness is common, awful to experience from a patient’s perspective, and has significant implications for an affected individual’s ability to work
and enjoy life.
Identifying the causes of dizziness is challenging, but a collaboration between NNUH and UEA has led to the development of the CAVA system.
The system consists of a diagnostic device worn near-continuously by patients in their own homes, together with sophisticated AI algorithms to analyse the data.
When brought to market, it is expected that the CAVA system will result in quicker and more accurate diagnoses for patients, with subsequent swifter access to effective treatments. This will result in significant cost savings for the NHS.
Finalists:
The COVID-19 pandemic: its impact on socio-economic inequality in mental health and inequity in access to health care – Dr Apostolos Davillas
Headucate: UEA student society – Amy Zile, Tory Selwyn, and Becci Howard

Outstanding Impact in Policy and Practice
Winner: Sequencing Covid-19 genomes to inform public health policy – Prof Robert Kingsley
A truly world-leading part of the UK response to the Covid-19 pandemic was tracking the virus spread and evolution using genome sequencing.
A group of scientists from UEA, Quadram Institute Bioscience and NNUH played a critical role in this effort.
To date, the team has sequenced over 60,000 SARS-CoV-2 samples. This work tracked transmission in hospitals, prisons and care homes in East Anglia, and contributed to identifying the emergence of variants of concern, guiding government policy in the UK and around the world.
The team was able to reach out to low-income countries to assist in sequencing Covid-19, including training and capacity building. In Zimbabwe, this helped guide both local responses and the global surveillance of new variants.
Finalists:
Break Staying Close Staying Connected Co-produced film project – Dr Jeanette Cossar and Julie Young
Visually communicating assessments of climate change to global audiences – Prof Kenny Coventry, Dr Jordan Harold and Dr Irene Lorenzoni

Partnership of the Year
Winner: INOGOV – Innovations in Climate Governance – Dr Johanna Forster and Prof Andy Jordan
International climate policy emerges at glacial speed, but new forms of governing are nonetheless appearing at the city level and in the private sector.
The problem is that non-state responses to the climate emergency are often too dynamic and diffuse to be comprehended via a conventional research project. Dr Forster and Prof Jordan opted for a looser style of working, forging an international partnership of 28 countries to leverage impact well beyond academia.
Funded for four years INOGOV was hugely productive: a book of its main findings has been downloaded over 90,000 times.
Of the 669 partnerships funded in the period 2014-20, an independent evaluation placed INOGOV amongst the four most impactful.
Finalists:
The Norwich Good Economy Commission – Richard Clarke, Dr Noel Longhurst and Prof Catherine Waddams
Sustainable Health Systems and Workforce Development through a Collaborative Workforce Transformation Academy – Dr Carolyn Jackson

UEA Chancellor Karen Jones CBE presents the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement to Prof Henry Sutton (Image: David Kirkham (Fisheye Images))

Outstanding Achievement
Winner: Future and Form of Literature – Prof Henry Sutton and collaborators
What will writing look like in 50 years’ time? This was the question the project set out to explore with six renowned writers and alumni of UEA’s Creative Writing Programme, celebrating its 50th anniversary.
The resulting multi-disciplinary and experimental works illustrate the interface between contemporary literature, storytelling and technology.
With major Arts Council England funding, the project involved many cultural and technical partners from across the region and beyond.
Five hundred writers, academics, artists, creatives, students and school children were involved in making Future and Form, which launched at Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2021.
With further representation at the national Being Human festival and Norwich Science Festival in the autumn, the project continues online at futureandform.net
Nearly 400,000 people have engaged with the works in person and online so far. Artforms and genuinely new technologies used in the making of Future and Form will provide springboards for future projects and industry applications, while numerous partnerships were forged and consolidated.

A recording of the full ceremony can be viewed on UEA’s YouTube channel and the brochure is available to read online. For more information on any of the winners or finalists, or about collaborating with UEA on a project, email business@uea.ac.uk
Follow the awards on Twitter @UEAIIAWARDS