Welcome to the Knowledge Exchange Awards

Convex Seascape Survey Education Programme

The Convex Seascape Survey is a large, interdisciplinary, international project led by the University of Exeter. Its research aims to investigate the ocean's vital role as the world's largest carbon sink. Over five years, the project will explore and quantify carbon locked in continental shelves, assess the role played by marine life in carbon storage, and determine risks from human activities.

Led by Professor Callum Roberts (PI) along with a team of academics, including Ceri Lewis and Adam Porter, they are co-producing an educational outreach programme with Encounter Edu and Blue Marine Foundation. They are creating a legacy of UK curriculum-aligned lesson packages while ensuring a global reach through live lessons, a free-to-access online repository of resources/activities, and an immersive digital experience. In the non-digital world, artist Naomi Hart is leading a series of informative art workshops and exhibitions.

ReefBudget: A Global Coral Reef Monitoring Tool To Support Reef Conservation And Management

ReefBudget is an online tool developed by Professor Chris Perry and his team that delivers data on coral reef growth potential. He has been working with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, USA), supporting them in adopting the ReefBudget coral reef monitoring protocol.

This is relevant to NOAA and other agencies because it predicts reef capacity to sustain critical ecosystem functions (e.g., coastal protection, biodiversity, fisheries). NOAA now uses ReefBudget across all its Atlantic and Pacific reef jurisdiction sites and recently funded an Exeter Research Fellow to develop an App-based version for managers.

We Are The Possible

We Are The Possible has pioneered a new way of communicating climate science that engages people intellectually and emotionally at major international negotiations and beyond, helping drive the call to action to safeguard and restore our planet. They help build bridges across cultures and generations, so as to move people from a place of eco-anxiety, anger and despair to a place of understanding, hope and agency.

The We Are The Possible (COP28, Dubai 2023), We Still Have a Chance (COP27, Egypt 2022), and One Chance Left (COP26, UK 2021) projects have been delivered successfully at COP and other fora. Led by Peter Stott, Cecilia Manosa Nyblon and Sally Flint, this project has helped to place the University of Exeter, their partners, and the UK at the heart of the international conversation on confronting the climate crisis with determination and hope, reaching 28 million people worldwide.

ENLIVEN

People with dementia really benefit from outdoor and nature-based experiences but often face barriers to access. Businesses and organisations that manage outdoor sites often lack awareness and knowledge of how to open up opportunities for people with dementia.

To address this issue, ENLIVEN has worked with outdoor providers to co-produce dementia-inclusive, nature-based experiences. Underpinned by research evidence and knowledge exchange activities, ENLIVEN formed 11 bespoke partnerships with historic properties, National Parks, and other outdoor experience providers throughout England and Wales, including the world-renowned sites the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew and the Historic Royal Palaces.

The project has brought together people with lived experience of dementia and businesses to co-produce visitor experiences that promote independence, accessibility, wellbeing, and inclusion while supporting organisational knowledge creation and innovation. ENLIVEN is an interdisciplinary project spanning the Business School and the Medical School in collaboration with external co-investigators, which received funding from the UKRI's Healthy Ageing Challenge research programme for 2021-24.

Healthy Parent Carers

The Healthy Parent Carers Programme is a 12-week health and wellbeing course specifically designed for parent carers of disabled children. It has been co-produced by health researchers and parent carers, extensively trialled and commercialised.

The feedback from parent carers who have participated in the programme is overwhelmingly positive, with several describing it as 'life-changing'. Healthy Parent Carers are now seeking to make the programme available to as many parent carers across the UK as possible by partnering with disabled children's charities, local authorities, and NHS England. 

The Citizen Phage Library

The silent pandemic of antimicrobial resistance continues to threaten global health, food security and modern medicine. Our most promising sustainable solution lies in the use of natural predators of bacteria called phages that have co-evolved with their bacterial prey for a billion years. Phages are highly specific, clinically safe, genetically tractable and cheap to produce, providing a low-cost precision and personalised medicine to those with drug-resistant infections. 

Through Citizen Science and a partnership with the Environment Agency, the Citizen Phage Library provides phages to clinicians and researchers around the world for use in therapy when no other clinical options remain.

Cultural Heritage Management Diploma Degree For Local Community Archaeology Tourist Guides, Colombian Amazon

The Amazon is in crisis. Saving the forests, the forests' residents who safeguard them, and their bio-cultural heritage are one and the same thing. Since the peace process in 2016, the world-class rock art of the Colombian Amazon has become a driver of positive social transformation, providing the local rural and indigenous communities a viable alternative to growing coca, joining the dissident guerrillas, or deforesting the Amazon for cattle-ranching. 

To this end, the Diploma Degree Project was conceived as an academic support strategy for community tourism guides, who have set up community organisations that combine tourism management with the conservation of cultural and natural assets.

Section 28 and its afterlives in the South West

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the repeal of Section 28, which prohibited local authorities and schools from “promoting” homosexuality between 1988 and 2003, the Section 28 and its Afterlives project team collaborated with local LGBTQ+ organisations, including the Intercom Trust, the leading LGBTQ+ charity in the South West. 

These collaborations have helped raise wider awareness of this difficult period of local LGBTQ+ history, created opportunities for reflection among those directly affected by the legislation, and enabled LGBTQ+ people of all generations to respond creatively to this history and to concerningly similar attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in the present.

The Community Law Clinic in Partnership

The Community Law Clinic is a service embedded in the local community with the overarching objective of creating a just, equitable, inclusive, and fair society. The Clinic provides pro bono legal services to those who cannot access justice due to barriers that can affect their financial situation, health, or understanding of a complex legal system. 

Their new partnership with Citizens Advice Teignbridge has elevated their student-led clinical offering in a new area of law to meet increasing demand.

The Exeter Tutoring Model

The South West Social Mobility Commission (SWSMC) Exeter Tutoring Model has positively impacted school-aged pupils. Through partnerships with schools, universities, and others, SWSMC has scaled up their model from their original pilot to reach around 700 pupils at 40 schools from Cornwall to Northumberland. 

At Exeter, students became tutors through an accredited module (a part of their degree). Then, they went into schools to deliver a course designed by an Exeter-based Headteacher. After the nine-week intervention, pupils’ ability to write accurate sentences improved by 100%.

The Exeter Tutoring Model has been praised by the Department for Education ministerial team and Labour’s shadow education team.

HistoryCity

HistoryCity is a unique app that expands heritage by translating world-leading research into immersive experiences that bring the past to life in the streets of the present. Innovative in platform design and first-person storytelling, HistoryCity has grown from a small impact experiment in 2014 to a self-sustaining venture.

Working with partners such as the app firms Calvium and Apple, universities, museums, and heritage organisations in the UK, Europe, and the US, they have created impactful public history resources and educational packages for students. This collaboration has also enabled civic bodies to provide new heritage interpretations and manage visitor traffic effectively.

SENISCA: Commercialisation of the University’s RNA Biology Expertise

Professor Lorna Harries' RNA Biology group has created a groundbreaking cell rejuvenation technology, commercialised within biotech as oligonucleotide therapeutics and cosmeceuticals as anti-ageing formulations. The resultant spin-out company is SENISCA. 

The success of SENISCA's commercialisation journey to date is evidenced by over £7M of equity funds raised, >£1M of Innovate UK grants, winning the 2021 OBN Best UK Biotech Start-up award, being a finalist for the Reuters Health entrepreneur award in 2022, and being the only UK company shortlisted for the global Nature spin-off 2023 prize.

Watercress Research

For over a decade, the 'watercress team' at the University of Exeter has researched the chemistry behind watercress's beneficial effects on reducing human skin irritation, with the crucial initial help of charitable funding from the Torbay Medical Research Fund. 

In 2019, Paul and Kyle co-founded the spin-out company Watercress Research Limited, focusing on sustainability and regional partnerships. 

In January 2024, Watercress Research Limited launched its first three skin care products under the "Prof & Doc" brand. This highly successful UK retail product launch has achieved astounding early sales and attracted widespread regional and national media coverage.

Microplastics as Vectors of Antimicrobial Resistance in Aquatic Systems

Emily Stevenson joined the University of Exeter in 2019 for her Masters in Conservation Science and Policy. During her MSc, she worked under the supervision of Professor Angus Buckling and Dr Aimee Murray, where they co-designed a research project to investigate the role of microplastics in spreading diseases. She is now in the third year of her PhD, researching the same topic but with supervision additions from Plymouth Marine Laboratory: Professor Penelope Lindeque and Dr Matthew Cole. During this time, she has worked in further roles in the community, industry and policy, which have increased the project’s broader impact. 

Opas Guides

Opas Guides is a small start-up that aims to "make medicine better" by creating custom surgical instruments and personalising medicine. They use patient CT scans to create digital twins of patient joints and model them in various movements to help surgeons visualise and understand their patients better. 

Opas Guides offers an 'Implant Placement Optimisation' service to help surgeons decide the best placement for an implant and design and manufacture patient-specific instrumentation for use in orthopaedic surgeries. This helps to accurately realise implant placement using Computer-Aided Design, fundamental engineering principles of design and additive manufacturing.

Phage Therapy: Understanding and Predicting Treatment Outcomes

The antimicrobial resistance crisis is a growing threat to healthcare, with an estimated 10 million deaths annually by 2050. Phage therapy represents a promising complement to antibiotics, and a recent report has shown treatment success in 61% of infections. Phage therapy uses viruses to infect and kill bacteria to treat infections. However, understanding of bacteria-phage interactions in clinical environments is limited. The Phage Therapy team partners with clinicians actively using phage to treat life threatening infections. They have shown that laboratory studies can predict treatment outcomes, and that phage resistance can be beneficial in treatment success. These insights are important for the development of therapeutics for individual patients which harness laboratory studies to estimate the most effective phages for treatment.

Digital Transformation of the Built Environment

Digital technologies are critical to the competitive advantage of organisations by enhancing informed decision making, productivity, and fostering economic growth. Despite making a significant contribution to the UK economy, the adoption of digital technologies has lagged in the built environment due to the sector’s dependence on legacy systems, inadequate budget, lack of standards, difficulty in realising benefits and inadequate cross-departmental communication or silos. 

This digital transformation project is currently working with Network Rail (infrastructure owner and operator) and Natural Building Systems (SME and construction product supplier) to improve the sector's traceability, sustainability and circularity. 

Ground Truth: Simulating Performance of Underground Water Mains with AI and Sensors

Water mains failure is a c. £500m direct cost to water utilities annually. Mains breaks result in substantial fines for water companies, and leaks create significant pressure on utilities in an age of increasing water scarcity. 

The University of Exeter and Datatecnics embarked in 2021 on a KTP to digitally map the underground network of pipes using AI and sensors. At the University, the Associate has worked on creating an entirely novel dataset of hydraulic and ground loads to calibrate a machine learning model which can then predict when pipes will fail more accurately than any present solution. 

STRAWS: Supporting Teachers, Resilience, And Wellbeing, Slovakia

The STRAWS project aims to transform Slovakia's education system. Frequent changes in political leadership have resulted in stagnation in educational policymaking, hindering the shift away from directive teaching methods rooted in the country's communist past. This has led to low student performance and poor mental health experiences in schools. Teachers lack the skills to manage their wellbeing and support their students. 

The STRAWS team has collaborated with the Coalition of Schools in Mental Health in Slovakia and the Social and Health Education project in Ireland to create an evidence-based programme that will inform educational practice and policy in Slovakia.

3rd Climate Change Risk Assessment Technical Report

The Technical Report for the 3rd UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3) was delivered by a large, multi-disciplinary consortium of experts led by Professor Richard Betts. This created new knowledge in the form of a comprehensive assessment of the risks climate change brings to the UK and the urgency of adaptation. 

This directly informed the advice the Climate Change Committee gave to the UK government and the Devolved Administrations, which in turn informed the report to the government to Parliament as required by the Climate Change Act. It also informed the development of the 3rd National Adaptation Programme.

Exeter at the Heart of the UK’s Metamaterials Revolution

With key collaborators at QineitQ and Dstl, the Metamaterials Team is the driving force behind the UK's Metamaterials Revolution. The Revolution has its roots in Exeter's hugely successful industry-aligned CDT in Metamaterials, with ambitions progressing through the EPSRC Big Idea, award of multiple million-pound grants, and establishment of the UK Metamaterials Network. 

The Team has firmly established the Centre of Metamaterials Research and Innovation (CMRI) at Exeter and the activities and membership of the national network, which today exceeds 800 industry, governmental, and academic representatives. Working together since 2018, the Metamaterials Team has enabled national leadership in this area of sovereign importance.

Global Carbon Budget 

The Global Carbon Budget (GCB) is the most comprehensive, independent, scientific report on global carbon emissions and sinks. It is consistently a significant science story at the UNFCCC COP negotiations, where it is launched every year. It informs and influences the climate talks at the highest levels, including talks with the UN General Secretary. 

Annually, it estimates the remaining carbon budget before the Paris Agreement’s 1.5˚C and 2˚C targets are breached, providing a reality check to world leaders and setting out the scale of the action required to address climate change in this critical decade for climate action.

Increasing Public Awareness of Medical Mycology

Fungal infections are commonly considered skin infections, like thrush or athlete’s foot. However, invasive fungal infections cause approximately 3 million deaths each year. Despite this devastating impact, they remain critically understudied. We need more accurate diagnostics, better antifungal drugs, and a deeper understanding of fungal disease.

At the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology (MRC CMM), a key objective is to raise awareness of the fungal threat and highlight the challenges facing researchers, clinicians and patients. To address this, the Centre’s Public Engagement and Communications team engage the public each year in new, innovative ways across disciplines and audiences.

Dr Rachel McInnes

Chairperson of judges for the Sustainable Futures Award

Rachel is Co-Director of the Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence, which brings together world-leading researchers from the University of Exeter and the Met Office, to pioneer the development of Environmental Intelligence research and deliver innovative, interdisciplinary education and training. 

Rachel has a demonstrated history of working in the environmental services industry. Her previous roles with the Met Office have focused on air quality impacts, climate information and climate impacts for health.

She gained her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Astronomy and Astrophysics from The University of Edinburgh and is an Associate Member of the Institute of Physics.

Professor Rosie Hails MBE DSc hc FRSB

Judge for the Sustainable Futures Award

Rosie is an ecologist and Nature and Science Director at the National Trust, holding honorary chairs at Exeter and Cranfield Universities. Her role is to develop the Trust’s nature strategy, research portfolio and advice on science evidence relevant to Trust decision making. She leads teams focusing on Nature Conservation, Environmental Research & Data, Trees & Woodland Creation, Wildlife Management, Land Use, Farming and Public Benefits delivered by Nature. She is also one of three Directors of ‘Renew’ – a five year Changing the Environment program funded by NERC, and led by the University of Exeter & National Trust Partnership.

She is a member of Defra’s Science Advisory Council, chair of the Biodiversity Expert Committee, and on a number of advisory boards. She was awarded an MBE for services to Environmental Research in 2000.

Professor Konstantinos Chalvatzis

Judge for the Sustainable Futures Award

Konstantinos joined the University of Exeter in 2024 as the Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Business Engagement and Innovation for the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy. Before that he was Professor of Sustainable Energy Business, Associate Dean for Innovation and Academic Director for ClimateUEA at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on energy sector innovation and business sustainability practices and his projects have attracted funding of approximately £22m. Konstantinos has held visiting posts with the Universities of Bologna, Maryland, College Park and ESCP.