Stream 3 - open call

impactQM is pleased to announce calls for Stream 3, an open call for collaborative funding with external partners. If you are a Queen Mary academic who has identified an organisation who wants to collaborate on a project, then  impactQM can provide cofunding. This is an open call with applications reviewed monthly. See http://www.qmul.ac.uk/impactqm/forms/ for application forms and full details of the scheme.

If you are a Queen Mary academic who wants to learn more about working with industry, has a broad idea of a collaboration but does not have a specific organisation in mind, or knows of an organisation who might be interested in the scheme, please contact impactQM at impactqm@eecs.qmul.ac.uk

And a reminder that there is still time to apply for our schemes for PhDs and postdocs.

Stream 1 If you are a current or very recent Queen Mary PhD student, an impactQM scholarship gives you the chance to set up a workplacement in a company or with other users of research, to network with employers at regular events, and to access professional short courses. Deadline 30th September.  Details at http://www.qmul.ac.uk/impactqm/forms/

Stream 2 If you are a current or very recent Queen Mary postdoc, an impactQM scholarship gives you the chance to set up a salaried short term position with in a company or with other users of research, to network with employers at regular events, and to access professional short courses. Deadline 30th September.  Details at http://www.qmul.ac.uk/impactqm/forms/ Read more

Announcing the call for scholarships

impactQM announces the formal call for the 2009-10 impactQM scholarships for Phd students and research staff with a deadline of 30th September. Go to
www.qmul.ac.uk/impactqm
to download the application forms and further details.

Please address any queries to impactqm@eecs.qmul.ac.uk

The scholarships are open to current and very recent Queen Mary Phd students and research staff in the science and engineering sector and related interdisciplinary areas. The offer the chance to spend time working in a company or with other users of research, to network with employers at regular events, and to access professional short courses.



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Scholarship call tiny delay

The scholarship call was already to go out  when on Friday at 4pm we discovered that the fonts on the form were all an illegible pale yellow in certain versions of Microsoft word. We decided to wait till Monday.

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Visit from Lord Drayson

Lord Drayson, Minister of State for Science and Innovation, visited Queen Mary today to see the Centre for the Cell, and also had a briefing on impactQM from the director and Queen Mary's new principal, Professor Simon Gaskell. He was  pretty positive, especially about the idea of placements in high-tech SMEs giving people a flavour of how cool innovation can be, and about the broad range of interactions that universities and business can have.

And if you hop on over to Lord Drayson's twitter feed at
http://www.twitter.com/LORDDRAYSON
you will see he has tweeted us "Listen up hi tech start-ups! Get a PhD student or post doc seconded 2 work 4 U 4 FREE! New govt funded scheme: ImpactQM http://is.gd/2PQKJ " (And yes, he does his own tweets). What an endorsement to kick-start the project....

You can follow impactQM on twitter at
http://twitter.com/impactQM
but we are not as popular as the science minister (yet).

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John Allen's talk at the impactQM summer party

Here is the text of John Allen's talk. His write-up in the Independent is
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/research-matters-cash-for-questions-1737519.html
and his web site is at
http://jfallen.org
""
Thank you for the invitation, and for the compliment. Two terms require definition: "research" and "impact". Let us leave "research" for the moment, but I'll come back to this.

IMPACT What is "impact"?

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Note "also fig.".... Can it therefore mean anything one likes....?

However, collision requires two bodies. So we have to ask; impact of research - upon what? And is the collision elastic or inelastic? Two billiard balls collide elastically. A train collides with a car inelastically, probably. The asteroids that left craters on the moon collided inelastically, probably. Perhaps the impact of science on society is mostly inelastic....

RESEARCH

Please cast your mind back to 1772. The year that Captain Cook (who lived just down the road in Stepney Green) landed on the South Island of New Zealand.

Quote from 1772

In 1772, Joseph Priestley demonstrated that oxygen is consumed by combustion or by respiration using a burning candle, or a live mouse, in a closed glass jar. His discovery pre-dated the term oxygen, which was coined later by Lavoisier20,21. The results were reported in a paper in Philosophical Transactions (of the Royal Society) entitled Observations on Different Kinds of Air:

“...I flatter myself that I have accidentally hit upon a method of restoring air which has been injured by the burning of candles, and that I have discovered at least one of the restoratives which nature employs for this purpose. It is vegetation. In what manner this process in nature operates, to produce so remarkable an effect, I do not pretend to have discovered; but a number of facts declare in favour of this hypothesis...

“One might have imagined that, since common air is necessary to vegetable, as well as to animal life, both plants and animal had affected it in the same manner, and I own that I had that expectation, when I first put a sprig of mint into a glass-jar, standing inverted in a vessel of water; but when it had continued growing there for some months, I found that the air would neither extinguish a candle, nor was it at all inconvenient to a mouse, which I put into it.

“…Accordingly, on the 17th of August 1771, I put a sprig of mint into a quantity of air, in which a wax candle had burned out, and found that, on the 27th of the same month, another candle burned perfectly well in it. This experiment I repeated, without least variation in the event, not less than eight or ten times in the remainder of the summer”.

The author of this paper was Joseph Priestley, after whom Queen Mary has recently named a building (on the dubious ground that he lived in Clapton, near Hackney, for about 18 months, prior to joining the enlightenment "brain drain" by moving, in 1792, to live with his son, in Pennsylvania, one of the soon-to-become-independent American colonies.)

Note that Priestley had an hypothesis - an expectation - which was that plants would injure air, just as animals do, and make it unfit for sustaining combustion or supporting life. His observation falsified this hypothesis. He contributed new knowledge. He had done RESEARCH.

After nearly 240 years, what can we say was the IMPACT of Priestley's research?

1. He had discovered a chemical element - oxygen. The simplest "missing difference" between "good air" and "bad air" is oxygen. What causes "malaria"? Not bad air... but Plasmodium -

2. Priestley had discovered, partly, PHOTOSYNTHESIS - the process by which plants, algae, and some bacteria capture and store the energy of sunlight, and incidentally, fix carbon from CO2 in the atmosphere to make more of themselves. All animals, including ourselves, depend absolutely on photosynthesis as the source of the oxygen in the air we breathe, and as the source of thefood we eat - which is either parts of plants, or parts of animals that have eaten plants.

3. Priestley's discovery is now EMBEDDED in our understanding of chemistry, chemical transformations, and of living things and how they work.

MY RESEARCH

What have I done? I see no way of avoiding a few technicalities.

1. Provided the first evidence that oxygen is consumed in photosynthesis (first shown in 1952 by Alan Mehler) by a reaction involving transfer of a single electron onto and oxygen molecule, producing the toxic free radical SUPEROXIDE. The toxicity of many herbicides - to plants and to animals - can be explained by their passing single electrons on to oxygen to make superoxide. Superoxide is bad news. All the basic processes of biochemistry evolved before photosynthesis had learned how to release oxygen, about 2 billion years ago. Much os subsequent evolution is a succession of "patches" that lmit the damage that free oxygen would otherwise cause.

2. Discovered the reason for the activation, by light, of protein phosphorylation in CHLOROPLASTS. The light -activation is actually an activation by electrons, which are moved by light in the primary photochemical reaction of photosynthesis, and control arises from a particular point in the chain of electron transport that makes the oxygen-evolving part of photosynthesis. This discovery explained a previously-described but otherwise mysterious ability of plants and algae to "tune" their photosynthesis to give high yield, or efficiency, despite otherwise unfavourable changes in the wavelength of light.

3. Proposed a hypothesis for the occurrence of genes, as DNA, in chloroplasts, and so for the phenomenon of non-Mendelian, maternal, or cytoplasmic inheritance. This hypothesis proposes that gene in chloroplasts are turned on and off by electron transfer reactions of photosynthesis, and that this REDOX SWITCH has been so important in evolution that it alone justifies the cost of maintaining a genetic system in the cytoplasm, outside of the cell nucleus.

What am I doing now?

1. Finding evidence for the hypothesis. Recent progress of Sujith Puthiyaveetil in my lab has identified the predicted "ELECTRON SENSOR" - and shown that plants require it in order to switch chloroplasts genes on and off. 2008 paper in PNAS.

2. Looking for ways to test the hypothesis further, examine its predictions, and apply it, to MITOCHONDRIA - descendants of bacterial cells, now within animal and plant cells, which also, like chloroplasts, transfer electrons, in respiration, and which also, like chloroplasts, contain genes for a small subset of their own proteins.

3. Looking for ways to test a connected hypothesis - that mitochondria have a single-electron "leakage" to oxygen, that this initiates ageing in animals, and that "new" mitochondria arise in each generation through the maternal line because mitochondrial genes are switched off in egg cells.

What is the impact of my research?

It has contributed, and will contribute, to become EMBEDDED within our understanding of living things, their evolution, the emergence of complex cells from simpler ones, and, possibly, life on this planet in the first place, from purely geochemical reactions. It will "exclude falsehood".

THE PROCESS OF SCIENCE ITSELF HAS "IMPACT".

Correspondence
Nature 459, 774 (11 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/459774b; Published online 10 June 2009

How science upholds civilization, human rights and democracy
Dick Taverne

House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW, UK
Email: taverned@parliament.uk

Sir
I would like to add two important points to the discussions of C. P. Snow's 'two cultures'
(Nature 459, 10 and 32–39; 2009).

First, it is not ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics that is the most serious gap in the education of many non-scientists, but a lack of basic understanding of how science works. For example, a recent UK survey, Public Attitudes to Science 2008, by Research Councils UK (http://tinyurl.com/o96lwg) showed that, although the public overwhelmingly believes that science makes the world a better place, a strong majority also maintains that no innovation should be licensed unless science has first proved it to be safe. As if it could! The controversy over the mumps–measles–rubella (MMR) vaccine showed that large sections of the public and, worse, the media either fail to understand the importance of evidence or have no respect for it.

Second, science is one of the pillars of civilization and liberal democracy, as that eminent philosopher of science, Karl Popper, convincingly argued. It is, he said, "one of the greatest spiritual adventures man has yet known". Because science rejects claims to truth based on authority and depends on the criticism of established ideas, it is the enemy of autocracy. Because scientific knowledge is tentative and provisional, it is the enemy of dogma. Because it is the most effective way of learning about the physical world, it erodes superstition, ignorance and prejudice, which have been at the root of the denial of human rights throughout history.

Perhaps "how science works" is an important impact that science has, and will have, on society, at least equal to the technological progress that follows basic research.

I have a strong feeling that Joseph Priestley, were he alive today, would agree with Dick Taverne.

I know I do.

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impactQM party!

Over 70 people turned out for the impactQ summer party. They heard Professors John Allen, Byron Cook and John Stark talk about what research impact meant to them.

We concluded that interaction with people and problems who can stimulate new ideas and thinking is good, but any idea that research can be produced "to order" or that all research must be with an industry partner is likely to hamper creativity. There were some particularly lively quotes.
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Update

Thanks to input from many people by email or at events we now have a plan.  The elements are:

• impactQM will fund 20-40 collaborative projects/workplacements a year, of length 1-12 months, with external partners.  The aim is to increase the impact of our research and our researchers through work with partners,  supplementing  traditional routes to  impact through IP exploitation with work in defence, policy/communication, digital media/creativity, and NHS/health links.
•  impact QM will fund Scholarships for PhD students which will take the form of short courses, master classes  and funding for a personal development plan. The  aim of the personal development plan will be to set up  a 1-6 month work placement for the PhD student. It will be used to work with the student's supervisor to investigate options for working with external partners,  to develop the students career or to build industry links for the research group. The workplacement will be funded at normal EPSRC PhD student rates, and can be taken during the PhD period or at the end, depending on the partner  and the student's work programme,  The first full call for scholarships will go out in late August 2009, with applications due at the end of September 2009. Current PhD students at any stage in their PhD can apply, by agreement with their supervisor. There will be additional calls in September 2010 and 2011.
• impact QM will fund Scholarships for postdocs. These will work like the scholarships for PhD students, except that the timing of the placement will need to fit with the postdoc's current contract of employment. The full call for scholarships will go out in late August 2009, with applications due at the end of September 2009. Any postdoc can apply, by agreement with their supervisor/PI. 
• impactQM will also have an open rolling call for collaborative projects, recognising that the importance of this funding for QM is that it gives access to funds quickly for external partners.
  
• The training element mentioned above will include Masterclasses from leading people in industry,  and short courses including entrepreneurship, and science policy and communication. Much of this will be open to all staff.

The project will contribute to the following, of major importance to Queen Mary and the Science and Engineering sector in particular:  

•  improving the graduate student experience, and hence recruitment of graduate students 
  
•  enhanced career development and employability for graduate students, postdocs, and early career staff 
  
• increased focus on impact of research and working with research users, in line with research council and HEFCE priorities, and the demands of the REF 
  
• strengthening relationships with key stakeholders: industrial and other users of research 
  
• collaborative research with external bodies with the potential for exploitation of our research
  

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Answers to some questions

Q How are these schemes going to work, exactly?

A There will be two routes. One is to have a short PhD student placement funded entirely by impactQM. The other is to have a collaborative research project to employ someone (6-12 months), where the company and impactQM both contribute: one third from the company if it is an SME, and half otherwise, and impactQM puts in the rest. The person would be employed by QM, and could be a QM PhD student or postdoc, or someone new.  (There will be some fine print, which we are still working out.)

Q What's an SME?

A A company with fewer than 250 employees.

Q I have an industry partner already  lined up who is keen to take part, what should I do?

A Contact Ian Llewellyn iplATdcs.qmul.ac.uk or Lisa Hearty  lmhATdcs.qmul.ac.uk who can start to get things moving. We are still putting the details of the schemes together, but can certainly talk informally.

Q Times are tough for companies at the moment - how about using the funds to bring industry people here?

A Good idea - maybe as a secondment if we can navigate any tax and HR implications ....

Q Can a Queen Mary funded start-up be an industry partner ?

A For a PhD placement, yes. For a collaborative research project , yes, if Queen Mary owns less than 50% of the shares in the start-up. 

Q What is the scope of the research covered by this project? Does it have to be work already funded by EPSRC at Queen Mary?

A It can be anything that falls within EPSRCs remit, not necessarily work that is already funded by them. In particular EPSRC are keen to encourage interdisciplinary work. So, for example, something that applied a piece of maths (maths and computing are in EPSRC's remit) to a problem in biology, medicine or social science would count, as well as something applying maths to  science and engineering areas).

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Working with partners?

We want to make Queen Mary a great place for external partners to work with, whether talking to our researchers, using our research or employing our PhDs and postdocs. How do we do that? Read more

Who are our partners?

What kinds of companies and other employers should we be talking to set  up collaborative projects using our research and research skills? What industries do you want to know more about to help plan your career?

Maybe you are physicist or astronomer who wants to apply your skills in understanding huge datasets in another domain, like the NHS? Maybe you are a chemist and you want to understand what the current trends in big pharma are?  

Let us know.

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Developing careers?

We want to make Queen Mary a great place for PhDs, postdocs and young academics, who'll get the knowledge and skills they need to  develop their careers and make a difference in the world,  in academia or elsewhere. How do we do that? Read more

How's all this going to be organised...

This project for science and engineering researchers  is about two things:

• making Queen Mary a great place for PhDs, postdocs and young academics, who'll get the knowledge and skills they need to  develop their careers and make a difference in the world,  in academia or elsewhere.  
• making Queen Mary a great place for external partners to work with, whether talking to our researchers, using our research or employing our PhDs and postdocs

There will be three main strands of activity:

• increased connections and awareness between Queen Mary researchers and external partners
• training and development  for PhD students, postdocs and young academics, in particular  in working out what external users of research want and how to set up links, leading to
• doing exciting research, and applying cutting edge research skills, in placements and short co-funded projects in collaboration with external partners

Making the project work relies above all on our researchers, supported by  

• staff in Corporate Affairs, who look after raising our external profile
  
• staff in ESD, Education and Staff Development,  who look after training and development
• staff in QMI, Queen Mary Innovation, who look after  setting up links with companies
• the Science and Engineering Graduate School, who organise training for PhDs and postdocs
• administrative staff based in EECS, who will run the project on behalf of Queen Mary

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We have a provisional name...

"impact QM - research making a difference"

or maybe 

"impact QM - researchers making a difference"

or i-QM or indeed IQ-M....

Why impact?   This project is about "knowledge transfer". For EPSRC, who fund it,  “Knowledge transfer describes how knowledge and ideas move from the knowledge source to the potential users of that knowledge. The Research Councils encourage knowledge transfer by supporting schemes and activities to transfer good ideas, research results and skills between, for example, universities and other research organisations, business, the third sector and/or the wider community.” In other words, EPSRCcare about whether the work  they fund makes a difference, or has an impact.

And most researchers care about that too - they want people to understand and pick up on their ideas, whether its an academic colleague or competitor, or a company just waiting to snap up the latest smart thing.  So in planning research projects, and research careers, we  think about why we are doing what we do, and how it will make a difference. Someone might be studying for a PhD or doing a postdoc so that they can go out into the world and use their understanding of cutting edge science in business, government or healthcare, or they might be working on fundamental questions that feed, maybe over a long time-scale,  into the work of other scientists who in turn change our understanding of the world around us.

"Impact" is  also a real buzzword with government right now - EPSRC want us to tell them about the potential "impact" of our research when we write grant proposals,  HEFCE want to include "impact" in the next REF, and the civil service would love a recipe that says "x million spent like this will generate an effect of y million like that". 

But I prefer to think of it as  something that guides choices - the choices we make as individuals and organisations when we decide how to spend our time and energy in pursuing  research and planning our lives. So the goal of this project is to help  PhD students, postdocs and  early career staff in that planning, by giving them opportunities to work with external partners on projects that explore the impact of research: and also to increase the impact of the research and research training that people have had by giving them a chance to look at new questions in new situations.  

What do you think?

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Invite to discussion event

Queen Mary's new EPSRC KTA project is due to launch in Autumn 2009. With funding of nearly three million pounds from EPSRC over three years, and matching  funding  of a further five million, this project is a unique opportunity to build on EPSRC funded work by undertaking collaborative research with partners in industry, the public sector and other bodies such as social enterprises, arts organisations and charities.  If you are a PhD student, a postdoc, or an early career academic, we particularly want to hear your views at an early stage - EPSRC indicated a positive attitude adn a willingness to think radically was what won the bid for QUeen Mary. 

 There will be discussion events over liquid refreshments in the SCR in the Queens Building at 5pm on 19th May and 15th June - so come along with your ideas. 

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Press release...

Queen Mary, University of London has been awarded £2.9m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to establish links between early career researchers and industrial partners. This will be matched by other funding to give a total of £8.2m to support knowledge transfer from academia to industry.

The scheme aims to use early career researchers to undertake projects which will transfer leading edge EPSRC funded research into business. At the same time, the early career researchers will be mentored in the skills required to transfer research into economic impact for the UK; leading to a new brand of researcher with both the technical and business abilities to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment.

Dr Ian Llewellyn, Head of Business Development at Queen Mary, explains: “The knowledge transfer projects will employ newly qualified post-doctoral researchers, enabling them to make the switch between academia and industry with a recognised qualification in knowledge transfer. They will also ensure industry is kept fully aware of the outputs for exploitation from our EPSRC funded research base.”

It is estimated that 30 per cent of the UK’s knowledge base resides in universities, and that universities produce nearly all the graduates and post-graduate talent that form the basis of the UK’s privately run research and development centres of excellence.

A pilot version of the scheme has already been rolled out at the College with great success - of the young researchers who were involved with the scheme, 80 per cent were subsequently offered employment with the industry partner. This included developing leading-edge research work with blue-chip companies such as Sony-Ericsson, Nortel and Dow Corning as well as smaller high-technology spin-outs. For every £1 expended on the pilot scheme by the Government through EPSRC, industry contributed £3.28 in cash and a further £1.60 in contributions in kind such as the lending of materials and equipment. Eight new products were developed in the pilot for commercial exploitation using Queen Mary’s expertise. 

The award, one of only nine in the UK, is recognition of Queen Mary’s growing research success: its RAE performance placed it in the top 3 fro increased earnings from HEFCE, with the science and engineering sector achieving a cash uplift matching that of a top 20 UK university

It builds on an ongoing strategy of developing early career staff, stimulating interdisciplinary research, and encouraging novel relationships with users in companies, the public sector and the creative industries. Feedback from EPSRC indicated that the positive attitude and willingness to think radically was what won the award for Queen Mary. 

Project lead Professor Ursula Martin, Vice-Principal for Science and Engineering at Queen Mary, added: “The leverage of university research to provide socioeconomic benefit is vital to the continued prosperity of the UK. We believe the process of turning technology, know-how, expertise and skills into innovative, commercial products and services is crucial, and we hope that this scheme will be a role model for future initiatives nationally.

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