By Michele Barbour
The University Enterprise Fellowship scheme provide resource, tailored support, and protected time to selected academics for a broad scope of enterprise undertakings that could include a patent, a spinout, a partnership relationship, or a consultancy.
It is with very great pleasure that I announce the University Enterprise Fellows for 24/25!
Our six new University Enterprise Fellows will be using their Fellowships to explore commercialisation of their research outputs and build new networks with industry and investors. You can read more about their plans and aspirations below.
Dr Richard Helyer
I am excited to have been awarded a University Enterprise Fellowship. This will allow me to engage with potential partners to bring our initiatives in using human patient simulation for undergraduate teaching to the wider healthcare education community.
Human patient simulation brought about a step change in healthcare education allowing learners to experience patients, trauma, disease and treatment in a safe environment and at scale. We have extended its use to teaching essential concepts of physiology, such as how the body responds to blood loss, and pharmacology, for example how drugs affect function of organs in the whole body, to early years undergraduates. Our approach has received considerable interest from other institutions and potential commercial partners who agree that improving the understanding of key scientific concepts brings about more effective and safer practice for healthcare professionals. The resources provided by this fellowship will allow me to explore the best direction in which to take our work with potential partners, for the benefit of students everywhere that are our future healthcare scientists and professionals.
Professor Iain Gilchrist
I am overjoyed to be awarded this fellowship. For the last 10 years we have been working on ways to objectively measure, in real time, the responses of audiences to creative content (including film, television and live theatre). We have known for some time that there is significant commercial interest in what we have been doing and this fellowship will give me the time, and focus, to really understand the market for our work and learn about the best way to deliver these new products to commercial partners and customers.
Professor Nicholas Howden
I am delighted to receive this University Enterprise Fellowship, as it will allow me to translate my research into real-world impact. Creating new tools to help solve practical problems is at the core of engineering, and the UEF will provide key support, expertise and industrial contacts to develop such tools.
Dr Robert Sharples
It’s a privilege to join the University Enterprise Fellows this year. I will use the fellowship to develop specialist programmes for international students, making sure that they have the best possible opportunity to thrive at university. I will be working with groups of students around the country, as well as their lecturers and university leaders, to create prototype resources and measure the impact they have on students’ learning and wellbeing.
Dr Rebecca Shepherd
I am thrilled to be awarded the University Enterprise Fellowship.
This opportunity will help me turn my research into real-world applications by setting up a commercial ivory identification service, demonstrating the impact of research beyond academia.
Dr Lucy Cramp
I’m really thrilled to have received this University Enterprise Fellowship. It gives me the opportunity to immerse myself in re-modelling our commercial offering of organic residue analysis at the University of Bristol. This is a complementary approach for reconstructing ancient dietary patterns from molecular traces in pottery vessels that can now be a routine part of the post-excavation toolkit across the heritage sector, from commercial units to museums and independent specialists. I am particularly excited to have the opportunity to integrate this offering with our new, cross-faculty AHRC Centre for Chemical Characterisation in Heritage Science, for which we have just been awarded £1M in funding to establish. From 2026, this will enable users from across the UK heritage community to access our facilities and expertise in mass spectrometric and stable isotope approaches in the heritage sciences.
I’d like to wish the best to all of this year’s University Enterprise Fellows, and I speak for all of us when I say we’re looking forward to hearing more about their experiences!