By Michele Barbour
I am delighted to announce our 2025 Early Career Enterprise Fellowship (ECEF) awards! ECEFs are postgraduate research students (PGRs) who wish to explore the commercial applications of their research, and the scheme provides training, time buyout, resource, and specialist support to help our busy PGRs delve into the intersection of academia and industry.
This is our second cohort of Early Career Enterprise Fellows, following the success of our pilot last year. I couldn’t be prouder of both the successful applicants and all those who applied, and it’s exciting to see the appetite for schemes such as this. Read on to hear more about this year’s ECEFs and their focus areas!
Chimwemwe Miti
Being awarded an opportunity to receive dedicated support to transform a bright research idea into a commercial product is a life-long aspiration. Truly timely, the Early Career Enterprise Fellowship will lay the requisite foundation necessary to explore the digitisation of a much needed NHS service. I look forward to the training and eventual showcase of what will be, as a result of this fantastic fellowship, a commercial-ready product. My supervisor and I are extremely grateful to the panel of judges for the award.
Sutharsanan Navaratnarajah
I am honoured to receive this fellowship to advance my research toward commercialisation. I aim to develop a design workflow as a foundation for an origami-based software tool to create defect-free, foldable composite components.
Weiyi Li
I am deeply honoured to be awarded the Early Career Enterprise Fellowship at the University of Bristol. This opportunity not only recognises the potential impact of my PhD research on surgical training simulators but also provides invaluable support to advance its commercialisation and intellectual property development. Through this fellowship, I aim to develop the engineering prototype and translate my work into practical solutions that address critical needs in medical training, ultimately helping doctors to understand surgical scenario. I am more than excited to participate in the fellowship, discover potential commercialisation opportunities, and contribute to bridging the gap between academic research and real-world applications.
Henry Hickson
I am very excited to have been accepted for the 2025 ECEF scheme! I am looking forward to developing my business skills and learning how to commercialise and apply research to real-world challenges. This will be an exciting step in our journey towards using swarm robotics for good for a whole host of applications.
Ziyu Meng
I am pleased to receive this ECEF opportunity. I have worked in three laboratories during the past seven years and accumulated many lab-work experience. However, I am always curious about how lab-stage technology is ultimately transformed into industrial applications. This project gives me an opportunity to re-examine my topic from the perspective of practical application and explore ways to create actual value. Through this project, I aim to transform my chemistry robotic platform system into a commercial application. I would like to gain essential commercialization knowledge and skills to commercialize it smoothly.
Carolina Gaudenzi
As a PhD student with an interest in the commercialisation of science, I am very excited for the opportunity to explore the possible applications of my research outside of academia. Organoids are “organs in a dish” derived from human stem cells, and recapitulate many of the complex, dimensional dynamics which cannot be achieved with traditional cell culture. They furnish a revolutionary new medium for the personalisation of medicine, the refinement of disease modelling, as well as the testing of novel therapeutics. I hope that through our work on the optimisation and upscaling of organoid production, we will be able to offer valuable services to both the academic and private biotechnology sector.
Umeir Khan
I am excited to be further developing my skillset and taking a proactive step in engaging with enterprise! By the end of the fellowship, I aim to have (a) gained an understanding as to how I can translate academic research to industry, and (b) apply this knowledge to advance the route to commercialisation for my innovation in composites.
Christopher Yi
I am privileged and grateful to be awarded the Early Career Enterprise Fellowship, which aims to support the commercialisation of ideas generated in our research projects. The ECEF will facilitate my exploration of an innovative concept for room scale air filtration, wherein I will develop a technical demonstrator whilst acquiring a holistic understanding of research commercialisation.
I wish you all every success in your ECEF journeys, and I’m sure I speak for plenty of people across the University when I say we’re looking forward to hearing more about your experiences at the 2025 Festival of Enterprise!
In other news, our 2024/25 University Enterprise Fellows are hard at work exploring commercial applications of their research, and we’ll be announcing our 2025/26 cohort very soon. Watch this space!