Exploring the Depths of Water Quality: Nicholas Howden’s Journey Through Interdisciplinary Research and Enterprise Fellowship

In the next in our series of conversations with our University Enterprise Fellows, we spoke with Professor Nicholas Howden of the School of Civil Aerospace and Design Engineering at the University of Bristol.

Michele, Manda and Nicholas talk about his Enterprise Fellowship

A Diverse Background Across Academia and Industry

Nicholas’ academic background straddles multiple disciplines, starting with a general engineering degree, where he specialized in civil engineering. He recalls he was particularly inspired by professors who had practical experience in industry, which he found enriched their teaching and made it more accessible and exciting. This blend of theory and practice became a cornerstone of Nicholas’s approach to research and problem-solving.

Nicholas’ undergraduate degree was followed by a PhD in hydrology, hydrogeology, and hydrogeochemistry and, after completing his PhD, he worked as a hydrologist for contaminated land consultants and the former technical arm of the Coal Board as a hydrogeologist. His work involved addressing legacy issues associated with coal mining and how these impact water quality. This time in industry provided him with in depth understanding of the complexity of the water system and the many factors which can impact water quality, combined with hands-on practical experience of tackling environmental problems.

After this period in practice, Nicholas returned to academia, first at Cranfield University in the National Soil Resources Institute, where he expanded his understanding of soil and land use, and later at the University of Bristol. While his disciplinary home at Bristol remains in engineering, his expertise would make him equally at home in Earth sciences, physical geography, or environmental sciences. Nicholas’ diverse background across academic research and industry equipped him with a very pragmatic, yet embracing of complexity, perspective on environmental challenges.

The University Enterprise Fellowship: A New Frontier

Nicholas’s work as one of our 2024/25 University Enterprise Fellows focuses on the impact of agriculture on water quality. Techniques used in agriculture over the past 100 years or more have significantly affected the chemistry of water in river catchments, sometimes with long lags and complex interrelations. For example, he describes how during WWII, the UK abruptly increased arable land use, leading to a massive release of nitrogen and carbon into groundwater and rivers. The effects of this were seen decades later, highlighting the long-term impact of agricultural practices. Agricultural chemicals, including fertilizers and pesticides, move into and through every component of the hydrologic system—air, soil, soil water, streams, wetlands, and groundwater. Increased levels of nutrients from fertilizers can stimulate algal blooms, affect stream health, and increase treatment costs for drinking water. This has implications for drinking water, ecological value, and estuarine environments. Nicholas’s research aims to understand how agricultural practices propagate through the system, often with long delays, and in his enterprise fellowship he seeks to create a credible and actionable plan as to how his and others’ research can be applied in practice to protect water supplies now and in the future.

As a University Enterprise Fellow, Nicholas continues this theme of addressing complex environmental issues with a blend of fundamental science and engineering coupled with an industry-informed grasp of the many pragmatic considerations of understanding and influencing water quality. He is using the fellowship to “deep dive” into the wider context of what influences water quality, and in doing so is engaging with a wide range of stakeholders involved in the water industry with the ultimate aim to provide robust evidence to help industry and regulators make informed decisions to ensure water security. He describes the University Enterprise Fellowship as transformative, in that it has given him protected time and “permission” to step away from some of his regular teaching and research activities and invest substantial time to really listen to industry stakeholders, and understand their context, and the most pressing problems to solve. He stresses the differentiation between this fellowship and research; the UEF is much more about building relationships and understanding the viable paths by which ideas and solutions might be implemented in practice.

Collaboration and Policy Implications

Managing these issues requires understanding historical practices and predicting future impacts. The challenge is to provide evidence for practical solutions, whether it’s building treatment works or modifying agricultural practices. Nicholas’s work is crucial in helping industry and regulators navigate these complex challenges.

Nicholas’ current principal external collaborator is a water company, but his work has broader implications for policy and industry practices. Policy is usually based on evidence, and the complexity of these issues requires long-term planning beyond typical five-year cycles. The data science environment has changed, with an expectation for real-time monitoring and decision-making. However, real-time monitoring for water quality is complex and requires validation.

Listening, Learning, and Building Networks

One of the key differences between Nicholas’s enterprise fellowship and his regular academic role is the emphasis on listening and learning. Nicholas humorously notes that being an enterprise fellow gives him time off from the day job of a professor, which is to “profess.” Instead of speaking, he has the time to prioritise listening and figuring out which questions he needs to ask to really understand the water industry’s challenges. The fellowship has given him the time to understand the concerns of industry stakeholders, hear how they think about problems, and explore practical solutions. This understanding is crucial for providing effective solutions and building relationships.

Nicholas’s journey through the fellowship has involved building networks, strengthening existing contacts and making new ones. One thing he attributes his extensive network to is being a trustee of CIWEM (Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management), which provided him with excellent contacts that he would not otherwise have encountered in his regular academic role. He highlighted the importance, particularly for early career academics, of taking roles that could be seen as peripheral to one’s main academic career but can bring unanticipated benefits like contacts and insights. Nicholas recommends that more junior academics take such opportunities, although in a measured and intentional way, carefully picking and choosing the opportunities that really interest them.

Looking Ahead

By the end of his fellowship, Nicholas hopes to have an agreement with a company about the next 18 months to three years of work, including a draft business plan. He also aims to identify initial projects where his work can add value and involve other university colleagues in the future.

Final reflections

Nicholas Howden’s use of the University Enterprise Fellowship is not an entrepreneurial, spin-out journey, as some are – rather his is a showcase of listening and learning, and collaboration with industry stakeholders. His work addresses complex environmental issues with a blend of theoretical knowledge and practical experience, providing robust evidence and practical solutions to help industry and regulators make informed decisions. With a focus on historical perspectives, policy implications, and building networks, Nicholas’s work is paving the way for a more sustainable future.

We’ll have one more UEF interview ahead of this year’s Festival of Enterprise. If you’ve enjoyed learning more about this year’s cohort and their activities, sign up to attend via Develop and hear more from our UEFs and our Early Career Enterprise Fellows!

Empowering Multilingual Education: An Interview with Rob Sharples

By Michele Barbour

Ahead of this year’s Festival of Enterprise, our annual flagship event which celebrates the intersection of industry and academia, Manda Baynes (Innovation Officer, University of Bristol) and I have been sitting down with our University Enterprise Fellows to talk all things enterprise!

In the latest in our interview series, we had the pleasure of speaking with Dr Rob Sharples, Senior Lecturer in Language and Education at the University of Bristol and founder of a new university spin-out company, Heddle. Rob shared his journey from being a teacher to academic to entrepreneur, highlighting his passion for supporting multilingual children and the importance of being willing to swim against the tide and try something new. 

(L-R) Michele Barbour, Rob Sharples and Manda Baynes discuss his new spinout company,

A Passion for Education 

Rob has always been passionate about working with children. He spent ten years as a teacher before pursuing a doctorate. “My PhD focused migrant pupils and their teachers”, Rob told us, “which was a natural fit with the research community at the University of Bristol.” 

Rob’s journey into academia was not the typical one, in that he left a job he loved to embark on a research career. “I always say to people when they ask if they should do a PhD, put it off for as long as possible,” he said with a smile. “It’s that motivation when you can’t possibly not do a PhD that drives you to devote years of your life to a single question.” 

Rob’s perspective as a teacher-turned-academic put him in a strong position to develop interventions that really work in the field. “When I was a teacher, I worked with migrant and refugee families, primarily teenagers outside of school,” he recalled. “Language teaching was a big part of it but we also worked with charities and other agencies to get the right support in place. This experience of working collaboratively and looking at the wider context of these young people’s lives was very valuable when I came into the university.” 

Rob’s research has led to a series of interventions that teachers can use, with little training, to improve the attainment of children who are new to English. But with nearly two million bilingual children in England alone, he needed a new approach to get that support where it was needed. This gave rise to his spinout company, Heddle. 

The Heddle story so far – Innovative Tools and Resources for Teachers 

Rob recently founded spinout company Heddle to make that expertise available to every teacher. As he explains, “we started with video courses and resource packs for specialist teachers, but we’ve had to expanded quickly to meet demand.” Heddle now offers a core membership for schools as well as specialist consultancy to multi-academy trusts and international schools, and is developing new edtech tools as well. “By the end of the year, our new digital assessment will give teachers precise, personalised recommendations and give an unparalleled level of insight to school leaders”. 

It is urgently needed, as the new company addresses the gap left by the withdrawal of guidance and policy over the past 15 years. Rob emphasises the importance of supporting the teacher-student relationship and ensuring that technology enhances, rather than replaces, this crucial dynamic: “Most edtech works great for students who can engage with it, who have the access and the support networks, but it’ll never reach the kids I want to support, and it can never replace their relationship with a teacher. Heddle exists to make teachers’ lives better, not to replace them”. 

The importance of a University Enterprise Culture 

Rob is one of the 24/25 University Enterprise Fellows which, alongside the ARC Accelerator, has provided him with time, support, and resources to further his enterprise ambitions. Rob is acutely aware of the importance of the supportive enterprise ecosystem in the University and the wider city, and the benefits of being part of a community of academic entrepreneurs. “The University has been absolutely fundamental to what we’re doing now,” Rob emphasised. 

He describes the University Enterprise Fellowship as a cornerstone of his success, providing him with the time, space, and resources to develop his ideas. “The fellowship provides credibility and legitimacy for activities which might otherwise be considered peripheral to an academic career”, he adds. “That has been invaluable.”  

Rob also highlights how the network of Enterprise Fellows has offered a sense of belonging and mutual support. “As an academic entrepreneur, you feel sometimes that you’re a bit of a square peg in a round hole,” Rob said, “but the fellowship gives you a community of people who also don’t fit the traditional academic mould: like-minded individuals who share a passion for tackling real challenges at scale.”  

Looking Ahead 

When asked what advice Rob would give to other academics and researchers who might be interested in exploring enterprise opportunities, he recommends taking advantage of the support available and explore the many events, lectures, masterclasses and online resources that allow them to test their ideas in a low-risk environment. “It’s a safe, well-supported way to take a risk,” Rob said. “Who wouldn’t want to try that?” 

Rob is excited about the future of Heddle and the impact he hopes it will have on the experiences of children and teachers. He acknowledges the challenges of balancing his academic career, entrepreneurial ventures and personal life but he thrives on the fast-paced, ever-changing nature of his work. “I like the slightly frenetic side of it,” Rob admitted with a grin. “I like having a point in the horizon to aim for but not knowing how we’ll get there.” 

Thanks, Rob! If you’d like to hear more from Rob and our other University Enterprise Fellows, sign up to the Festival of Enterprise (Wednesday 4th June). In the meantime, I’ll be back soon with another UEF profile!

Rob Sharples spoke with Michele Barbour and Manda Baynes in April 2025 

www.heddle-eal.com 

Introducing the 2025-26 University Enterprise Fellows!

By Michele Barbour

Following our Early Career Enterprise Fellowships announcement last month, I have more exciting news to share with you all.

We have confirmed our next cohort of University Enterprise Fellows (UEFs)! This fellowship scheme, launched in 2022, enables academics and researchers at the University of Bristol to explore an opportunity in enterprise, entrepreneurship, and research commercialisation. What we mean by ‘enterprise’ is illustrated in this short video from the Festival of Enterprise 2022, and we’ve been delighted by the response to this scheme since it first launched.

Our 2025-26 University Enterprise Fellows

Read on to learn more about this year’s cohort!


Amberly Brigden

Epilepsy, affecting around 630,000 people in the UK, is marked by recurring seizures that pose risks of injury, premature death, and impact on social, work, and mental health. The unpredictability of seizures is a major challenge for those with epilepsy. To address this, our team is developing technology that forecasts seizure likelihood using a smartwatch and smartphone app. This technology collects data on known seizure triggers, such as disturbed sleep, stress, infection, and missed medication, and employs machine learning to analyse this data. The forecasts are presented through the app, along with self-management support. Our research focuses on developing and testing this technology for end-users and optimising the AI algorithm. During the University Enterprise Fellowship, I will explore commercialising this technology through training on spin-outs, licensing, intellectual property, and industry collaborations, as well as conducting market research and seeking partnerships with companies for support.

This seizure forecasting technology could significantly improve the lives of people with epilepsy, and commercialising it is crucial for making it accessible to end-users. I’m excited about the University Enterprise Fellowship’s potential for real-world impact. As commercialisation is new to me, I’m eager to connect with academics interested in this field, learn from those who have successfully commercialised medical devices, and explore the complexities of bringing AI-based medical devices to market.


Richard Cole

I am delighted to have the opportunity, through this Fellowship, to develop the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s pioneering work around games for public service. The Lab, which I co-founded in September 2022 as a University of Bristol, Faculty of Arts Research Group, has since charted new possibilities for collaboration between academia and the gaming industry. This Fellowship is an exciting next step in that journey. It will help me put into action a consultancy model that builds on our work advising academics making research-informed games, our collaborations with the third sector using games to explore complex problems, and the value we bring to games development through player insights. This Fellowship comes at an ideal time as we look to firm up our existing partnerships, as well as forge new ones through pitching at national and international industry conferences. It is deeply rewarding to have the Lab’s work recognized in this way, as well as dedicated time and resources to make the most of the intersections that we have opened up.


Lucy McCarthy

I am delighted to receive this opportunity and support from the university to give me the time needed to work on food system change. It takes time to understand the needs of communities, to build key relationships with those already doing incredible work in food provisioning. This fellowship gives me an opportunity to do my best to co-create change, allowing me to engage meaningfully with farmers who are growing, community and charitable initiatives who are providing access to fresh food, to aim to create a security of demand to build a better, fairer and more environmentally resilient food system.

This fellowship will help support a multi-stakeholder public procurement pilot project aim at creating shorter, more equitable and environmentally resilient supply chains. The aim is to support farmers, retain value from food surplus while reducing food waste and helping local communities and other users to access fresh produce under the umbrella of the Circular Agriculture Hub.


Ash Toye

I’m thrilled to have this University Enterprise Fellowship to explore further how my research can be translated beyond academia. Having some dedicated time to focus on this process is invaluable, allowing me to bridge the gap between research and real-world impact.


Angeliki Papadaki

I’m thrilled to have been awarded a University Enterprise Fellowship to explore the commercialisation potential of Meals on Wheels UK – a state-of-the-art website, featuring a unique database and map of Meals on Wheels services, developed to connect communities with essential Meals on Wheels services across the UK. By engaging with different potential partners, my goal during the fellowship is to explore the market value and commercial potential of this resource, helping to establish Meals on Wheels UK as a sustainable tool that supports communities and improves access to social care services.

Being awarded this fellowship is a significant milestone for me. It’s a stepping stone toward making the vision of accessible and equitable social care a reality. I’m passionate about ensuring that older adults and those with care and support needs have access to the services they need to live independently, and this fellowship offers a unique opportunity to help bring that vision to life.


Levi Wolf

My University Enterprise Fellowship will allow me to start a spin-out company focused on helping people make better geographical planning decisions, like where to locate a new school or how to schedule deliveries along delivery routes. These kinds of optimization problems are solved every day by any firm who schedules shift workers, designs delivery routes, or assigns personnel to tasks. When these problems involve geography, special techniques are needed to make good decisions. I’ll be working directly with existing clients to enhance and complete a new software decision support product, implement new computational techniques to solve geographical planning problems, and develop training courses on how to make better geographical planning decisions.

This fellowship is transformative for me. I have over ten years of experience between three different firms and private consulting in this industry, and after having relocated from the US to the UK, I have been attempting to re-build my business. Without the UEF, I would not have the ability to think strategically and develop a platform for further consulting built on cutting-edge geographical science. This UEF will give me the space, time, and resources to consolidate my successful consulting projects, affecting millions of euros in revenue, and develop a platform to cultivate further success. It will be transformative for my research-driven consulting and the commercialization of my work.


This all sounds fascinating, right? I can’t wait to share more information about this year’s cohort and their journey through the world of enterprise and innovation, but this blog isn’t your only chance to hear from them!

Our annual Festival of Enterprise is on Wednesday 4th June. The Festival is a celebration of both the work our UEF and ECEF schemes enable and an opportunity to learn more about the support available across the University for exploring the commercialisation of research. University of Bristol staff can find out more about the Festival and register to attend via Develop.

I hope to see many of you there!

Announcing the 23/24 University Enterprise Fellows

By Michele Barbour, APVC – Enterprise and Innovation

It is with enormous pleasure that I announce the University Enterprise Fellows for 23/24!

Our four new 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 work and their aspirations below.

The University Enterprise Fellowship scheme provide resource, support and, crucially, 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.

Dr Camilla Morelli

I am absolutely delighted to have been awarded a University Enterprise Fellowship. I will use this unique opportunity to develop an idea for a children’s animated TV series on climate hope, sustainable futures, and the relationships between people and the environment

I hope to gain an in-depth understanding of commercialisation in the animation industry, to expand my networks with creative practitioners in Bristol and internationally, and to seek possible investors to produce the series. I look forward to working with the Enterprise and Commercialisation Team, and feel truly excited to take my research towards new directions. `

Prof Charl FJ Faul

I am delighted to be given this opportunity, through the University Enterprise Fellowship scheme, to explore commercialisation of our antibacterial materials from my laboratories.

I am aiming to use the time and released resources to have a much better understanding of the next steps in this commercialisation journey, whilst engaging with appropriate industry partners.

Dr Frances Giampapa

I am delighted to be awarded the University Enterprise Fellowship in support of the Researchful Practice Toolkit – an online self-study tool to support early years educators to access and evaluate research leading to the development and execution of their own setting focused research.

Being the first fellow in the former Faculty of Social Sciences and Law is a great honour and for this year I am keen to continue my commercialisation journey through networking opportunities to understand the market value of the toolkit and user testing the toolkit with a wider audience within the early years education sector across the UK.

Dr Paul Clarke

I’ve been developing Future Places Toolkit, an Augmented Reality (AR) tool for use in planning consultation, which I think has both civic purpose and commercial potential. The UEF will give me the time to take FPT from a prototype to being a creative consultation service marketable to councils, architects and developers. I’ll be able to test it with communities in different contexts, aiming to engage a wider range of people in more meaningful consultation about the future of their places. Plus, with support from Bristol’s commercialisation team and in partnership with AR/VR Studio Zubr and my theatre company Uninvited Guests, I’ll explore setting up a spin-out company to deliver Future Places Toolkit. Our hope is that this will make consultation more engaging and meaningful for local people, lead to communities buying into plans that are better aligned to their needs, and to smoother planning processes for architects and developers.

Bio-inspired urban adaptations: what insects can teach us about dealing with noise

Professor Marc Holderied
Professor Marc Holderied

Professor Marc Holderied has devoted more than 20 years of his life’s work to understanding how bats have evolved and what their extraordinary abilities can teach us about adapting to our ever-changing environment. Building on this rich foundation as a sensory ecologist and bio-acoustician, he is gathering a team of fellow researchers and commercialisation experts who can help to take his work on bio-inspired sound absorbers to the next level.

This Enterprise Fellowship project has the potential to bring significant benefits by solving the social, health and environmental problems of urban noise pollution. Not only that, it’s one that Professor Holderied believes provides yet more evidence for the attention, respect, care and wonder that nature deserves.

You’re renowned for your work on wildlife acoustics and acoustic camouflage. When did you first become interested in this, and why does it continue to inspire you?  

I always wanted to be a scientist, even before I could pronounce the word! For my ninth birthday, my aunt gave me a nature guidebook that I took everywhere, identifying everything I could find. My passion for bats started when I was around 17 when I went on a winter bat count. At university, there was a professor whose specialism was bioacoustics, in particular bats, and it was just the perfect match – from then on, it was all about sound.

Bats are the most fascinating mammals, for the simple reason that they do two things that no other mammal does: they can do active flight and they can echolocate. As a result, there are so many more constraints on the standard mammalian design that they have had to implement, with amazing special adaptations.

Then there is this whole hidden world available to them because they see with their ears. I find it fascinating that bats have control over what information they receive. That adaptive sensing is an intriguing implementation of physics into biological behaviour, which can be linked to the physics of sound manipulation – there is so much that has gone into this that can inspire bioinspired engineers for a long time.

Of all the investigations you’ve been involved in and the discoveries you’ve made, what do you consider to be the most striking?

What has really kept me busy for the last decade is the evolution of echolocation and examples of convergent evolution. There are organisms out there that want to manipulate how their echoes sound to a bat to suit their own ends – in the same way that a flower manipulates our visual perception by producing colour, there are plants out there that want to be found by bats as they are pollinators. We have studied the echo-acoustic equivalent of colour in these bat-pollinated flowers. Now we mainly work with organisms that don’t want to be found by echolocation – prey insects.

There are nocturnal insects out there that have no ears to detect bat calls – they have to depend completely on passive defences. The ones with ears obviously have an advantage, and theoretically, insects without ears should be easy prey.

Professor Marc Holderied with a ghostly silkmoth
Professor Marc Holderied with a ghostly silkmoth

This led us to look at moths, specifically silk moths, which have no other defences and completely depend on their very furry bodies. We found that when their furry exterior was removed, their echoes became much louder, suggesting that the fluff on their bodies absorbs sound and prevents their detection by bats. But how can they equally reduce echoes from their wings without compromising their energetics or aerodynamics? The body fluff would be too thick. We discovered they have evolved a very thin structure of overlapping scales that dampens the sound they reflect back to bats at a rate that is about ten times better than any sound absorbers humans use, for noise control for instance.

Moths have effectively evolved an acoustic metamaterial with emergent properties. We now understand enough of this mechanism that we can replicate it with the aim to make our world a less noisy place.

Your Enterprise Fellowship is focused on exploring the commercial potential for this bio-inspired noise control solution. What do you hope to achieve?

Noise is the second-biggest environmental health risk for humans, particularly in urban Western environments. In Europe alone we lose over a million years of healthy life through noise every year. The UK government estimates that the negative health losses – including cardiovascular disease and blood pressure – and the societal costs of road noise alone are higher than the cost for all the road traffic accidents (that’s in England alone), causing an annual bill of over £9 billion.

The promise of the moth wing is that we can create a sound absorber that can provide a level of absorption at a fraction of the space requirements, and hopefully produce a product that people can put in their living rooms to improve their living conditions.

That’s our mission – to make the world a quieter and healthier place.

Did you always have a commercial output in mind when you began working on this?

Personally, I’m a curiosity-driven researcher – I want to know ‘how’. My primary motivation isn’t that I want to be an entrepreneur, I’m perfectly happy discovering things. But I also don’t want to be the person who has lots of regrets from not even attempting something new.

I stumbled upon this nugget of gold, and the Enterprise Fellowship came at a perfect time, when I was looking at commercialisation ideas. As a professor with a very dense teaching load, the prospect of having to do a full CEO role on top of my full academic role is impossible. The Enterprise Fellowship scheme is fantastic because it gives buyout to my department and will be run like a sabbatical, which allows me to reduce my teaching load and invest a substantial amount of time into enterprise activities.

Your work in reverse engineering seems a potent example of how invaluable nature is in teaching us how to survive and thrive through adaptation. What other lessons do you think we can learn from this?

I’m a very engineering-inspired biologist, but I’m a naturalist too, so I’m saddened by the loss of insect biodiversity. Everything that is diminished means fewer things for us to study and discover, so this loss of wildlife is an immense problem for ecosystem stability. From an ecological standpoint, we need to have a readiness to defend every organism that lives and shares our habitat with us. But from a very selfish standpoint, if we lose them, we lose all the ingenious inventions that they carry with them, without us even noticing.

There is great awareness about the importance of nature in terms of proteins, genetics, chemical defences and antibiotics. Here, we have found an example of how sensory ecology can help make our lives and our environment much healthier and better in general.

Everything in the ecosystem has a role to play, is a brick in the building, and if you lose one after the other, the whole thing eventually collapses. Moths are beautiful creatures and beneficial in many ways; my hope is that more people will realise that.

Marc Holderied is Professor of Sensory Biology in the School of Biological Sciences. He is also a member of the Cabot Institute for the Environment, and Bristol Neuroscience.