KTN wins Team of the Year at KE Awards

The forum, which brings together people from the mathematical sciences to help address challenges in the UK, won the prize at an online ceremony on Thursday 18th November. The Awards were sponsored by UKRI, the UK’s research and innovation funding body.

Hosting the awards was the PraxisAuril Chair, Iain Thomas (Cambridge Enterprise); CEO, Maxine Ficarra; Founder & Patron, David Secher and UKRI’s Director of Commercialisation, Tony Soteriou.

The awards received over 60 entries following the competition’s launch at PraxisAuril’s annual conference held online in June this year. The judging panel then had the exciting but challenging task of selecting 17 finalists across six categories.

Full list of winners in each of the categories are:

KE Partnership of the Year – Presented by David Secher; PraxisAuril Founder & Patron
• SUNRISE – Swansea University

Academic Engagement of the Year – Presented by Gurmit Kler; University of Birmingham, Director of Business Engagement
• Turing Data Study Groups – The Alun Turing Institute

KE Deal of the Year – Presented by David Bembo; Cardiff University, Director, Research and Innovation Services
• Apollo Therapeutics: Attracting major investment to empower a unique, multi-university portfolio-based biopharmaceuticals venture – UCL Business and on behalf of Imperial College London and University of Cambridge

KE Team of the Year – Presented by Simon Bond; SETsquared Partnership, Innovation Director
• Virtual Forum for Knowledge Exchange in the Mathematical Sciences – KTN / ICMS / INI / Newton Gateway

Place-Based Initiative of the Year – Presented by Fariba Soetan; The National Centre for Universities and Business, Policy Lead, Research and Innovation
• Space Park Leicester – University of Leicester

Pandemic Pivot of the Year – Presented by Alex Chaix, UK Research and Innovation, Head of Commercialisation
• Testing Times at University of Exeter – University of Exeter

Matt Butchers, KTN’s lead on Industrial Mathematics, said: “We are delighted to have received this prize, it really is a wonderful reflection on what can happen when organisations get together to drive coordinated activity. This award has been made possible by a collaboration between KTN, Isaac Newton Institute, Newton Gateway and the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) and enabled by vast amounts of goodwill and solid support from a small number of academics; in particular Professors Rebecca Hoyle, Alan Champneys and Chris Budd.”

Maxine Ficarra closed the ceremony with a thank you to the KE Awards sponsor, UK Research and Innovation, without whom the awards would not be possible. She also offered a thank you to all those who took the time to enter the KE Awards this year, adding: “We plan to continue to shine a spotlight on your success and will be working hard next year to incorporate as many examples of KE excellence as we can from across all entries into our best practice learning communities”. Thank you to the volunteer Judging Panel; David Secher, Gurmit Kler, David Bembo, Simon Bond, Fariba Soetan, Alex Chaix.

Watch the video about V-KEMS’ winning team and their activities below.