Neil Morris, CEO, shares his thoughts on the maturing of our scientific projects and on our researcher community, its strengths and what it means to be a part of it.
Our annual report published just before Christmas outlines the significant achievements of our community in the first years of the Faraday Institution’s development, transformation and growth. We’d encourage you to share it so others can learn about our ground-breaking research, our capability building initiatives and how we are helping the transition to a fully electric UK.
Over the past year, our PhD programme has welcomed its second cohort, with a third about to be recruited. We launched an entrepreneurship programme, which today funds four energy-storage start-ups. Last year the community delivered great science, as evidenced by significant numbers of high quality papers being published – not least SOLBAT’s Nature Materials paper and ReLiB’s review paper published in Nature on EV battery recycling.
Our programmes are building momentum, and we are now looking to the projects to deliver impactful results – outputs that have the potential to be commercialised for the benefit of UK industry. We are pleased that such opportunities are beginning to be realised, and advancements in these areas will influence the rescoping of the four initial research areas for years 4 and 5, as communicated to researchers at the end of January. The central Faraday Institution team, our research teams and university technology transfer offices are in the process of protecting a number of pieces of intellectual property. Though it is too early to openly discuss them we hope to be able to do so soon. These opportunities include: a novel characterisation technique development and a new material processing technology development from the degradation project; and entirely new materials discovery from within SOLBAT. Impactful invention with commercial application is a key output from the research programme. Being able to cite such successes will be highly valuable when talking to stakeholders, especially our funders.
Will your project team contribute to this growing list of significant, commercialiseable discoveries made within our community this year?
A reminder that if anyone, at any career level, thinks that they may have made a breakthrough or discovery that could have commercial value they should talk to their supervisor, principal investigator, technology transfer office and Ian Ellerington without delay. If you’re in any doubt on its commercial value, talk to Ian. And let’s make 2020 the year when our community routinely takes timely and explicit decisions on when to publish or protect research.
Those of you at the November 2019 conference may well have felt, as I do, that our community has hit its stride. I would urge all our researchers to remain mindful of what it means to be a member of our community. We want this to be a community built on collaboration, respect for others, recognising achievement, proactively offering a helping hand to colleagues (at group, university and wider Faraday Institution level), one that strives for equality and inclusion, and one that is recognised internationally for its achievements. Our ability to globally compete is strengthened by the collaborative power of our research community – to date around 400 researchers. This is an important basis on which the UK will fulfil its potential as a global leader for battery development and innovation.
Another goal for 2020 is to strengthen the Faraday Institution’s links with industry. Three industry sprint projects are up and running and this model is highly regarded within government, funding bodies and our board. We will be looking to increase the number of projects in this portfolio during the year. The role of our project’s nascent industry panels will be extended and intensified in 2020. We also recently launched our industry fellowships as a funding mechanism to allow researchers from academia to spend time in industry or vice versa.
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