The Light of Understanding is an institution-wide award to recognise individuals and groups who are carrying out amazing public engagement with research work. The name of the award was inspired by Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel Laureate and Alumnus of University of Birmingham, who was also a pioneer of research communication and storytelling.
The Light of Understanding Award not only rewards brilliant work, but aims to catalyse more activity and act as a beacon to be passed to other researchers. Therefore, winners of the Light of Understanding are rewarded with a grant of £2,000 to spend on further public engagement activity that helps spread their good practice to other researchers.
Nominations for the award in 2023 are now open. Anyone can nominate, self-nominations are strongly encouraged and nominations for groups are welcome. The deadline for nominations is Friday 8th September 2023 and completed forms should be emailed in a PDF format to engage@contacts.bham.ac.uk.
Please follow this link to complete the 2023 nomination form.
2019 Winners
The award was judged by an expert panel consisting of Public Engagement Committee Chairs, Prof Alice Roberts and Prof Ian Grosvenor, Prof Tim Softley, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Helen Featherstone who is a leading national public engagement expert. The panel were so impressed with the number and quality of applications to the scheme, that they decided to award a special commendation to PhD student Liam Crowley (Biosciences) for his portfolio of work promoting the work of our forestry institute, BiFOR, and in particular his work on the successful insect podcast, Entocast. Liam received £250 to spend on further PER activity.
Prof Heather Flowe, Dr Melissa Colloff and PhD student Danielle Hett
The 2019 Light of Understanding was awarded to the Applied Memory lab who’ve developed a brilliant project call ‘Are You a Good Eyewitness’. The project includes a tourable exhibition which has been used to engage with over 2,000 children at the Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum and a website featuring lots of great images and videos that really bring their research to life.
The judges were particularly impressed by their attitude towards involving researchers at different career stages including a team of 24 undergraduates. They also designed their activity so that they can use the data collected directly in their research and the experience has also affected aspects of how they plan to carry out future research. The activity involved a large number of researchers and students, but was led by Prof Heather Flowe, Dr Melissa Colloff and PhD student Danielle Hett.
2021 Winners
Professor Amaury Triaud
Our first winner was part of a team who made a remarkable discovery of a nearby exoplanetary system, composed of seven Earth-size rocky planets. This system, called TRAPPIST-1, is the first that will enable humanity to start the search or evidence of life beyond the Solar system.
Our winner guessed that the public interest would be big, so started preparing and thought it would be a good time to try new approaches to engagement.
- With a graphic designer they produced seven digital collages, exploring themes about those seven planets.
- They created a series of infographics as way to give information without requiring a graph.
- The created a script targeting 11-15 year olds) which was adapted into a short graphic novel.
These successful graphic products were then used by our winner to develop a series of workshops to engage diverse audiences across the midlands including home educator families and those within remote rural areas of the UK who are often not engaging with university research.
Their graphic products have also inspired other artists and creatives including the creation of a young adult novel, a rock song, a graphical and musical piece of art, and more recently the work of two composers who are preparing an opera on the theme of TRAPPIST-1.
Dr Zoe Schnepp
In 2017 Dr Zoe Schnepp decided to create an online accessible resource to inspire school pupils in chemistry. Through activities that link the UK national curriculum (from pre-school to A-Level) the website they created, ChemBam opened up world-leading University of Birmingham research to schools across the world. Since its launch the website has received 150,000 visits including teacher and students from the US, India, Australia and Canada.
Zoe has led the team developing content for the website with a commitment to ensuring that their resources benefit the most disadvantaged pupils in the UK. To achieve this, they sourced funding and launched a spin off project ChemBOX. Each ChemBOX contained the equipment and consumables needed to run 6 ChemBAM activities with classes of 32 and science teachers and technicians from the 10 schools involved were given a training session and the response from teachers was overwhelmingly positive.
Since the launch of Chembox the project has been expanded to additional parts of the UK and in recently our winner gained funding to complete– a 1-year study of the impact of regular research-linked science activities with 120 Y3 pupils in Tamworth.
Our winner has also developed a new project ChemBAM VI which is a series of chemistry experiments for pupils with vision impairment aiming to make chemistry accessible for all pupils and to enable teachers to include pupils with VI in chemistry lessons.
As well as the positive impact on the young people engaging with the project the University Students and staff that our winner has trained, mentored and supported have gone on to secure funding for their own outreach projects.
In 2020 The ChemBAM team were presented with the prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry Inspiration and Industry Award.
2022 Winners
Prof Ruth Gilligan:
As well as working as EDACS Impact Lead in the run up and through a very successful REF submission, Ruth submitted her own engagement and impact work as part of an ICS. She continues to work proactively in public engagement activities around narrative and empathy, focused especially through her work with the Narrative 4 organisation (N4), a global empathy-building charity founded by author Colum McCann, which has run over 100,000 story exchanges to date.
N4 was already running ‘story exchanges’ across the US and overseas (e.g., South Africa, Israel, Palestine). This is a methodology devised in the US, which culminates in retelling a stranger’s life story framed in the first person as if it were your own. Despite its US success, story exchange had yet to enjoy any presence in the UK; by organising story exchanges in Birmingham and generating media interest (e.g., an Irish Times article in 2016, a 6-page Guardian spread 2018, a Hay Festival talk 2019, a feature-length documentary which premiered in 2019), Ruth increased N4’s profile on this side of the Atlantic. As N4’s Director of Global Programs testified, ‘Ruth has been directly responsible for N4’s expansion into the UK and Ireland’. This increased profile led to new funding (e.g., from Microsoft Ireland) and new partnerships (e.g., Tony Blair Faith Foundation and NLT); meanwhile Ruth was invited to present her work as an example of best practice to over 500 educators at N4’s global summits (2018, 2019) and to feature in N4’s 2020 fundraising event hosted by Sting (2,395 online views to date).
Ruth’s engagement and impact work has enhanced confidence and developed empathy in diverse learners and influenced the work of local, national and international organisations. This has led to changes to Organisational practice, improved wellbeing (participants) and change of discourse/understanding (again, participants).
Dr Adam Ledger :
In conjunction with the Commonwealth Games, and building on his extensive research into immersive theatre practice (which formed the basis of a REF2021 4* Impact Case Study), in July 2022 Ledger curated and ran the theatre festival ChocFest.
By collaborating with local communities and groups living and working in the vicinity of the Cadbury factory, as well as with cocoa-growing communities and international artists from Ghana, ChocFest combined performance, visual and audio installations and workshops. The goal was to expose the darker side of chocolate production and challenge received notions of the industry and Birmingham’s relationship therewith.
The festival was funded by a Creative City Grant (the only one awarded to a UoB staff member) as well as via QR funding (£49k) and the Feeney Charitable Trust (£3k). All of this built on a smaller seed project from November 21 – January 22, which was funded by Birmingham City Council (£20k).
As a piece of practice-as-research, Ledger’s project sought to interrogate ideas around the Commonwealth, legacy of place(s) and identity, as well as to test the efficacy of certain methods of practice and co-creation.
As mentioned, this practice-as-research project has further informed the way Ledger approaches his theatre work and the immersive strategies he uses to connect the public with wider political issues. In the past, his work had focused on topics to do with climate change, whereas ChocFest marked a new area of interrogation and engagement. It was also the most place-specific of his works to date, thus adding a new consideration to his immersive work.