Environment submissions database

Brunel University London supported the national response to Covid-19 in a variety of ways, including staff and students volunteering in the NHS and other front-line services, fundraising, sourcing materials and manufacturing a range of PPE, providing access to our campus for NHS keyworkers, loaning laboratory equipment to Covid-19 testing centres, providing data analysis and decision making support to hospitals, local authorities and government, and developing a new on-line testing programme for critical care staff. Our researchers produced resources for schools to adjust to life after lockdown, built an AI model to identify the signs of covid-19 in lung x-rays, developed a point of care test kit for rapid diagnosis of Covid-19 and provided advice on the airborne spread of Covid-19 in supermarkets and other public settings. We have actively provided support to local business during the pandemic including a Webinar series focussed on resilience and recovery, and a Business Resilience Fund to support innovation activity with individual SMEs. Our research activity was impacted by the need to prioritise the digitisation of our teaching curricula, as well as by the closure of the campus, the need for the remote working and the impact of Covid-19 on staff and PGRs as individuals. Since the start of the pandemic our Research Institutes have convened multi-disciplinary groups of staff to build research projects to address Covid-19 challenges, often those outlined in the UKRI Covid-19 priority areas. We have worked on over 7 Covid-19 focussed research projects supported by £600k of grants from UKRI. Brunel has been at the forefront of mobilising universities in West London to come together to generate growth through innovation and entrepreneurship and to promote a research-led recovery. We were a key partner in the production of the West London Alliance’s Build and Recover Plan for West London. Covid-19 has slowed the progress of the building work for the Future Metallurgy Centre, funded by a Research England UKRPIF award. The difficulty of international travel has delayed expenditure on a variety of GCRF and Newton Fund grants as well as on our Research England International Investment Initiative award “UK and Finland: Research Collaboration for Prosperity and Health” to collaborate with the Tampere University. Expenditure on a number of Innovate UK funded research programmes has slowed because the industrial partners furloughed staff and they were therefore unable to complete their work-packages. We had 7 impact case studies where either the impact activities or our ability to collect key corroborating evidence was disrupted. We have provided an affected case study statement for each of these case studies through the submission system.