Environment submissions database

While the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted our University, we have worked hard to mitigate its effect and continue to support and facilitate research. The March 2020 UK lockdown left labs, libraries, studios and offices closed for several months. However, we quickly moved to home working and then introduced measures to reopen our campus safely, including enhanced cleaning, sanitiser and temperature stations and social distancing guidance. We also established a comprehensive testing regime. We were the first university to host a local NHS testing site and one of the first universities to start our own asymptomatic testing programme. We have performed over 22,000 tests of staff and students, between September 2020 and February 2021, proactively helping to minimise the spread of the virus on campus and informing SAGE advice to government. We have shared our expertise with local schools and businesses to help them establish their own testing regimes, and colleagues in our School of Health and Care Professions are now working in partnership with Health Education England to train hundreds of vaccination volunteers. Colleagues have had less time for research as the move to online delivery saw teaching workloads increase, along with pastoral student care and childcare responsibilities. To help, we brought in additional PTHP support, provided payments to cover additional costs of home working and invested in extra online mental health services. We bolstered our policy on flexible working by introducing a laptop-loan scheme for children of staff, and started our own “school buddy club” to assist with home-schooling. Our Graduate School continues to support postgraduate research students (PGRs), securing £305k of additional funding to extend bursaries for our university-funded PGRs, in line with the UKRI additional bursary funding. We also provide no-cost fee extensions for returning PGRs, as well as dedicated mental health support and hardship funds. Research remains a challenge throughout the pandemic, but our Thematic Areas have quickly risen to that challenge developing an online, university-wide “Research Futures” webinar series (40 so far), adapting to the new working methods and maintaining our sense of community. RIS also continues to provide online help with grant-writing and bidding, seeing a 30% increase in bid submissions during the pandemic - particularly for the dedicated UKRI COVID fund (£788k of such funding awarded already). We are proud of how our research and innovation has helped the national response to the pandemic. We invested £623k into our work on RNA-sequencing, which, in partnership with Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust and others through the COG-UK Consortium, provides a vital understanding of the mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We responded early to the need for more PPE, with colleagues in our School of Creative Technologies designing and mass-producing over 10,000 face-shields for local NHS, police, fire service and social care providers in April 2020. The design was made open-source and free for non-commercial use, and has been downloaded more than a thousand times globally. This project was a finalist at the 2020 National Knowledge Exchange Awards.