Environment submissions database

Disruption to our research environment was felt immediately. The Director of Research was hospitalised with COVID in early April 2020, while key Research & Innovation Services staff including the Deputy Director of Research and School research leaders had to balance caring responsibilities, home schooling and work duties, often without appropriate space or equipment. Planning processes required by the change in operating circumstances caused major disruption, with research managers simultaneously fact-finding for themselves, the University and a range of external stakeholders including Universities UK, Universities Wales and the Higher Education Funding Council, Wales, all of which were engaged in urgent consultation with the sector. Some research-active staff lost parents to COVID. Others caught it themselves while being simultaneously engaged in wholesale curricula review and a rapid shift to online delivery. Unlike research-intensive universities, our teaching year extends into the summer term. Together with a limited return to campus in September, this meant researchers were forced to spend almost all of the time between March and September preparing for online delivery rather than engaging in research. Many research staff and students with clinical expertise returned to front line NHS duties, while laboratory closures and widespread furloughing in industry partner companies caused significant disruption for a wide range of research programmes. Further disruption was caused by researchers having to develop contingency plans for stalled research and in supporting PGR students through the widespread and significant demands the pandemic placed on them. The scale and reach of two impact case studies was damaged. The impacts of a device called HUG on people with dementia were negatively impacted. A spinout company had launched in early March 2020 in partnership with Alzheimer’s UK, Sunrise Senior Living and the NHS. COVID’s effects on the NHS and care sector immediately impacted access to trial participants and the Alzheimer’s UK grant funding was delayed, so that both the trial data and expected sales (and therefore reach) from the new spin-out were significantly degraded. Impact work in our Education UoA was also affected: Had the WG’s new ‘Curriculum for Wales’ project maintained its pre-COVID trajectory, it would have impacted all schools in South East Wales. Initial trajectory in bold with our actual claim in brackets are: 12,427 (1,045) teachers in 614 (33) schools hosting a combined total of 222,322 (14,900) pupils. From March, PGRs no longer had physical access to labs, training, or supervisors. Those at the laboratory testing stage and with no feasible alternative experienced lengthy delays, while those at earlier stages worked intensively with supervisory teams to re-design their programmes of study. Significant effort was diverted to ensuring PGR wellbeing, while the launch a new ‘Doctoral Academy’ web portal to enhance communication and facilitate online training was brought forward by three months to ensure that our PGRs were able to carry on with their studies effectively.