{"id":308,"date":"2022-11-21T11:39:48","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T11:39:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ris\/?p=308"},"modified":"2025-05-19T10:56:34","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T09:56:34","slug":"research-and-innovation-prize-winners-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/ris\/2022\/11\/21\/research-and-innovation-prize-winners-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"2022 Research and Innovation Prizes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Through these awards, the University seeks to recognise and to showcase the research and innovation achievements of our staff, and to celebrate their hard work and their successes\u2019\u00a0<\/em><\/h2>\n

Professor Shane Weller, Pro VC Research and Innovation, Research and Innovation Awards Event, Summer 2022.<\/p>\n

We are\u00a0delighted to\u00a0formally\u00a0announce the winners of the 2022\u00a0Research and Innovation\u00a0Prizes<\/strong>.\u202f<\/span>We\u00a0would like to thank all the\u00a0nominees\u00a0and\u00a0recognise the tremendous work being carried out\u00a0across the University.\u00a0A huge\u00a0congratulations<\/span>\u00a0to all our winners\u00a0and those highly commended.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The University\u2019s Research and Innovation Prizes 2022 are designed to celebrate the achievements of academic, professional services and technician staff across a range of areas.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The prizes in particular highlight activities that have had a transformative effect, creating new knowledge,\u00a0benefiting\u00a0a particular community, and supporting others in the research and innovation ecosystem.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Starting Research Prize, Winner: Dr Nikhil Sengupta<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>Nikhil\u2019s research broadly investigates people\u2019s attitudes towards the society in which they live, how these attitudes develop and change over time, and how they motivate social and political behaviour. This includes people\u2019s thoughts and feelings about their own circumstances, their fellow citizens, leaders, institutions, and government. Nikhil has examined these themes using large-scale longitudinal surveys across several countries. Most recently, Nikhil won an ERC Starting Grant to conduct largescale longitudinal research on social and political attitudes across the UK, over a five-year period.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Starting Research Prize, Highly commended: Dr Wenjing Zhang<\/a><\/h1>\n

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Wenjing is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Services Studies. Her research expertise and interests focus on social care, ageing and international and comparative social policy. She has worked on a diverse range of policy- and practice-oriented research projects. For example, Wenjing is leading an NIHR School for Social Care Research (SSCR) funded coproduction project on Better Care Moves for Older People. Her developing research profile demonstrates outstanding academic skills and a clear commitment to collaborative working with stakeholders including social care practitioners, service users and carers. For example, Wenjing is also a Researcher in Residence for Kent Research Partnership; in this role, she supports practitioners at Kent County Council and the wider social care workforce to build research capacity and novel practitioner-led social care research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Consolidator Research Prize, Winner: Dr Lois Lee<\/a><\/h1>\n

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Lois\u2019 research interests centre on the nature of the existential in modernity, with an empirical focus on non-theist and nonreligious populations. Her research explores egalitarian conceptual approaches to religion (such as \u2018worldview\u2019, or her own concept of \u2018existential culture\u2019); secularisation and other theories of religious change; and socio-political approaches to religion and existential culture, including political secularism and pluralism. She has helped establish social scientific research into the nature and significance of nonreligious identity, worldview and experience around the world, leading landmark research programmes, including Understanding Unbelief (2017-2021), which investigated atheism, agnosticism and other forms of so-called unbelief around the world, and Explaining Atheism (2022-2024), which revisits the question of why individuals and societies become atheist, in light of UU and other work that is transforming what we think atheism is. She engages normatively as well as scientifically with questions around the role of religious and nonreligious existential culture in public life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Consolidator Research Prize, Highly commended: Professor Aleksandra Cichocka<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"\"Aleksandra works primarily in the area of political psychology. She investigates how the ways individuals feel about themselves and the social groups they belong to affect their political attitudes and behaviours.<\/p>\n

In one line of work, she investigates links between narcissism and various political attitudes, including ideology, conspiracy beliefs and support for democracy. She is also interested in the dynamics of self-worth. In another line of research, she focuses on collective narcissism\u2014a defensive group identification, characterized by an emotional investment in an unrealistically positive image of the in-group. Aleksandra examines political and social consequences of collective narcissism, as well as factors that contribute to strengthening this form of in-group identification.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Consolidator Research Prize, Highly commended: Dr Jennifer Leigh<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n

\"\"Jennifer\u2019s research interests centre around embodied experience, such as how innovative and creative research methods can add depth, richness, honesty, and emotion, and facilitate reflection into lived experiences in different contexts. She is interested in the boundaries between research, therapy, art and science. She explores intersectional experiences of marginalisation due to factors such as gender and ableism, and leads research for the International Women in Supramolecular Chemistry network.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Advanced Research Prize, Winner: Professor Karen Douglas<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n

\"\"Karen studies the psychology of conspiracy theories. Her research examines why conspiracy theories appeal to so many people, and the consequences of conspiracy theories for individuals, groups, and societies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Advanced Research Prize, Winner: Professor Ann-Marie Towers<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n

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Ann-Marie is a Professor of Social Care. Her work focuses on improving the quality and outcomes of adult social care and the translation of research into evidence-based practice. She leads the Kent Research Partnership, one of six adult social care research capacity building partnerships in England and a programme of work to develop and support the use of the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT<\/a>). ASCOT is used internationally to measure the impact of social care on quality of life. Ann-Marie is particularly interested in how we might employ qualitative methods, such as observations, supported interviewing techniques and forms of adapted communication, to try and ascertain the views and experiences of care home residents and people with cognitive and communication difficulties.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Advanced Research Prize, Highly commended: Professor Heejung Chung<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n

\"\"Professor Chung\u2019s interest lies in examining different labour market patterns and outcomes across European welfare states. Most recently, she has been exploring the impact of flexible working and home\/hybrid working on worker\u2019s well-being, work-life balance and gender equality both at home and in the labour market. Her most recently published book is \u2018The Flexibility Paradox: why flexible working leads to (self-)exploitation\u2019 published by Policy Press (2022).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Advanced Research Prize, Highly commended: Professor Mark Wass<\/a> and<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Professor Martin Michaelis<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n

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The research of Professor Michaelis is focused on the identification and investigation of drugs and their mechanisms of action. The primary interest lies on acquired drug resistance in cancer. In collaboration with Professor Jindrich Cinatl (Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main), he manages and develops the Resistant Cancer Cell Line (RCCL) Collection, a unique collection of >1,300 cancer cell lines with acquired resistance to anti-cancer drugs. In addition, Professor Michaelis is interested in virulence mechanisms and therapeutic targets in viruses and in meta-research that investigates research practices in the life sciences.<\/p>\n

Mark\u2019s research focusses in two main areas. The first is the development of novel computational methods for the analysis of large scale biological data, particularly methods for the prediction of protein structure, function and interactions. The second area is the application of such methods to address important biological problems. These cover the association of genetic variation with human disease, investigating mechanisms and biomarkers of acquired resistance to anti-cancer drugs and also identifying determinants of pathogenicity in viruses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Early Career Researcher involved in Knowledge Exchange Prize Winner: Dr Michael Wilde<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"\"Michael works mainly in epistemology and the philosophy of science. His recent research develops a theory of evidence to help understand how causal claims are established in medicine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Knowledge Exchange Collaboration Prize<\/h1>\n

This awards recognises an academic\u2019s impactful collaboration with a business. Nominees will need to demonstrate the impact the collaboration has had on themselves as well as the businesses involved in the collaboration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Knowledge Exchange Collaboration Prize Winner: Dr Anna Brown<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"\"Dr Anna Brown is a psychometrician with an established reputation and extensive industry experience, currently teaching Psychological Methods and Statistics at the School of Psychology. Previously, she taught short courses in Applied Psychometrics at the University of Cambridge. Her experiences outside of academia included research and test development at the Research Division of the UK largest occupational test publisher SHL Group, where she held senior and principal psychometrician positions for many years.<\/p>\n

Anna completed a 5-year Master\u2019s programme in Mathematics with distinction and a Ph.D. in Psychology with distinction. Her Ph.D. research led to the development of the Thurstonian Item Response Theory (TIRT) model described as a breakthrough in scoring of \u2018ipsative\u2019 (relative-to-self) questionnaires, and received the prestigious \u201cBest Dissertation\u201d award from the Psychometric Society for 2010. Further advances in this methodology made by Dr Brown enabled the development of novel personality assessment tools that are resistant to response biases and \u2018faking good\u2019 by candidates. Multiple world-leading test publishers and organisations, including SHL and Korn Ferry, incorporated this methodology into over five million individual psychological assessments that have taken place in 37 different languages, across 40 different countries since August 2013.<\/p>\n

Currently, Anna\u2019s research focuses on psychological measurement and psychometric testing, particularly issues in test validity and test fairness. She specialises in modelling of complex survey and longitudinal data, measurement invariance, multidimensional item response theory, test optimisation, and modelling response processes contributing to response biases and impression management. She has extensive experience in designing, developing and implementing psychometric testing solutions in the workplace, health settings and education, and provides psychometric advice to several organisations in the private and public sectors internationally.<\/p>\n

Anna has published widely, including 45 peer-reviewed journal articles, 5 book chapters and 4 psychometric tests. Her publications have been cited over 2,800 times. She served as an elected member on the Council of the International Test Commission (ITC) for 8 years, chairing its Research and Guidelines Committee. In this role, Anna facilitated publication and translation of ITC guidelines aiming to improve testing standards internationally. She also serves as a member of the editorial Board of the International Journal of Testing, and as an ad-hoc reviewer for countless journals in the field of psychological testing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Technician of the Year Prize<\/h1>\n

Technician staff must have excelled in their role and be able to demonstrate, through their activities and achievements, how they have positively impacted, transformed and supported research and innovation culture at the university.<\/p>\n

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Technician of the Year Prize Winner: Frank Gasking<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"\"Frank is a Senior Technical Specialist (Developer) within the HSS Technical Team, and enjoys working within a great team supporting both staff and students with the design and development of experiments, applications and games for lab and online based studies. As well as development, Frank also helps to teach and train staff and students on how to program and build experiments using the open source PsychoPy, attempting to share knowledge and empower where possible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Professional Services Support of the Year Prize<\/h1>\n

Professional services staff must have excelled in their role and be able to demonstrate, through their activities and achievements, how they have positively impacted, transformed and supported research and innovation culture at the university.<\/p>\n

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Professional Services Support of the Year Prize Winner: Jacqueline Aldridge<\/a><\/h1>\n

Jacqueline has worked within higher education since 2004 in a range of research support roles, helping academic colleagues with their research and innovation funding bids as well as with Research Excellence Framework submissions and developing departmental processes that support research. She currently works as a consultant in this area with a variety of clients, including the University of Kent. she is also lead author of \u2018The Research Funding Toolkit\u2019 (Sage 2012), a best-selling title on grant-writing and which she is also in the process of preparing a second edition of.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Professional Services Support of the Year Prize Highly commended: Chris Barton<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"ChrisAs Grants & Contracts Officer, Chris support schools with the accurate costing and submission of applications for external research funding, negotiating and setting up of grant agreements and contracts, and providing ongoing support and advice through the lifetime of research projects.<\/p>\n

Chris graduated from the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at Kent in 2006, before completing his MSc and PhD in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College, London. In between, Chris worked in various funding and support roles in local government and further education institutions. He continues to contribute to peer-reviewed academic research in various fields, conducting quantitative data analysis on a freelance basis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

2022 Kent Research and Innovation Community Prize<\/h1>\n

The staff member must have excelled in their role and be able to demonstrate, through their activities and achievements, how they have positively impacted, transformed and promoted the research and innovation community at the University, and where possible outside of academia.<\/p>\n

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2022 Kent Research and Innovation Community Prize Two Winners: Dr Lindsey Cameron<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Dr Hannah Swift<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"\"<\/strong>Lindsey\u00a0is interested in how children become \u2018social beings\u2019: how do children develop the social knowledge and skills that we have as adults take for granted? Specifically, she is interested in how inter-group processes develop throughout childhood. Her research interests are as follows:<\/p>\n