Projects which support early-stage translation of research to real impacts will benefit from new funding awards.
The University of East Anglia (UEA) is receiving two new Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) Awards from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Totalling £946,800, the funding will support impact activity for the next three years within the remits of the Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC).
The Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) supports critical early-stage translation of UK research to real impacts, transforming public services, creating new jobs, attracting private investment and forging new partnerships with business and charities.
These awards will build on the success of UEA’s previous IAAs (ESRC, NERC and BBSRC) in supporting a range of sub-projects, strengthening our existing strategic research partnerships, and developing new external relationships. Many of the impact projects funded through previous IAAs went on to form valuable impact case studies submitted to REF21.
Prof Fiona Lettice, UEA Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, said: “We are really pleased to receive these awards. These will help us to build on our successful impact strategy and accelerate even more of the good innovation and impact work that we do, enabling our research to make a difference across a range of sectors.
“These awards will enable more researchers to explore the potential that their research has to address key challenges and provide exciting new solutions in the broad areas of creativity, culture and health.”
The new AHRC IAA investment will focus on three strategic themes addressing contemporary challenges through cross- or multi-disciplinary research: communicating across cultures and communities; developing creative industries and digital cultures; and strengthening heritage cultures and museum and gallery futures.
The MRC IAA plan has a broader approach to translational and commercialisation projects arising from research across the MRC remit of global health, infections and immunity, molecular and cellular medicine, neuroscience and mental health, population and systems medicine.
It is expected that internal funding calls will be launched throughout summer 2022 for projects to start later in the year.
Further information can be obtained from either Claire Jowitt (AHRC) (c.jowitt@uea.ac.uk) or Colin Cooper (MRC) (colin.cooper@uea.ac.uk) as IAA leads or from the Impact Team in RIN (impact@uea.ac.uk).
As well as providing much needed funding for specific impact projects, both the AHRC and MRC IAAs will contribute to training, events, mentoring, and the support of impact and innovation specialists for the UEA research community.
