The awards ceremony for the second annual Prizes for Public Engagement and Enterprise was held on Thursday 15 May, to celebrate the excellent breadth of activity at Queen Mary. The prizes were presented to the winners by Professor Mike Curtis, Director of the Centre for Public Engagement (CPE) and Professor Peter McOwan, Vice-Principal for Public Engagement and Student Enterprise.
Professor Peter McOwan said:
Queen Mary has a strong tradition of engaging with those outside of the university environment, both with businesses and the general public. These awards represent the opportunity to reward and recognise the excellent work of our staff and students in this area. We were very impressed by the quality of the applications we received this year – the panel had a difficult time choosing the eventual winners. It is fantastic to find out about new activity and projects as part of the judging process.
The winner of the Bruce Dickinson Award for best Queen Mary Enterprise Activity was Professor Jonathan Pitts for Actual Experience: a company using QMUL research to analyse the digital world as humans experience it, enabling businesses to tune and adapt their digital supply-chains to perform properly for staff and customers.
Highly commended were Dr Josh Reiss for MixGenius, a company working on commercialising automatic music production research and Dr Andrew McPherson for TouchKeys, a system to add touch sensitivity to the surface of any piano-style keyboard.