Impact Workshop (20): Understanding and Describing Research Impact

Abstract:

Professor Robin Wallace co-chaired Sub-panel 15 (General Engineering) of the 2014 REF in the UK.  In this workshop he will outline the key areas within which submissions were assessed, discuss the need to clearly identify impact from research and offer some suggestions on how to achieve this.

About the Speaker:

Professor Robin Wallace graduated B.Sc. in 1976 and Ph.D. in 1990 at the University of Edinburgh.  Between these times he worked for Parsons Peebles Motors and Generators project-engineering turnkey power generation systems around the world, mainly in small-hydro.  He holds a personal chair in Renewable Energy Systems and founded The Institute for Energy Systems in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh where he is now Dean International in the College of Science and Engineering.   He has established research collaborations between the Institute and partner universities in many countries including USA, Canada, India, Taiwan, China and Chile.

His research interests include marine energy development and smart-grids, specifically the interaction of distributed renewable energy generation with the autonomous electricity networks.  He has been principal or co-investigator on research projects amounting to over £40m in value, and has supervised 18 PhD students to completion, while publishing over 100 papers. 

He is Executive Director of the EPSRC SuperGen UK Centre for Marine Energy Research, a Director of the FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility and a founding Co-Director of the Scottish Energy Technology Partnership.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and The Institution of Engineering and Technology and is a Chartered Electrical Engineer.

Background on the Workshops:

Impact beyond the academia is a key element of the University's knowledge exchange (KE) strategy. Furthermore, Impact will become an element of assessment in the UGC RAE 2020, carrying a weighting of 15%. The UK experience in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 indicates that it is important to collect evidence of such impacts.

The Knowledge Exchange Office is organising workshops to be conducted by researchers who have hands-on experience in preparing impact statements and impact case studies for the UK REF 2014 or research councils overseas. The workshops will be of interest not only to colleagues who want to maximise the impact of their research, but also to those who coordinate research developments and research assessment in Faculties.