Our University shortlisted for three Times Higher Education Awards
09 Sep 2021
We’ve been nominated in the categories of Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Research Project of the Year: STEM and The DataPoints Merit Award
Our shortlisted entries in THE’s annual awards are:
Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Combatting energy injustices with the European Energy Poverty Observatory (Professor Stefan Bouzarovski, Dr Harriet Thomson)
Through the Energy Poverty Observatory (EPOV) and working with National Energy Action as a UK partner, Manchester research has radically transformed EU decision makers’ awareness, knowledge and engagement with energy poverty.
Starting from an almost complete absence of research and policy on the issue, EPOV developed a novel set of quantitative indicators, measurement frameworks and conceptual approaches that have now become an essential tool for building a fairer energy transition across Europe.
Research Project of the Year: STEM
The Invention of Molecular Weaving – Making the World’s Finest Fabrics (Dr Leoni Palmer and team)
Scientists from our University have invented a way to weave molecular strands, creating the finest woven fabric ever produced. Each layer of the fabric is just 4 nanometres thick – 10,000x thinner than a human hair.
The fabric has remarkable properties: it is twice as strong as the unwoven strands and behaves like a molecular net. It opens the way for lighter, stronger and more sustainable fabrics (less material is needed), and ‘molecular filters’ that let water and oxygen through but block larger particles such as viruses.
Professor Colette Fagan, Vice-President for Research, said:
“I am delighted to congratulate our two nominees who are shortlisted for the THE Research Projects of the Year: Professor Stefan Bouzarovski for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Dr Leoni Palmer and team for STEM. We nominated them after a competitive internal selection process which we run annually and I wish them success in the final awards stage.”
The DataPoints Merit Award
This award uses data THE collects for its suite of rankings, but it is unrelated to the rankings themselves and does not require submissions. With COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference, taking place in Glasgow this autumn, THE’s data team decided to look at how UK and Irish universities performed on relevant measures in the THE Impact Rankings. The shortlisted institutions for this year’s THE DataPoints Merit Award lead the way on practices such as energy efficiency and sustainability, environmental education and net-zero carbon commitments.
Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice-President for Social Responsibility, commented:
“We’re very pleased to have made the shortlist for the THE DataPoints Merit Award, which is proactively chosen by THE outside of the usual application process. We were honoured to be named the world’s number one university in THE’s Impact Rankings earlier this year, and this nomination is further recognition for the breadth and quality of information we compiled to achieve this status.”
The awards ceremony will take place on the evening of 25 November 2021 in central London. This year the awards, which are widely known as the "Oscars of Higher Education", focus primarily on activity during the 2019-20 academic year, and so include a large number of submissions based on the outstanding initial response of higher education institutions to the unique and wide-ranging challenges brought by the Covid pandemic. Nearly 600 institutions, teams or individuals were nominated in total – breaking all previous entry records.
Further information: