Engineering Professors’ Council 20th Anniversary Awards
Engaging in Engineering
Closing date: 18:00,  3 February, 2014

At the Engineering Professors’ Council Congress 2013, one of the major messages from all the key stakeholders and speakers – senior politicians, funding councils and senior business leaders alike – was the need for engineers in Higher Education to communicate more engagingly with the community beyond universities about what they do.

A number of learned societies and representative organisations such as the Institute of Physics, Royal Society of Chemistry, the Physiological Society etc. offer grant schemes to support public engagement activities and the development of their members in delivering such activities.

As one of the initiatives to celebrate its 20th Anniversary in its current form, The Engineering Professors’ Council is offering its members the opportunity to bid for funding for public engagement projects which:

  • help you to share your expert knowledge through collaboration with partners without a science or engineering background and to reflect on the social impact of your research; or
  • develop creative activities that enable you to communicate in new ways and/or to new audiences; or
  • design and deliver bespoke leadership development activities for those working in engineering in higher education that equips them with communication and public engagement skills; or
  • develop initiatives which help businesses, particularly SMEs, to interact more productively and effectively with universities. We are looking for a new general approach, not a specific topic that might be appropriate for a knowledge transfer project.

The scope is deliberately broad. While it may encompass completely new ideas and activities, it also allows you to build on existing initiatives that have worked well locally or regionally but which might, with some additional funding and/or through collaboration with other Engineering Professors’ Council members, extend the reach and impact to the national level.

So… have you an idea which, perhaps with the support of some colleagues from other parts of the country and with a modest amount of funding could be rolled out nationally? Or perhaps you’ve already developed something that could benefit from such additional input and could be rolled out for use by our wider membership?

At the Engineering Professors’ Council’s Congress in Glasgow in April 2014, 6 shortlisted applicants will have the opportunity to pitch their proposals to Congress delegates who will vote to decide on 2 winning proposals which will be awarded up to £10,000 each.

Full details of the applications process, guidelines, an application form and timetable are available at http://epc.ac.uk/20th-anniversary-awards.