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The Adam Weiler Doctoral Impact Award - Previous Winners
The Adam Weiler PGR Impact Award recognises and celebrates outstanding academic impact among postgraduate researchers. Check out all the incredible awardees from previous years.
2024 winners
The 2024 nominations were reviewed by Matthew Dimmock and Margaretta Jolly (Media, Arts and Humanities), Kamran Matin and Anke Schwittay (Global Studies) and Matthias Gobel (Psychology), and the panel chaired by Jeremy Niven, Dean of SRS.
Check out the interviews with our two top prize winners, Wezi Mhango and Nico Edwards, to discover more about their impactful research and how the award supports their development.
Sciences
- Winner: Wezi Mhango (Psychology), whose research, supported by the Commonwealth Commission Scholarship and Wellcome Trust Active Ingredients Award, proposes effective mental health interventions for pregnant adolescents in low-income countries, addressing a gap in support for young women at high risk of common mental health problems.
Focusing on Malawi, her studies resulted in the development of Footpaths for Adolescent Mental Health, or FOR MAMA, an antenatal intervention incorporating psychoeducation, emotion-focused and problem-solving coping strategies. This simple, flexible and low-cost initiative can be delivered by non-specialist health workers or adolescent peers, and offers a real opportunity to address the growing burden of mental health problems and positively impact young people's lives across Sub-Saharan Africa. - Runner-up: Julia Schreiber (Psychology), who uses emerging AI to analyse millions of social media posts across borders, examining allyship and responses to conflict.
- Runner-up: Robert Dickinson (Psychology), whose work combines political and social theory with public health and psychology to research topics such as Covid-19.
Social Sciences
- Winner: Nico Edwards (Global Studies), whose work examines what is driving the pivot to environmental sustainability in military industry and practice, looking at both green militarism and climate justice, and considers both the consequences of this shift in strategy and the potential for resistance.
Taking an innovative approach that combines interviewing, reflective diary writing and participant observation at international arms fairs, and already widely published, Nico is making a truly original contribution to the literature and to civil society work. And as an advisor to Scientists for Global Responsibility, an Associated Researcher with the World Peace Foundation, and an Emerging Expert with the Forum on the Arms Trade, she shows the potential to make a real difference on the world stage. - Runner-up: Catherine Grant (Institute of Development Studies), who is using innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies to research disease epidemics and pandemics more effectively.
Clinical Sciences
No award.
Arts and Humanities
No award.
2023 Winners
The 2023 awards were judged by Miroslav Chlebik (MPS Director of Doctoral Studies), Lucy Robinson (Associate Dean of Doctoral Studies for MAH) and Natalia Slutskaya (Business School Director of Doctoral Studies). Congratulations to our winners and to everyone who was nominated.
Check out the University news story to read more about the incredible research being carried out by our winners.
Arts and Humanities
- Winner: Sam Harrold (Media, Arts and Humanities), uses a highly original synthesis of interdisciplinary methods, fusing scientific and practice-led approaches across disciplines from medicine to creative writing to explore how art and music can support care home residents with memory loss. Her close work with residents, family members and care workers has led to new insights into how we view the changing status of memory at end of life, how we can respond more respectfully to residents’ complex needs, and how serenity can be found within the noisy chaos of the care home environment.
- Runner-up: Ali Ramsey (Media, Arts and Humanities), whose of-the-moment research into media representation of the menopause considers the relationship between feminist grassroots activism and neoliberal concepts that fuel the wellness industry.
Sciences
- Winner: William Roper (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) has been instrumental in developing new computer code to speed up numerical simulations that are used to gain an understanding of how galaxies, stars, gasses, dark matter and black holes form and evolve. This faster code makes it possible to process larger volumes with higher resolution, something which has limited discoveries to this point.
- Runner-up: Hon Wing Boaz Chan (Life Sciences), for designing novel reaction systems in two exceptional projects that will impact the fields of chemistry and sustainable technology.
- Runner-up: Sebastian Oakley (Life Sciences), for exciting research into the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s and a small molecule drug that may prevent progression of the disease.
Social Sciences
- Winner: Phillippa Groome (SPRU, Business School), is exploring how organisations can successfully promote equality, diversity and inclusion, specifically gender equality, within the demanding context of the UK construction sector. She is taking an innovative approach to develop research initiatives collaboratively with industry and policy stakeholders, and advocating for participant-led methodologies within the project delivery field.
- Runner-up: Chloe Anthony (Global Studies), whose research focuses on UK environmental law and predicts the current move towards collaborative landscape-level ‘nature recovery'.
Clinical Sciences
- Winner: Arran Pack (Brighton and Sussex Medical School), our inaugural Clinical Sciences winner, takes an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to blood cancer research, pioneering a way of integrating mutations into computational simulations of healthy cells to predict how cancer cells will respond to their environment in the body and to drugs.
2022 Winners
The 2022 awards were judged by Prof Jeremy Niven (Dean of the Doctoral School), Prof Gerhard Wolf (MAH Associate Dean of Doctoral Studies) and Prof Nuno Ferreira (LPS Director of Doctoral Studies). Congratulations to our winners and to everyone who was nominated.
to read more about the incredible research being carried out by our 2022 winners.
Arts & Humanities
- Winner: Effie Makepeace (Media, Arts and Humanities), who is developing innovative methodologies for co-creation through community theatre, democratising and decolonising research practices, and reframing participants as co-researchers to allow them real interpretive freedom. Working with female co-researchers in Malawi since 2008, Effie has more recently applied the group's methods with homeless and at-risk women in the UK, via Zoom.
- Runner-up: Riziki Millanzi (Media, Arts and Humanities), whose research into ‘Black Girl Magic’ in speculative fiction is making an important contribution to Black female representation and resistance in popular culture.
- Highly commended: Florian Zabransky (Media, Arts and Humanities), whose unique study of male Jewish intimacy in the Holocaust is of huge importance.
Sciences
- Winner: Abigail Dunn (Psychology) is working in a new area of mental illness prevention, focusing on what can be done to reduce the risk of mental health problems passing from generation to generation in families. Abby helped establish the first NHS parent mental health clinic in the UK, set up a network for research in this growing field, and will act as PI on a £30,000 ARC-funded feasibility study of parenting intervention in an NHS inpatient setting.
- Runner-up: Christopher Challen (Engineering and Informatics), who is applying epidemiological techniques to power systems research to improve the resilience of critical electricity infrastructure.
- Highly commended: Eleni Ladikou (Brighton and Sussex Medical School), for developing a new model to investigate therapeutic treatments for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.
Social Sciences
- Winner: Shalini Nair (Law, Politics and Sociology), whose ground-breaking intersectional research focuses on sexual violence survivors from marginalised groups in India whose speak-outs have been excluded from the mainstream #MeToo discourse. A trustee for Survivors’ Network in Sussex, Shalini’s research identifies specific areas for intervention in policy and media reporting, and her journalism is shaping public debate and community practice.
- Runner-up: Kaveri Medappa (Global Studies), whose participant observation of platform-based gig economy workers in India raises urgent questions about digital technology and labour rights.
- Highly commended: Ian Hadden (Psychology), who has developed a tool to enable schools to identify the most effective psychological intervention for reducing outcome gaps between students.
2021
To find out more about the impacts Chantelle and Maria are making read the 2021 Adam Weiler news story.
Winners
- Chantelle Rizan (Brighton and Sussex Medical School) for timely and innovative work measuring the carbon footprint of hospital surgery, particularly the use of disposable PPE, and strategies to mitigate environmental harm.
- Maria Bjarnadottir (Law, Politics and Sociology) for work on human rights law, privacy and online sexual images legislation, including drafting the Sexual Privacy Act 2021 for the Icelandic government.
Runners-up
- Arts and Humanities: Shalini Sengupta (Media, Arts and Humanities) who is taking an intersectional approach to the concept of difficulty in late modern and contemporary poetry.
- Sciences: Jenny Terry (Psychology) who coordinates the Many Anxieties Project on statistics and maths anxiety across 150 labs in 45 countries.
- Social Sciences: Cassandra Wiener (Law, Politics and Sociology) who is researching the law around coercive control from the survivors' perspective.
2020
Jointly awarded to (Mathematical and Physical Sciences), whose pioneering work seeking the existence of dark matter particles affected an entire sub-field in physics; and (Media, Film and Music), whose collaborative approach to the design of a new musical instrument, the halldorophone, is truly innovative.
Three commendations were also awarded to Ali Kassem (LPS), Alison Lacey (Psychology) and Selin Tekin Guven (Psychology).
2019
The inaugural winner was (Law, Politics and Sociology), whose research focuses on the link between law, cities, and the environment.