This year's Sussex Impact Days took place over two days, Tuesday 18 June and Wendesday 19 June, in the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA).

Three themes ran through each day which aimed to showcase the impact of Sussex research and answer questions related to building impact. On Tuesday 18 June, sessions were grouped around ‘Introduction to impact’, ‘Let’s talk about impact’, and ‘Impact success at Sussex’, where attendees had introductions or refreshers to impact and its place in UK higher education, a chance to meet impact support colleagues from across Sussex to help explain and identify potential research impact, and learn more about the different ways that impact can be successful. On Wednesday 19 June, sessions were grouped around ‘Avenues to impact’, ‘Impact tools and how to use them’, and ‘Impact and the REF’, where attendees learned more about different avenues to impact and how to research and start new relationships with external audiences, what tools are available to help keep track of impact, and what impact looks like in the next REF.

All Sussex staff and students who are involved in leading, conducting or supporting research at any level and in any discipline were welcome to attend.

Please view the full programme for the two days below. You can view presentations from the sessions here: Sussex Impact Days 2024 - Presentation slides [PDF 5.30MB]

This event was part of the Summer of Research 2024, a festival celebrating fantastic research from the University of Sussex and its positive impact.

Tuesday 18 June programme

09.15-11.00: Welcome and opening panel: Impact from the institutional to the individual

09.15-10.00: Café

There will be coffee and morning refreshments available alongside an exhibition of posters from the Sussex Participatory Research Network, demonstrations from the schools of Engineering & Informatics and Life Sciences and stalls featuring various teams from across Sussex who support research impact (Research Information, Quality and Impact (RIQI), Research Development, Research Initiatives, Innovation and Business Partnerships (IBP)). Do join us for a morning coffee and to meet and learn about some of the teams who can help you with your research impact.

10.00-11.00: Auditorium

The panel will explore how individual researchers can work within the University’s strategic goals for impact while pursuing their own distinctive ambitions to make real-world change in the areas they care most about. Join the Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and some leading Sussex researchers to explore these issues and share your own questions.

11.00-12.00: What is impact, why does it matter, and how to incorporate it into your funding bids

Auditorium

In this session, the Research Quality and Impact (RQI) and Research Development teams will introduce research impact, why it matters in UK Higher Education, and some of the ways you can incorporate it into your funding bids. This session will act as an introduction (or refresher) to research impact, how it might be relevant for you and your research, and what funders are looking for with reference to impact.

12.00-14.00: Let’s talk about impact: meet your impact support teams from across Sussex

Café

In this interactive session you will get a chance to meet teams from across Sussex who support impact. Representatives from RIQI, Research Development, Research Initiatives, IBP and Policy@Sussex will be on hand to answer questions and highlight the impact support available at Sussex. Through interactive activities, this session will help you:

• Explain your research and identify its potential impact
• Identify what support you need to help develop your impact
• Consider how you can transition from aspiring to make impact to actually making it

Lunch will be included in this session where you will have additional opportunities to network with representatives from the above mentioned teams and colleagues from across Sussex.

14.00-15.00: Does research still matter in public policy? An (honest) external perspective

Gardner Tower

Speaker: Alistair Dillion, Head of the Climate and Environment Unit, House of Commons

Building on his 20+ years of policy making in parliamentary contexts, Alistair will address questions such as:

• Who is involved in policy making across the public sector?
• With a particular focus on Parliament, how is policy formulated, who is involved and where does research fit in?
• How can researchers engage with policy making in Parliament?
• How is research effectively communicated to policy makers?
• What can the research community contribute to the new Parliament?

Bio
Alistair has worked in the House of Commons Select Committee Team since September 2015. He is currently Head of the Climate and Environment Unit in the House of Commons Select Committee Team. In this role, he and his team advise and support select committees in their scrutiny of any topics which relate to climate, environment, energy, agriculture and fisheries. He previously worked in teams providing EU policy advice to select committees. Prior to joining the House of Commons, Alistair worked for the House of Lords European Union Committee, including its Sub-Committee on Environment and Agriculture. Alistair began his career as a researcher for a Scottish Member of the European Parliament, based in Brussels, which is where his interest in sustainability policies began. He studied EU Studies and languages at Edinburgh University before undertaking a Masters in European Studies at the LSE.

15.00-16.00: What does impact success look like? A roundtable discussion

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This roundtable will explore impact from multiple perspectives, asking what impact success looks like in different contexts. Facilitated by Tom Wolfenden (Senior Knowledge Exchange Initiatives Manager), we will first hear from contributors who hold a variety of roles in producing and supporting research impact.

Charlotte Humma (Centre and Communications Manager for the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy) and Dr Sarah King (School of Psychology) will be joined by Research / Impact Leads Professor Gianluca Memoli (School of Engineering and Informatics) and Professor Mark Walters (School of Law, Politics and Sociology) as well as the Director for Research and Knowledge Exchange for the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Professor Andrea Banfi. 

After sharing their own impact experience and what success looks like to them, the floor will be opened to give everyone a chance to discuss some of the following questions:

• What does impact success mean to you?
• How have you achieved/supported impact success or how do you plan to achieve/support impact success?
• What are examples of good practice or processes that work well to identify impact success across Sussex?
• How can we best recognise impact success here at Sussex?

16.10-17.00: Research Culture and Research Impact Awards Showcase

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This session will showcase the research of those shortlisted for the Research Culture and Research Impact Awards. Come join us to hear more about the exciting work that is leading to impact across Sussex.

17.00-19.00: 2024 Research Culture and Research Impact Awards Ceremony

Auditorum

The Research Impact Awards and Research Culture Awards winners will be announced at this evening ceremony.

Wednesday 19 June programme

08.30-10.00: Welcome and Keynote with Phil Ward: Regionality and impact: the case for consortia

08.30-9.00: Café

Join us for morning refreshments to start day two of the Sussex Impact Days.

9.00-10.00: Auditorium

In this keynote presentation, we will hear from Phil Ward, Director of Eastern Arc, who will speak about the value and opportunities of impact and engagement that comes from consortium working. The University of Sussex has recently joined the universities of East Anglia, Essex and Kent to become the fourth member of the Eastern Arc research consortium. We will hear about how consortium working can allow a focus on regionality and place, to bring people together and encourage engagement on a broader scale.

10.00-11.00: When ‘I’ becomes ‘we’: Building long term relationships with organisations to create impact

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Working with organisations who need your research has long been cited as a prerequisite of developing impact, but what happens to those relationships as the work grows and develops over time? What implications does this have on researchers in terms of their work and ways of working and what have they discovered along the way?

Join the panel to reflect on their own personal lived experience of stepping outside the University to work with external organisations to bring about change, facilitated by Nora Davies, Sussex KE and Impact Support Programme.

Panel:

• Dr Tom Wright and Katy Mack talking about their experience of working with local schools and football clubs around the use of oracy – School of Media, Arts and Humanities
• Dr Maja Golf-Papez reflecting on her work with NHS Sussex and Health Innovation Kent, Surrey and Sussex to design out digital exclusion in health and care – University of Sussex Business School
• Dr Shahrzad Fouladvand speaking about her work of collaborating with organisations addressing modern slavery through better use of data – School of Law, Politics and Sociology
• Dr Charlotte Rae reflecting on how she has worked with businesses adopting a 4 day working week to support their 4 day week journey, from implementing a trial to assessing success – School of Psychology.
• Dr Tahir Zaman reflecting on his experience of working with people, place and communities to deliver innovative ways of supporting displaced people, including building the capacity of a HE institution in North West Syria - School of Global Studies.

11.00-12.30: Collaborate with Impact: engaging with external partners

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An opportunity to hear first hand from external partners and academics about the impact of collaborative working from across the disciplines. Pose your own questions to our panel of businesses about how and why they engage with University expertise. Discover the wide impacts that have resulted through one of the Universities Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, hear about the many different mechanisms that business use to engage with academic expertise.

Speakers:

• Sprint Electric Ltd KTP: George Parisis (PI) Mark Gardiner (CEO) Nick Toomey (KTP associate)
• EMTEQ AKT: Martin Yeomans (PI) Charles Nduka (CEO) Rhiannon Armitage (RA)
• Innovation & Business Partnerships: Nick Bull, Nile Amos, Elisa Fortunato

12.30-14.00: Impact tools and how to use them: an interactive session over lunch

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How are you capturing evidence of your research impact? In this workshop, Maggie Symes (Research and Open Scholarship Librarian, Library) and Dr Hayley Cordingley (Research Intelligence Adviser, RES) will focus on:

• How you can use the Impact Module of Elements to plan and capture your research impact.
  • This module is the place to record, store, collate and retrieve easily all the information you can about…
  • … the work you do to generate impact from your research, the impact that you achieve and the evidence you gather to support this.
• How Altmetric “Explorer for Institutions” (EFI) can help you evidence your impact
  • This tool searches a range of online sources (such news outlets, social media, policy publications…) for mentions of research output identifiers (such as DOIs)…
  • …providing external evidence of reach and engagement with your research beyond academia

As well as a brief demonstration and the opportunity to ask questions, the workshop will include time for you to interact with and explore both the Elements module and Altmetric Tool over lunch (which will be provided) so please do bring your own laptop/device with you.

14.00-15.00: Researchers writing popular books

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This panel will consider how books can be a route to impact through reaching a popular audience. We will hear from Professor Dave Goulson (Life Sciences), Professor Fiona Mathews (Life Sciences), and Professor Hester Barron (MAH), all of whom have written research-based popular books, who will speak about their experiences in this area and consider the challenges and opportunities in writing both research monographs and ‘trade’ books for a popular readership, and how academic authors can navigate between high-quality research publication and accessibility.

15.00-16.00: Arts & humanities impact in practice: AHRC IAA project showcase

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This panel discussion session brings together AHRC IAA project leads from several Schools, to talk about their experiences of delivering impactful engagement activities. The 4-year, £600,000 AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) programme enables arts and humanities researchers across the University to bring about societal, economic, environmental and other impacts beyond academia. The session will be particularly relevant to those working in the arts and humanities subjects, and of broader interest to anyone considering how they might connect with organisations, communities or individuals, to achieve beneficial change through their research.

Chair: Dr Piotr Cieplak (MAH)

Panel: Katy Mack (MAH), Dr Emily Robinson (LPS), Dr Sarah Scuzzarello (Global) & Piotr Cieplak (MAH).

16.00-16.30: REF2029: What we know so far

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In this session, the RQI team will present an overview of everything we know so far about REF2029 followed by a short Q&A session.

16.30-17.30: REF and the impact landscape: a roundtable discussion

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This final session of the 2024 Sussex Impact Days will consider REF and the broader impact landscape in UK Higher Education. This discussion will be facilitated by Professor Seb Oliver (DPVC Research) and we will first hear some reflections from a variety of colleagues at Sussex who produce and support impactful research, including Dr Barny Greenland (Life Sciences), Professor Ben Highmore (MAH), Professor Kristine Langhoff (ESW), and Richard Poole (Assistant Research Impact Manager, Business School), before opening the floor to give everyone a chance to discuss some of the following questions:

• What does impact look like in REF2029? Are the recent developments positive?
• Are case studies the best way of measuring impact?
• What is the influence of the REF on the impact landscape in UK HE?
• What are the positive and negative aspects of this influence?
• What are the challenges and opportunities for impact in the lead up to REF2029 and beyond?