OU research awarded for Best External Collaboration

The Best External Collaboration award in the OU’s Research Excellence Awards 2019, was presented to Dr Jude Fransman, Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Skills, for The Rethinking Research Collaborative (RRC), an international network committed to research for global development.

The award recognises and celebrates external engagement and the development of lasting successful academic and/or non-academic collaborations in research and enterprise.

There were two runners-up in this category:

Dr John Barnes and Professor Carole Haswell, Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, for The RedDots Collaboration, a state-of-the-art planet search focusing on the Sun’s very closest neighbouring stars, which are all red dwarf stars.

The Centre for Electronic Imaging, Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics world-leading industrial-academic collaboration, specialising in high-performance imaging technology for space applications.

The awards were presented at DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel at the MK Dons Stadium on Wednesday 23 October.

Collaborating for global development

The Rethinking Research Collaborative (RRC), co-convened by Dr Jude Fransman, Research Fellow in the OU’s Faculty of Wellbeing, Education & Language Studies and Kate Newman (Christian Aid), is an international network spanning academia/civil society across the global South that is committed to working together to explore the politics of evidence and participation in research for global development.

RRC has advanced thinking on ‘collaboration for global challenge research’ by developing a range of theoretical/methodological models to develop an iterative conceptual framework to capture the dynamics between evidence and participation in research partnerships, leading to expansion of theory and policy recommendations.

Watch the video to hear more about Dr Fransman's research:

Focusing on the closest stars to the Sun

The RedDots Collaboration, a runner-up in this category, is led by Dr Guillem Anglada-Escudé (Queen Mary University London), Dr Sandra Jeffers and Professor Stefan Dreizler (Georg-August-Universitaet Goettingen) and the OU leads are Professor Carole Haswell, Head of Astronomy, and researchers Dr John Barnes and Dr Dan Staab.

In 2016 RedDots discovered Proxima b, a rocky planet orbiting the closest star to the Sun. This was widely acclaimed as one of the top science discoveries of the year with significant impact beyond academia.

Imaging technology for Space

The Centre for Electronic Imaging (CEI), a runner up in this category, was established in 2004 as a world-leading industrial-academic collaboration, specialising in high-performance imaging technology for space applications. Since moving to The Open University in 2008 CEI has gone from strength to strength.

At the heart of the success of CEI has been a long-standing collaboration with Teledyne e2v. The latest collaboration agreement (2018-2023) sets out over £1 million of cash investment to the OU from Te2v over a 5-year period, with a further £500,000 per year in kind, underpinning CEI’s core research and helping to underpin or leverage additional research and external funding.