Making research glow

The eminent scientist who makes an incredible breakthrough on their own, is a myth. Great research is inherently collaborative – engineers, chemists, ecologists, anthropologists, clinicians and many more who come together to solve a global challenge achieve more than any single person can alone.

But thinking of collaborative research as just researchers from different fields working together is still reductive. Administrators, project managers, communicators, technicians, and intellectual property experts, and many more are vital roles to maximising the successful delivery and impact of research.

This is at the heart of what we believe at Imperial’s Research Impact Management Office (RIMO). We are a team of project management, communication, and innovation experts dedicated to maximising impact for large, collaborative research projects led by Imperial.

With over a decade of experience supporting European Union (EU)-funded research projects amounting to hundreds of millions of Euros, we know our services can and do  lead to maximising the  impact of research. We are impact managers.

To celebrate a decade of RIMO and our service, we have partnered with the digital artist, 72Kilos to produce a collection of artwork that conveys our collaborative journey and what it means to support some of the world’s leading researchers and their projects.

"Spirals and Tales"

This artwork is a playful reimagining of the DIAMONDS research. The twirling spiral echoes the ravelling and unravelling nature of the DNA helix. When we have the right tools to unwind and make the invisible visible, we can reveal and explore the many unique characteristics and narratives our blood holds.

DIAMONDS is a five-year, EU-funded research project aimed to revolutionise diagnostic processes for serious bacterial and viral infections in children.

Currently, if a child is admitted to hospital with a fever and non-specific symptoms, they could go through a whole series of tests, such as blood tests, spinal fluid samples, MRI and CT scans, while medics try to identify the cause. These tests can be uncomfortable, invasive, and take a long time to get results.

The team found through previous work that common diseases are characterised by unique patterns of gene expression (the process of DNA information being converted into instructions for cells to make proteins and other molecules). When a disease is associated with the switching on and off of genes in blood, it forms its own ‘gene signature’; its own unique fingerprint.

Building on over a decade of this research into genes switching on and off, the DIAMONDS team will make diagnosis faster and more accurate. The team have developed ground-breaking research already including successfully identifying the gene signatures for tuberculosis and Kawasaki disease.

DIAMONDS is the culmination of over a decade of collaborations with partners across the globe and nearly €60 million in EU-funding. Three projects, ILULU, EUCLIDS, and PERFORM are the predecessors of DIAMONDS.

• RIMO leads on the project management for DIAMONDS

• Principal Investigator: Professor Mike Levin, Chair in Paediatrics & International Child Health. Department of Infectious Disease – Faculty of Medicine

"Bridge Between Worlds"

This piece is about our continued exploration of real and virtual soundscapes. This duality is frequently being blended with much of our everyday lives progressively involving AR/VR to the extent where the bridge between what is real, and what is not, is gradually becoming harder to ascertain.

SONICOM is a five-year EU-funded research project focussed on transforming how we experience sounds in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) and better understanding how we can advance technologies to create seamless, personalised virtual experiences.

The potential applications would help us better connect with each other. In putting on a personalised set of headphones, a music student could step into their loungeroom engulfed by a virtual choir, or a visually-impaired person could walk the streets following real-time adjusted audio cues, or a hearing-impaired person could manage a noisy party as their cochlear implants blends virtual and real sounds, or an online workshop participant could hear other participants based on their position on the screen. SONICOM is about creating transformative sound experiences that can feel intuitive, immersive, and provide new, inclusive ways of interacting in created spaces.

• RIMO leads on the project management, and communication and dissemination management for SONICOM.

• Principal Investigator: Professor Lorenzo Picinali, Spatial Acoustics and Immersive Audio. Dyson School of Design Engineering – Faculty of Engineering

A short history of RIMO

We are in 2011 or thereabouts, when an Imperial academic needed some tailored project management support for their circa €10 million research grant. A few deferred emails and one or two conversations later, one person within Imperial Enterprise (a department which helps turn research and ideas into real-world impact through startups, industry partnerships, and innovation support) was found to help.

Fast forward to 2014, and this one person became three and now bore a team name, the Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO was supporting and managing €21 million worth of projects under the European Union’s FP7 and Horizon2020 research and innovation scheme.

Jump to 2019, and the team has grown to six people with a €75 million portfolio. Come new prospects, comes a new team name with the newly rebirthed Research Project Management Office (RPM). It was five people dedicated to project management and one person for a new, dedicated service offering: managing the communication and dissemination activities of the research projects. The growth of our portfolio showcased the quality of our services and the strong relationships we had built. Our impact was growing. And then came the year… 2020.

It was a force majeure of double trouble: BREXIT and COVID-19. The uncertainty of the UK being able to participate in the largest research-funding scheme in the world (European Union Research and Innovation Programme) – was quickly followed by a global pandemic that shook everything to its core. It was difficult to see where RPM would land and if indeed, it could continue with its business focus in EU-funding schemes. Alas, whatever challenge approaches, comes a team with drive, resilience, and passion to meet it head on. RPM pushed and innovated their service with vigour and came out even stronger, more adaptable, and more enthused. A new service paradigm, of course, must bear a new name.

It is 2025, and the aptly titled Research Impact Management Office (RIMO) is managing over €120 million of research funding. We are seven people with diverse skills, strengths, and interests; providing project management, communication and dissemination management, and a new service offering of innovation management.

The next vignette is from a project called PRESTIGE-AF.

"The Heart Factory"

This artwork reimagines stroke prevention research as the inner workings of a factory, capturing the complex, collaborative process behind such work. Each cog represents a different element of the project, all driving toward the clinical trial at the heart of the machine.

PRESTIGE-AF was a Horizon 2020 research project addressing the complex challenge of how to prevent further strokes in people with atrial fibrillation (AF) – a condition where the heart beats irregularly or unsteadily – and who also have suffered a recent brain bleed, known as an intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH). Those who have ICH and also have AF, are at higher risk of blood clots forming in the heart and travelling to the brain - known as an ischemic stroke - and also have higher risk of having another brain bleed.

These patients usually take anticoagulants or blood thinners to prevent a blood clot from occurring. However, the dilemma is, as these patients are also at risk of a blain bleed (ICH) what do doctors do? How do you balance risks of a brain bleed, against the risk of a brain clot?

• RIMO led on the project management, and communication and dissemination management for PRESTIGE-AF.

• Principal Investigator: Professor Roland Veltkamp, Neurology and Chair of Stroke Medicine, Department of Brain Sciences – Faculty of Medicine

New horizons

As we slowly healed and came out of the pandemic, so did RIMO with a new Horizon Europe project, CoDiet. Replete with a new set of challenges as the UK was not associated to the EU’s research scheme. CoDiet was the first project at Imperial that needed to change coordination of the project over to a Member State partner as the UK had not yet associated to the Horizon Europe scheme. RIMO lead the way and it became a co-funded venture between the EU and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Another first for RIMO was taking on an already awarded co-funded project, MUSICC. Funded by The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the EC, this €57 million project is the largest project RIMO has ever taken on.

The next two vignettes are from two projects, CoDiet and MUSICC respectively.

"The Sea of Choices"

This piece imagines dietary decision-making as a vast sea filled with a variety of food. The people fishing represent individuals navigating this sea, casting their lines in search of what’s right for their body. Just as no two catches are the same, no single diet fits all. The scene reflects the deeply personal nature of nutrition and the complexity of finding what works for each person.

CoDiet is a four-year, Horizon Europe and UKRI co-funded project that will trial innovative diet-monitoring technologies to improve understanding of the relationship between what we eat and non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The CoDiet aim is to personalise nutrition. The consortium is developing innovative tools to help assess how each person’s body interacts with the food they consume. This assessment will help determine what foods heighten NCD-risk for one person, and what minimises it for another.

• RIMO leads on the communication, dissemination, and exploitation management of CoDiet

• Principal Investigator: Professor Gary Frost, Chair in Nutrition & Dietetics, Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction – Faculty of Medicine

"Over the Mountain"

This artwork visualises the scale and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Juxtaposed pre- and post-pandemic worlds highlight both the magnitude of the challenge, and the global collaboration required to overcome it.

MUSICC is a five-year CEPI and Horizon Europe co-funded project laying the crucial groundwork to understand the role of immunity in the respiratory tract of humans and develop the next generation of COVID-19 vaccines.

At the core of MUSICC is a human challenge study – deliberately infecting people with the virus to assess its impact. Human challenges studies seemingly contradict the cardinal rule of medical ethics, “do no harm” but since the first smallpox vaccine, which was developed from Edward Jenner deliberately inoculated a young boy with cowpox and then repeatedly exposed him to smallpox to create immunity, a lot has changed. In recent times, regulatory and ethical standards that govern human challenge studies have significantly changed where participant safety and health is priority. Human challenge studies have been indispensable in supporting the development of vaccines for malaria, typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis and MUSICC, aims to add COVID-19 to this list through their vital work.

Unlike traditional vaccines which are injected into muscle, MUSICC will test the potential of nasal spray or inhaled vaccines against beta coronaviruses – the pathogen family that includes SARS-Cov-2. The team aims to develop next-generation vaccines that not only reduce disease severity but also stop people from catching COVID-19 and other coronaviruses in the first place.

• RIMO leads on the project management, and communication and dissemination management for MUSICC.

• Principal Investigator – Professor Chris Chiu, Infectious Diseases and Immunology, Department of Infectious Disease – Faculty of Medicine

Collective impact

To close out this tale of collaboration and creative passion, is the RIMO vignette, ‘Where research glows’. The team of RIMO brought this exhibition to life as not only did we want to celebrate all the wonderful teams and science we support, but to explore what it means for us to be part of such amazing research initiatives.

The projects we support are complex, but they are beautiful in what they aim to achieve: creating a better future for us all. We are all beneficiaries of scientific breakthroughs and we at RIMO wanted to create an exploration of what it means to be part of it.

We started by saying that the lone scientist cannot break ground and that is true. It is a collective; a collaboration of everyone working together. The RIMO team created the Making Research Glow exhibition as an exploration of the wonders of creativity, partnerships, and research.

The final vignette is for the team of RIMO.