Faculty of Science and Engineering Research Awards 2025
Vice Principal's Award
For overall excellence across multiple areas
Dr Stefaan Verbruggen and Dr Chris Chapman are joint recipients of this award. Both are Lecturers at the Centre of Bioengineering within the School of Engineering and Materials Science and are outstanding, collegiate academics who deliver world-class research and education. Working collaboratively as Programme Directors, they have made significant contributions to the development of the Biomedical Engineering programs, the enhancement of student satisfaction, and the recruitment of international students. Their research activity is extremely strong with high impact papers and extensive grant funding. Chris has recently secured major funding from ARIA on 'Engineering biology for scalable neural interfaces'(£400k), whilst Stefaan has just been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant on computational and in vitro modelling of cancer (£1.5M).
Research and Innovation Excellence Awards
For academic staff delivering world leading research in each of our five schools
Dr Viresh Patel
Dr Margherita Malancini is a Reader in Psychology and leads research on how genetic and environmental factors shape children’s cognitive, socio-emotional and educational development. Her work shows that academic success reflects not only intelligence but also non-cognitive skills such as motivation and self-regulation. Her research integrates behavioural genetics, longitudinal methods and educational psychology, advancing understanding of how diverse developmental pathways influence learning, mental health and life outcomes. She provides excellent mentorship to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, and has led many high-impact papers in leading journals, including Nature Human Behaviour, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, and Nature Genetics. She was recently awarded a major MRC grant (£944k) to investigate the combined impact of behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders on educational outcomes.
Dr Xuekun Lu is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Sustainable Engineering in the School of Engineering and Materials Science delivering world-leading research in Hydrogen Energy and Energy Storage. With a prolific portfolio of over 60 publications, Dr Lu continues to push scientific boundaries. His recent breakthrough paper in Nature Nanotechnology unravelled the complex electro-chemo-mechanical processes in graphite/silicon composites for battery electrodes. His research excellence is further evidenced by his success in securing highly competitive funding, including an EPSRC Open Postdoctoral Fellowship (2023) and a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant (2025).
Dr Dimitrios Kollias is Senior Lecturer in Multimodal AI, and a member of the Centre for Multimodal AI. His research focuses on advancing the field of trustworthy (fair, responsible and explainable) multimodal AI. His aim is to develop new knowledge related to Machine and Deep Learning, Generative AI, Large Language Models, Vision-Language Models, for social behaviour analysis, modelling and understanding, as well as for medical imaging and diagnosis. He is the inventor of the "Facial-Behavior-Analysis" patent and has developed Aff-Wild and Aff-Wild2, the largest in-the-wild affective datasets, which are utilized by over 1,000 research groups and 150 companies globally. He has recently secured £200k research funding from industry partner, Toyota, and has an excellent record in supporting PhD students.
Research Impact Awards
For a member of staff or student translating research into beneficial societal impact
Dr Kostas Papafitsoros is a Lecturer in Mathematical Data Science in the School of Mathematical Sciences. With the help of a 2023 QMUL Impact Acceleration Fund, and together with ARCHELON and MEDASSET he has created a unique interactive web-platform Zakynthos Turtles, which actively engages visitors and tour operators with responsible sea turtle conservation on Zakynthos Island, Greece. This is driving adoption of turtle-friendly attitudes in ecotourism. Through Dr Papafitsoros' platform, visitors upload images of turtles for individual photo-identification and receive information about them in real time e.g., including their behaviours, interesting stories, and quantification of the human pressure that 'their' turtle is subject to.
Dr Paddy Cullen is a Senior Lecturer in Renewable Energy in the Centre for Sustainable Engineering in the School of Engineering and Materials Science. Paddy’s research spans energy storage materials and catalysis. His spin-out company with Paul Balcombe, Methanox, is developing new catalytic converters to reduce methane emissions from shipping and secured £1.5M investment from Tharisa PLC. His innovation in solid state sodium ion batteries, with Isaac Abrahams, is also the subject of patent activity that looks likely to develop significantly in the coming years.
Outstanding Post Doctoral Researcher Award
For a post doctoral researcher delivering highest quality research in the Faculty.
Dr Laura Lacconi is an outstanding early-career researcher physicist in the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences. She is already well known for her research on inflationary models in cosmology. Her recent work investigates whether inflationary models producing gravitational waves remain perturbative. She has actively disseminated her work through over 15 invited and contributed talks in the past two years, including at the “Early Universe from Home” conference. At Queen Mary, she organises seminars, discussion groups, and major events such as the UK Cosmology conference and a CERN-funded workshop on loops in cosmology. Her excellence is widely recognised, with external reviewers noting her “impressive scientific independence, versatility, and ability to work across collaborations.”