The winners of the CommNet Impact Awards were announced last night at the CommNet event: Building the Bioeconomy – Creating Impact through Communication: CommNet’s 3rd Bioeconomy Forum & Final Conference - Dialogues, Debates, Awards at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Brussels, Belgium.
The winning project in each stakeholder category was:
- Engaging industry: Food4Me
- Engaging policy makers: BioConSepT
- Engaging citizens: PharmaSea
- Inspiring young people: I.Family
Each of the projects had demonstrated strong communication and dissemination activities to their chosen stakeholder group.
Food4Me, which focusses on personalised nutrition, used a wide range of methods to communicate to stakeholders including a booklet outlining future scenarios of personalised nutrition in Europe to help the development of business models.
PharmaSea, a project that aims to collect marine organisms from some of the hottest, deepest and coldest places on the planet gained impressive international media coverage for their work on novel antibiotics.
The BioConSepT project aims to produce chemicals to make plastics from sustainable biomass. This project developed a serious gaming application to engage with European policy makers.
The I.Family project investigates the drivers behind healthy food choices, especially for adolescents and their families. The project engaged with young people in Italy by creating a partnership with a local football team F.C. Avellino.
Professor Ronan Gormley, who was one of the judges for the awards and also chaired the awards ceremony said: “It’s vital that researchers do more to communicate their work to a wider audience in order to really deliver on the public funding they have received. It’s great to be involved with these awards to recognise projects who are doing this well and I hope this inspires others to reach out and communicate their research to a wider audience”.