Litelok at Swansea University’s Research & Innovation Awards 2020 – LITELOK®
Swansea University’s Research & Innovation Awards showcases projects resulting from collaborations with organisations from all around the world that have the potential to greatly impact their given fields and solve problems that face humanity. With Swansea University celebrating their centenary year, the awards evening marked the first event in their calendar, showing what amazing work they do collaborating with public, private, and third sector organisations.
Here at Litelok, we are interested in solving world problems through design, engineering, and cutting-edge manufacturing and that is why we are proud to have sponsored the Global Reach & Significance Award. Professor Neil Barron, CEO of Litelok, sat on the judging panel for this award and was blown away by the level of innovation displayed.
“The process of shortlisting this year’s nominees was really thorough and comprehensive. The team have put a lot of effort into this and the panel meeting was both robust but also enjoyable because there was such a diversity of applications and panel members. It was extremely stimulating.” – Professor Neil Barron
Neil Barron is involved with multiple Universities in the UK and abroad. He has held multiple visiting academic positions including the Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Innovation at The Royal College of Art Innovation Design Engineering department with Imperial College and Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University London. He has also run design, innovation and enterprise projects around the world collaborating with many diverse and world-renowned institutions including the National Institute of Design in India and Tokyo University in Japan where he worked on a project looking at reconstructing businesses on the Kesennuma Peninsula after the devastating Tsunami in 2011.
The winner of the Global Reach & Significance Award 2020 went to Professor Stefan Doerr and his team for their focus on Wildfires and their impact at a local, regional, and global scale. Their work has already substantially improved air quality information for global wildfires emissions and they continue to work towards a new 3D modelling approach for predicting wildfire behaviour which will drastically help how these fires are fought.
We will revisit the work of Professor Doerr and his team in detail in a future blog.
With climate change increasing the risk of wildfires on a global scale, the work of Professor Stefan Doerr and his team is more important than ever. Climate Change is an issue that is really important to us here at Litelok. We are working towards decreasing our carbon footprint with the objective that all of our manufacturing will take place within a 30-mile radius of our office here in South Wales. We are all about encouraging more people to cycle more but the truth is a worryingly large number of people never cycle again after having their bike stolen. This is one of the main reasons we developed a lightweight, practical, secure bike lock as we want people to feel confident and at ease when they are out cycling.
Professor Neil Barron and ‘Team on Fire’ – winners of the Global Reach & Significance Award.
The awards evening itself was superb. Hosted by Elin Rhys, founder and chair of Telesgop, a Swansea-based, award-winning multimedia production company, with the keynote speech from Under Secretary of state for Wales, David TC Davies MP. We also met many wonderfully leading-edge people from different sectors of science and engineering. It was a real honour to be involved in an event with such promise and prestige as this.
“I’d like to personally congratulate everyone who was shortlisted. Even if your project didn’t win a category, it is clear that Swansea University is a centre of excellence, and you all should be very proud. It is clear that Swansea University is engaged in and committed to research and innovation which has a global significance.” – Professor Neil Barron.
All the winners from Swansea University’s Research & Innovation Awards 2020