Awarded Projects 2025/26

A Co-Created Road Safety Educational Intervention for Young Drivers and their Passengers

Dr Gitit Kadar-Satat (Psychology) and Kate Castle (Warwickshire County Council)

Dr Gitit Kadar-Satat (Psychology) and Kate Castle (Warwickshire County Council) are co-leading a collaborative project with Dr Melina Kunar (Psychology), Luda Ruddock (Warwick Innovation Group), Fay Cannon, Fiona Cremin, and Andre Russell (Warwickshire County Council), and student co-creators Lasini Jayasekera, Charlotte Manley and Michaela Pawley. Together, they are piloting a new educational intervention to reduce risky driving behaviours among 17-24 year olds - one of the highest-risk groups for serious road collisions. The project builds on the 2024 Warwick Psychology Ideathon, where students designed a theoretically informed, evidence based, peer-led intervention. The winning proposal, developed by the student co-creators, is now being refined and piloted with support from Warwickshire Road Safety Partnership and Warwick Enterprise. The intervention includes interactive elements such as quizzes, role-play, and group discussions to help students navigate peer pressure and make safer choices on the road. The team aims to evaluate its impact within the Department of Psychology before scaling it across the university and beyond, contributing to a broader culture of road safety through university-community collaboration.

Solihull's Youth Voice Project

Katie Crompton (Education Studies) and Charlotte Slater (Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council)

Together, Katie and Charlotte are developing a youth voice model to empower young people in Solihull to influence local services and policies by training them to conduct peer-led research as part of a work experience programme. A launch event will bring together stakeholders and young people from Solihull to introduce the model, identify research priorities, and share aspirations around work experience. Following this, Katie and Charlotte will co-design four week-long research based work experience programmes for around 60 disadvantaged young people. The project aims to build self-efficacy, provide hands-on workplace experience, and develop public engagement skills. In turn, Solihull Council will gain valuable, youth-driven insights to inform more inclusive service design, whilst the University strengthens its commitment to local community engagement.

Getting Hands-On with Tamil History and Heritage

Shavena Vigneswara Kumar (ELCS) and Vithu Karunakaran (Coventry based potter)

Building on the momentum of pilot workshops run with the University of Warwick Tamil Society in February 2025, Shavena and Vithu are partnering to further provide a healing and exploratory space for diaspora Tamils in the UK to reflect on relationships to community memory, identity and heritage practices. Vithu and Shavena's partnership emerged through conversations around their shared sense of diasporic identity and heritage connected to the Tamil homelands in the North and East of Sri Lanka. They recognise the complexity of relationships to pasts and practices and the diverging experience tied up with the Tamil diaspora. They are invested in bringing together their expertise, Vithu in clay craft, and Shavena's experience as a creative facilitator and researcher, to build spaces that enable deep reflection and processing of lived experiences, family and community histories and heritage practices.

They will deliver a set of four creative participatory community workshops with existing groups as well as taking part in cultural events such as Tamil Heritage Month. As part of the series, they will also deliver a session directed towards community organisers who work with the Tamil community to support development of facilitation skills so they can adopt an artistic and creative approach in their practice. There will also be an exhibition to bring together the artworks produced throughout the series and celebrate with the groups that participated, as well as engaging stakeholders with the work including the outcomes and approach.

Creating Democratic Spaces through Spoken Word Poetry

Karen Simecek (Philosophy) and Lisa Mead (Apples and Snakes)

In collaboration with the UKs leading spoken word organisation, Apples and Snakes, whose mission is to enable unheard voices to be heard, we want to demonstrate how spoken word can serve as a catalyst for social change by enabling the inclusion of voices that the 2024 Khan report cites as essential to social cohesion and healthy democratic life.

Starting locally and drawing on existing connections, we will collaborate with local poets, policy makers, Coventry Libraries and other arts organisations to pilot a model for using spoken word poetry to build community identity and voice that can be applied nationally and internationally. This will include the creation of a pop-up poetry space in the city, inviting community members to contribute their own words and voices. The poets will use the collected material to create a multivocal poetry piece, which will contribute to both a case study and ongoing research into inclusive civic engagement. This work will also inform the practice of Apples and Snakes, advancing their mission to amplify unheard voices through spoken word poetry.

Exhibition and Public Talks at the Lord Leycester

Naomi Pullin (History) and Heidi Meyer (Lord Leycester)

We are strengthening the partnership between Warwick and the Lord Leycester Hospital to uncover this unique almshouse's early history. Extensive research of the almshouse has already been undertaken through a Collaborative Doctoral Fellowship, and we now want to create a legacy of this research through a development of a new exhibition and public talks to engage local residents and visitors to the Lord Leycester on the sixteenth and seventeenth-century residents of this military hospital and its place within wider local and national debates about poor relief and care of ex-soldiers. Through this work, we are seeking to deepen our model of coproduction and collaboration by disseminating the findings of the Collaborative Doctoral Award to a non-academic audience, as well as enhance the user/visitor experience of the Lord Leycester alongside providing the institution with the ability to attract new audiences and further professional development opportunities for its staff and volunteers.

EmpowerAI: Local Skills, Global Tools

Ninna Makrinov (WMG), Veronica Yusuf (Sterling People Hub), Ade Johnson (Coventry Central Hall), Maria Napitupulu (WMG) & Luqman Sudrajat (WMG)

Ade, Veronica, Ninna, Maria and Luqman are building their partnership to understand the needs of local micro-entrepreneurs, build trust in working together, support the development of basic skills in the integration of AI solutions, and plant the roots for participatory action research projects. In consultation with community members, they plan to deliver a 1-day event at Coventry Central Hall for local micro-entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds. This project stems from an ongoing collaboration with Coventry Central Hall started through integrating public engagement in a research methods module at WMG, thanks to the WIE's Public and Community Engagement Fund. In July 2024, local entrepreneurs told the team that they wanted to achieve maximum value from research and knowledge and that marketing and funding were their key challenges. Since then, we have delivered online and face to face training for the community. The collaboration is also embedded in Ninna's new module Artificial Intelligence Research, Development and Management.

SymbioSphere

Orkun Soyer (Life Sciences), Keegan Neeve (Neeve Engineering) and Ben Matynoga

This project will communicate microbes' essential ecological roles to the wider public. Microbes, being mostly single-celled organisms, are almost never visible in daily life. Popular perception remains dominated by the minority of microbes that cause disease and spoil food. A cardinal fact, unknown to most, is that microbes have made, and maintain, our planet the green, habitable planet that sustains our lives today. While popular science books explain microbes importance in this ecological context, that information cannot substitute for witnessing microbial activities first-hand. This project will precisely provide the first-hand engagement and help audiences comprehend a vital concept: we and all animals are sustained by interconnected microbial metabolic activities.

To achieve this we will utilise cyanobacterial granules - centimetre-scale aggregates featuring cyanobacteria and other bacteria that form self-sustaining ecosystems that survive long periods without any chemical inputs, i.e. feeding. We will house granules in an engineered platform called "Symbiosphere", where user-collected time lapse images and chemical measurements will capture the ecosystem dynamics and microbial activities. This will be supplemented with scientifically accurate yet publicly accessible narratives in written text and video production, explaining fundamental roles of interlinked microbial metabolic activities in shaping Earth's air, water, soil and rock.

The SymbioSphere will allow users to engage directly with the microbial world and share observations and data with each other and scientists. We will showcase SymbioSphere at the Resonate science festival at Warwick and at the Science on the Hill events, and take it to local secondary schools. Feedback from these events will allow us to prepare for future participation at larger science festivals and applying for further funding for this innovative public engagement and citizen science platform.