Newcastle University Awarded Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Research in Water Security
Newcastle University was recently awarded the prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education for its research programme of global excellence in water security.
5 December 2023
Newcastle University was recently awarded the prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education for its research programme of global excellence in water security. This marks the fourth time that it has been presented with this prestigious award.
The prize not only recognises the University’s role in leading the research programme but also reflects its work in collaborating with various communities, industries, governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to deliver lasting real-world impact in an area encompassing floods, droughts, water quality and public health.
Adopting a holistic, interdisciplinary and solutions-focused approach, which was developed over numerous years, the research has led to an integrated understanding of water risks across the entire water ecosystem, and shaped local and national government policy. This changed how billions of pounds of infrastructure is designed, ensuring its resilience to current and future water risks. One of the innovative solutions pioneered at the University is the portable ‘lab in a suitcase’, which enables potentially unsafe water to be screened for pathogens anywhere.
Dr Michaela Goodson, Dean of Research at Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia (NUMed), is part of the team involved in this project, having joined the International Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub in 2017. She expressed her excitement on how the university’s research has advanced through the years, and the opportunities that have arisen across Southeast Asia, Africa, India, South America, and beyond, as a result.
“NUMed now has our first home-grown fully funded PhD student, which is an exciting step forward that will grow future initiatives to increase planetary health, and environmental research and teaching opportunities in the Malaysia and Singapore campuses. We recently doubled our ‘star’ rating for our local Research Excellence Framework (REF) equivalent, and look forward to getting some impactful articles published soon,” she shared.
Professor Chris Day, Vice-Chancellor and President of Newcastle University, added: “Receiving this prestigious prize makes us all very proud. It is a remarkable achievement and testament to the excellence of our world-leading water researchers, our colleagues across the University, and our partners, who support this pioneering and globally significant work. Our recently launched Newcastle University Centre for Water provides the perfect platform from which to build on this award through interdisciplinary research.”
Granted every two years to celebrate outstanding work by UK colleges and universities, the Queen’s Anniversary Prizes are the highest national honour awarded in the UK further and higher education by the Monarch. They were first awarded in 1994 and run by the Royal Anniversary Trust, an independent charity.