Each year, we celebrate the contributions of our staff and students to the research community within the Faculty of Engineering & Design. Among this year's awards, Ellie Smallwood, a Doctoral Researcher at AAPS CDT, received the award for Radically Curious. She tells us what this award means to her.
"In the summer of 2025 I was delighted to be awarded the Radically Curious Research Culture Award from the Faculty of Engineering and Design. Not only did this involve a wonderful event to celebrate the achievements of researchers across the faculty but it has also given me the opportunity to reflect on how my experiences have shaped and been shaped by the research culture of the faculty, and more widely across the University of Bath.
My PhD was initially co-created by academics at the University (including my supervisor Prof Richard Burke) and an external industry sponsor (AVL), aiming to create a mathematics-based model to detect anomalies within automotive testing data. Whilst I agreed with this in principle – and have subsequently created an unsupervised, data-driven machine learning algorithm to achieve this goal – I also reframed the challenge away from being purely technical to instead consider data quality more broadly, including human and organisational factors, and the environmental impact of bad quality data. This was very important to me as I’m sure we’ve all had experiences of technology that can accomplish something in theory but is almost impossible to work with, or even worse, a technological “solution” where it wasn’t needed; I did not want to add to this by creating a technical approach with no consideration of the environment or people that would interact with it.
Although it may sound simple to alter the scope of a project, I needed to learn new methods and skills, especially interview and ethnographic techniques and qualitative data analysis. Overall, I have had advice and support from academics in the mechanical engineering, computer science, and psychology departments and the school of management in order to achieve my research goals. Finding people with the right expertise and time to help me was challenging at times, but I have really enjoyed meeting new people and learning about whole new areas of study – I think this willingness to help is a great reflection of the research culture within the University!
I have also been able to learn by being involved in projects outside of my PhD: learning how to create, disseminate, and quantitatively analyse a survey on attitudes towards digital twins with the Centre for People-Led Digitalisation; exploring the interface between digital and physical systems (and how my research could help) for a Data Sharing Infrastructure for the energy sector, a project now hosted by the National Energy System Operator (NESO)(thanks to Prof Furong Li for getting me involved!); and completing a UKRI Policy internship at the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST) for which I wrote a report on Green Choices for Net Zero.
As I approach the last few months of my PhD I can start to appreciate the “highs and lows” of being a researcher, and I hope that I’ve been able to effectively share my experiences and any advice with my peers. In early 2025 I was going through a period where nothing in my research seemed to be going well, despite all my best efforts – a feeling I’m sure many people can relate to – so to be told I’d achieved this award during that time was a very needed and appreciated boost. I think having these awards is incredibly important to ensure people’s efforts are recognised, and I am extremely honoured to have been deemed ‘radically curious’!"
The winner
Ellie Smallwood:
The award
The Radically Curious award recognises individuals who are open-minded, inquisitive, and ambitious in pursuing new research directions. They are willing to try bold or unconventional approaches to achieve their research goals and openly share both successes and failures to support the growth and development of others. Driven by curiosity and resilience, they demonstrate the ambition and determination needed to overcome challenges and push research forward.
