Get your nominations in for the Vice-Chancellor's Engage Awards 2025 and get recognised for your public involvement and engagement work.

The Vice-Chancellor's Engage Awards

Since 2013, we at the Public Engagement Unit host the Vice-Chancellor's Engage Awards to celebrate the achievements of colleagues from across the University of Bath working to involve and engage people with their research.

Who can apply?

The Informing, Involving and Collaborating award categories are open to all staff from the Education and Research (including doctoral students) and Technical and Experimental job families. We also welcome submissions from staff in the Management Specialist and Administration job family who support and input into research.

The Local & Civic Engagement award category is open to all staff.

Public involvement and engagement with research

For us, public involvement and engagement with research allows people to discover, use, discuss, participate in and/or create research in ways that are meaningful for them.

It is activity that generates mutual benefit to you and/or your research and the people you involve and engage that helps them meet their goals as individuals and within their communities.

Public involvement and engagement with research can happen at any stage of the research life cycle.

It can encompass a diverse set of activities, the nature of which will vary depending on the discipline you are working in. These activities have several features in common, they should:

• relate to active and specific research
• involve people outside academia in spaces or at times where they can choose to participate
• be relevant (in terms of interests, needs and goals) to the people involved and/or engaged
• be beneficial for the people involved and/or engaged as well as for you and / or your research

Award categories

For the 2025 Awards, four categories are open for nomination: Informing, Involving, Collaborating, and Civic & Local Engagement.

Informing, Involving and Collaborating award categories

These categories for the Vice-Chancellor's Engage Awards broadly reflect why people have told us they want to involve people in and engage them with their research.

Examples of projects that fit within these categories include (but are not limited to):

Informing - broadcasting, exhibitions, radio, blogs, social media activities, public lectures or research-related outreach activities.

Involving- roundtable discussions, citizen science or public contributor panels.

Collaborating - carrying out research with community and public partners, collaborating with local artists groups to run an exhibition based on your research or working with research stakeholders to create tools based on your research.

You can apply as an individual or as a team. Check out the full criteria on the Engage Awards nomination guide. Feel free to drop us a line if you have any questions.

Local & Civic Engagement award category

University staff engage with local communities from across Bath and North East Somerset through various work covering the University’s operations, teaching, learning and research. This award aims to recognise the outstanding contributions of staff who engage locally and make a civic contribution on behalf of the University.

We're not being too prescriptive with our criteria for this award; we encourage colleagues to read the Local & Civic Engagement award category guidance and submit nominations that you feel are relevant to this award.

We encourage you to drop us a line if you have any questions. The full criteria are available in the Engage Awards nomination guide.

Guide for nominations

The Vice-Chancellor's Engage Awards nomination guide provides full details of the scheme. Read on for more details of the main categories.

Apply now

The deadline for all Engage Award categories is Thursday 10 April 2025, 4pm. Once received, a judging panel of engagement experts from the University and beyond will assess the nominations before announcing the shortlist. The winners will be revealed during the Vice-Chacnellor's Engage Awards and Showcase presentation event on Wednesday 25 June 2025, 11am-1pm.

The Vice-Chancellor's Showcase

We know award schemes aren't for everyone and that's ok.

We are hosting a showcase exhibition as part of the Vice-Chancellor's Engage Awards presentation to celebrate as wide a diversity of public involvement and engagement with research work as possible.

So, if you don't want to nominate your work for an award, why not bring it along to the Vice-Chancellor's Engage Showcase instead?

You could bring along anything you would like to illustrate your public involvement and engagement with research achievements. This could be a film you produced during the research, an engaging poster that tells the story of your work, hands-on interactive activities you used in your work, or anything else you would like to bring along.

If you would like to contribute to the Vice-Chancellor's Engage Showcase please tell us a little more about your contribution by filling in the Vice-Chancellor's Engage Showcase form. If you are unsure about what you might want to bring, drop us a line to chat about your ideas.

Also, it's Phil Taylor's (Vice-Chancellor and President) first Vice-Chancellor's Engage Awards and Showcase, so it'll be a great chance to show off some of the ways you involve people in and engage them with your research 😉.

Dean Veall is Deputy Head of Public Engagement at the University of Bath