KESS 2 recently asked participants how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted on their respective research projects. Postgraduate researcher Simon Johns, and his company partner Gwylan, share their experiences of continuing their KESS 2 funded R&D during these trying times. The Student Perspective: Simon Johns, Cardiff University I’m studying an MPhil; it’s an evaluation of a… Read more »
As part of my postgraduate skills development award I have been able to attend and give an oral presentation in a symposium with both my supervisors, Prof. Pauline Horne and Dr. Mihela Erjavec at the British Psychological Societies 3-day Cognitive and Development conference at Reading University. This was a great experience and excellent opportunity to disseminate my research.
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Student: Catherine Sharp Company: Food Dudes Health Ltd (SR) Academic Supervisor: Dr Pauline Horne & Dr Mihela Erjavec Currently there is an obesity epidemic, which is costing the NHS millions of pounds. A prevention method to obesity and other serious illnesses, e.g. cancer, is consuming fruit and vegetable. There are more than 40 million preschool… Read more »
The KESS project was a development of an early year’s nursery intervention for children to learn to eat fruits and vegetables; it was undertaken in co-operation with our company partner Food Dudes. Food Dudes have award winning programmes proven to work with children who are in primary schools, however because we know that eating habits are established early on, we know that we should intervene as early as possible.
The KESS project was to develop an intervention for children who were about 2-3 years old and then pilot it in nurseries in the area. To my knowledge this is the only project of its kind that has successfully completed the research and immediately translated the results by the company into a commercially viable product, therefore an intervention that can be administered in nurseries nationwide.
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We got involved with KESS because we think it’s important to develop academic talent and help graduates learn about the process of bringing academic ideas to market. Academia is particularly important to us, because Food Dudes grew out of the School of Psychology at Bangor University under the leadership of the late Professor Fergus Lowe and Professor Pauline Horne. Although the programme itself had been in development for 20 years, it wasn’t until 2010-11 that Food Dudes started to become of particular interest to Public Health professionals around the UK, no doubt because of the public and media pressure to do something about the problem of obese children.
Since we span out the business in 2011/21, Food Dudes has become possibly one of the fastest growing social enterprises in the UK. That said, any support we can find for the project is warmly welcomed – hence our interest in KESS.
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