Our annual Festival of Research brings together students and staff to celebrate the vibrant research community at Royal Holloway.
Across four exciting days, we showcase the breadth of our research through talks, training, drop-ins and workshops. and training.
Highlights in 2025 included:
Day 1: Spotlight on Early-Career Researchers
We kicked off with a celebration of our Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers, with over 20 supervisors receiving certificates marking the completion of their supervisor training. The day also featured workshops on what PGRs value at Royal Holloway and how their experience could be enhanced.
Day 2: Innovation in action
Visitors explored cutting-edge work in drones, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Sessions on research support and a popular grant writing masterclass gave colleagues practical tools to take their ideas further.
Day 3: Campus connections
The day began with our Open Meeting and BBQ - an informal chance to connect with colleagues and hear from senior leaders. Attendees then toured research labs and facilities across the Egham campus, getting hands-on with the latest projects.
Day 4: AI & education futures
We wrapped up with a focus on AI and how researchers are engaging schools and young people. The festival closed with a keynote from Geoff Barton CBE, who shared powerful insights on education and policy.
Festival of Research Engagement Awards 2025
Our awards recognise and celebrate our researchers’ challenge-led research and impact. These awards are highly competitive and all of our nominees demonstrate outstanding contributions to research at Royal Holloway. You can view all of our 2025 award category and winners below.
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Briony Hughes – Outstanding Impact by an Early Career Researcher
Briony has made a real difference in the local community by working closely with schools, councils, and other groups. She’s now bringing that same energy to campus, helping upskill university staff and showing how research can benefit both the community and Royal Holloway.
Hari Harindranath & Tim Unwin – Best Collaboration and Innovation Research Project
Hari and Tim’s global project is a standout example of research in action. Since 2019, they’ve worked with the UN, NGOs, and tech organisations to create training tools that are already making a difference in communities around the world.
John Regan – Best Interdisciplinary Research Project
John and his team broke new ground with a project that analysed how the UN talks about climate change. By combining expertise from linguistics, politics, and digital tech, they created the first open-access toolkit for analysing UN texts in multiple languages, opening up new ways to understand global environmental policy.
Konstantinos Markantonakis – Outstanding Mentoring / Developing Others
Kostas has supported students to publish research, land top internships, and join leading PhD programmes.
