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The upheaval brought by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to bring fresh challenges over the past year. But alongside this we have been encouraged and awed to see the creative and resilient ways that our community has risen to meet these problems. Above all, it has shown humanity – in the ways that our Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê community has supported one another and in a constant striving to help improve the lives of others through the research being developed.

Teams have continued to innovate in their response to the virus spanning right across our thematic areas of prevention, monitoring, diagnostics, therapies and rehabilitation. A year and a half after our engineers and Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²ÊH doctors worked alongside Mercedes AMG-HPP (Formula 1) to manufacture breathing aids, Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê-Ventura CPAPs are now helping to save lives in over 25 countries. Another technology, Living With Covid Recovery, that treats long-lasting and often debilitating symptoms of the virus has now been rolled out across over 20 NHS trusts helping thousands of patients to recover.

The year has also been particularly difficult for many of our early-career researchers, navigating an exciting but often uncertain stage of their careers. We have prioritised stimulating opportunities for students and early-stage scientists to build their skills and to not miss out on interdisciplinary interactions and meaningful knowledge exchange. As part of this, we established a pioneering Impact Fellowship scheme focused on growing our researcher’s skills in co-production, engagement, communications and policy work – the first of its kind. We also ran a ‘discipline hopping’ scheme for the first time, enabling engineering students to spend 8-week summer placements embedded within hospitals to deepen their understanding of the interdisciplinary collaborations that underpin healthcare engineering’s impact.

Read on to find out more about all of this and for a deeper dive into our activity across six chapters that correspond to our different, identified priority areas; Research, Translation & Industry, Careers, Engagement, Education and Global.

We hope you enjoy the read and we welcome you to get involved with our initiatives in the coming year!