Accelerate Impact: Oxford’s Impact Acceleration Account Conference 2025

An event to celebrate and learn from the impact of Oxford’s research across all disciplines

Thursday 9 October 2025 | 09:30–17:30
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford

Registration is now open!

On Thursday 9 October, the Oxford Impact Acceleration Account Conference will bring together researchers from across the University of Oxford working on Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) projects, alongside external project partners. The event, Accelerate Impact, is a chance to celebrate and explore the range of economic, social, and policy impacts these collaborations have achieved to date.

The conference is free. Register here to attend.

Background

In 2022 the University of Oxford was awarded over £7 million in UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) IAA funding, which is aimed at ‘fuelling the best, brightest and most disruptive ideas’ from UK research institutions. Through this support, researchers at Oxford have been able to respond to impact opportunities quickly and efficiently, accelerating the application of their research to help solve some of the complex challenges faced by society, government, industry, businesses and third sector organisations.

About the conference

Accelerate Impact will showcase how IAA projects have enabled Oxford researchers to build new partnerships, exchange ideas and knowledge and unlock the value of their work, and celebrate engagement and impact underpinned by research from all disciplines – medical sciences, biosciences, engineering and physical sciences, social sciences and humanities.

The conference is aimed at all University of Oxford researchers, engagement and impact professionals, and colleagues from business, government, third sector, and policy communities. We welcome those already collaborating and those with an interest in working with University of Oxford’s researchers, as well as those interested in research impact who are based outside our institution, including those beyond our region.

What to expect

The programme will feature morning parallel sessions from the five Oxford IAAs (BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC and STFC) on how IAA support has boosted their research impact. In the afternoon, two parallel panel discussions will explore how researchers can collaborate across disciplines to tackle pressing complex challenges such as health, climate change and sustainability.

Throughout these sessions we aim to share best practice in knowledge exchange and impact.

The conference will also include keynote speeches and a networking showcase of selected IAA-funded projects that highlight the diversity, range and scale of impact achieved by Oxford’s research.

We anticipate that participants come away with a better understanding of how IAA support can:

• – help them engage with non-academic partners so that their research outputs can be used, adopted, commercialised to help society and make a difference;
• – provide early-stage support to take their research to the next stage in the impact pipeline, for example as proof of concept (POC) project, for commercialisation, towards market validation, or with activities targeting policy, business and the third sector.

Register to attend

Join us on 9 October to connect, share, and explore the future of impact-driven research at Oxford and beyond. Spaces are limited, register here to attend.

If you have any queries about the conference, please contact the conference secretariat: epsrciaa@mpls.ox.ac.uk

You can find our privacy notice for the University of Oxford Impact Acceleration Account Conference here.

Supported by

The conference is brought to you through the generous support of the University of Oxford’s UKRI Impact Acceleration Account, which includes BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC and STFC IAAs.