Innovation Journeys Across King’s: From Small Ideas to Impact invites staff to explore the innovation already happening across our community. Through a series of inspiring case studies, colleagues from different disciplines and career stages will share how everyday research questions, challenges, and curiosities have evolved into impactful products, therapies, and new ways of working. This session moves beyond polished success stories to reveal real journeys from the below innovators with more to be announced soon:

• Professor Stuart Jones, whose research group develops innovative pharmaceutical formulations and devices. He has eight patents and is developing three medical devices that focus on administration of active ingredients into and through the skin.
• Professor Maria Thanou, research leader in image-guided drug activation methods. She collaborates with a number of biotech and medical device companies and is the main or co-inventor of 10 patents including a new approach in cancer treatment through Apeikon Therapeutics, tackling the widespread side effects caused when anti cancer drugs circulate throughout the body.
• Dr Arthur Galamba is a Senior Lecturer in Science Education at King's College London, where he works in teacher education, digital pedagogy, and science education research. He is the co-founder and pedagogical lead of Collabits, an interactive representational learning platform designed to support collaborative, and hybrid learning. His work focuses on formative assessment, blended and hybrid learning, dialogic teaching, and the development of innovative pedagogical approaches that enhance interaction, feedback, and student engagement in higher education and teacher training.
• Dr Miquel Serna Pascual is a postdoctoral researcher currently working in advanced ECG signal processing for cardiac drug safety assessment. With expertise in data science, he is passionate about facilitating the extraction of actionable knowledge from biomedical datasets thus creating impact by improving health research and care provision. Miquel has also been on the “Innovation-to-Commercialisation of University Research” (ICURe) pre-accelerator and King's Med Tech accelerator programmes.
• Dr Matthew Howard’s research addresses a key challenge in robotics: handling soft, flexible materials like plants, textiles, and food, which traditional grippers struggle with. His breakthrough came from realising that tangling could be used as an effective gripping method, revealing strong commercial potential. With support from King’s, he developed prototypes, secured IP, and built business skills through the Spinout Accelerator, where he also refined his value proposition and founded the Weird Gripper Company. Now focused on industrial pilots in sectors like agriculture and food packaging, his goal is to enable more adaptable, efficient automation while reducing waste and labour pressures.

Attendees will hear honest, practical accounts of how innovation emerges through the routines of research life—how small insights can lead to meaningful change, how setbacks can spark creativity, and how adapting to new challenges is often at the heart of innovative thinking. These personal stories will offer fresh perspectives and practical insights that help demystify the innovation process and show that it is an accessible and achievable goal for King’s researchers.

Celebrating the many pathways innovation can take across disciplines and career stages you’ll gain insight into the mindsets, and KCL teams that support innovation in day to day research and see how colleagues have navigated uncertainty and learned from setbacks along the way. The interactive session combines short showcases, small group reflections, a panel discussion and audience Q&A designed to spark conversation, encourage connection across faculties, and develop your networks. Whether you’re just starting your research journey or already exploring impact, this session will help you see new possibilities for innovation in your own work.

By the end of this session, participants will:

1. Recognise how everyday challenges and insights can spark meaningful innovation.
2. Identify practical approaches and mindsets that support innovation in daily work. 
3. Understand diverse innovation pathways across disciplines and career stages. 

This session is open to all staff at King’s, with relevance for researchers (at all levels) and research support staff who are interested in developing their own innovation journeys and/or guiding others.