Joe Murphy

When did you start at EI?

I’ve been with EI since November 2021

How would you explain your job to an alien?

I help Early Career Researchers at the University to translate their research from lab-based ideas into useful tools in the “real” world outside of the university. I provide bespoke 1:1 support which can be highly diverse from project to project but often includes the early validation of translational ideas. I help academics figure out whether or not their idea has enough potential to justify their time, effort and resources to pursue. If they conclude it does, I can assist them with convincing funding bodies of the same thing.

What did you do before EI?

Before EI I worked for the University of Manchester Innovation Factory, the Tech Transfer arm of UoM. I started out as a team admin with no previous experience in, or knowledge of, research commercialisation. I did a lot of my learning on the job by pestering the various Project and IP Managers on what they were doing to prepare commercialisation projects for decision-making meetings on patenting, licensing and spinout formation.

When our office went into lockdown in March of 2020 and UoM implemented an institution-wide hiring freeze, I received something of a battlefield promotion and was gradually given some of the more straightforward commercialisation projects to manage myself. I worked hard to make sure I could argue a solid case that the University should invest in the commercialisation of my portfolio. I also benefitted from the goodwill of everybody in the Tech Transfer office who taught me the job. In particular, I am intensely grateful to the Head of IP who delivered personal 1:1 IP training. My monkey see, monkey do approach paid off in the long run.

What’s the best thing about working at EI/the University of Edinburgh?

The best thing about working at EI is the degree of freedom I am given in my role. I often say that I am blessed with the best job at the University, keeping eyes and ears out for Early Career folk with good ideas. 

Once I’ve met with ECRs, my sole purpose is to help them out in any way that I can to move their developments on and secure funding. I get to see my efforts translate into tangible impacts on an early career in relatively short windows of time. 

Fortunately, Edinburgh has no shortage of really talented and inspiring researchers, and there is never a dull moment learning about what manner of witchcraft folks are cooking up in their labs; technology which, in many cases, I couldn’t even have imagined. 

Favourite project that you’ve worked on? (as many or as few as you like) What did the project accomplish?

One of my first projects at EI. An ECR at the Roslin Institute had leveraged previous expertise in microfluidics to present a novel idea for taking non-invasive biomarker samples from the lungs of sheep to evaluate the success of genetic therapies in cystic fibrosis research.

I engaged with this project in the very early stage with some market analysis and IP searching, and loudly supported it at the funding panel meeting, assisting in securing £5K for the build of an early prototype device. The ECR has been incredibly successful from these early stages and has landed over £100K in additional funding as well as an Innovation Fellowship at the University. It was pretty amazing to me at the time what a difference a relatively small cash injection could make, both to an early invention and to the trajectory of an ECR’s career.

What are you most proud of from your time at EI?

I am now responsible for the ECR Support Team’s seed funding process from which the above project benefited (This funding is currently open), and I actively tour around the university delivering training on how to validate early research projects, gathering the requisite information to secure further funding support. 

I’m proud to be a point of contact for many in our Business Development team where market analysis is concerned, and I get the opportunity to input on all kinds of diverse projects from early-stage Seed Fund and Innovation Competitions to large-scale DPFS and Follow-On Fund applications worth millions. I can take feedback from these activities at all levels to better understand and inform our ECR cohort on what makes a good application, and how to make proposals more attractive to funders. 

What does innovation mean to you? 

Innovation to me means exercising creativity to solve problems with new approaches. There seems to be a common public misconception of scientists and academics: that they are not very creative types and are purely analytical minds with little imagination. I fiercely disagree. The ingenuity on display around the university is amazing, with interdisciplinary efforts from all corners of the university coming together to collaborate and invent.

If you had one more hour in the day, how would you spend it?

I would be in my garage. I’m often engaged in some left-field project in my free time, and at the moment it’s learning to weld. My Dad was a pipefitter/welder in his early career and often takes credit for a small HVAC duct that you can see standing tall over the Trinity statue outside the East Stand at Old Trafford. He readily admits that it could have been tucked away neatly, but he made it 6 inches taller for no reason except he’d be able to see it from the car park. I probably shame his expertise with my early welding attempts, but I’m slowly getting better.

What piece of advice has stuck with you?

In my first job as a freshly minted graduate, I ended up working a short stint for a recruitment agency. I quickly disliked this job, but it did teach me a lot about maintaining good working relationships. As part of my early induction, my manager said to me “at the end of the day, people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel”. I try to hold this as something of a guiding principle, and hope that everyone I work with feels like I respect their feelings, ideas and ambitions. I do.

What would you really like to work on at EI/UoE? 

I’m keen to push more efforts to bring together folks from across the University and encourage them to talk to each other about their research ideas. I have come across so many instances of research teams working towards the same goals with complementary approaches, but who are completely unaware of one another. 

I would like to push for more “design thinking” style events for bigger funds that stress interdisciplinary research as part of their scoping requirements. With enough lead time, I’d like to pick one of the bigger value funds and hold an event where potential lead investigators could pitch an idea or approach to a group of potential co-investigators, who may themselves be able to lend different perspectives and skillsets to the problem. We could come out of an event like that with a completely different, better idea than the sum of any ideas we had when we went in!