University celebrates triple win at Education North Awards
14 May 2026
Colleagues honoured for tackling cancer, nurturing young scientists and saving peatbogs.
Our University is celebrating three honours at the Education North Awards (ENAs).
Director of the CRUK National Biomarker Centre, Professor Caroline Dive was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Our Science and Engineering Education Research and Innovation Hub (SEERIH) team won the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Initiative Award for its outreach programme, Great Science Share for Schools.
And our University and Yorkshire Wildlife Trust KTP took the Sustainable Green Initiative – University Sector Award for PeatFix, a project to save the county’s peatlands.
The ENAs celebrate excellence, high achievement and improvement across the North and bring together hundreds of academics, students, executives and businesspeople as well as politicians to applaud the development and growth of the sector.
Caroline Dive – awarded a CBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honour List for services to cancer research – is a world leader in developing ‘liquid biopsies’ to hunt cancer cells that have broken free from tumours and are circulating in the bloodstream. Her work on developing simple blood tests to capture cancer cells could help researchers understand how lung cancer changes as it grows and spreads, and how it can become resistant to treatment. In turn, this will open up opportunities to develop new therapies to treat this disease more effectively.
Caroline joined Manchester in 1990, ostensibly for three years, but stayed as she realised this was a place where basic and clinical research can interface: “There are very few places where this could happen so effectively, so I’ve never left.”
The Great Science Share is a long-standing Manchester success story, having secured UNESCO National Patronage for a third year in 2026, with more than 830,000 young people in 50 countries registering to ask, investigate and share science.
It was set up by SEERIH in 2016 as part of its programme to engage schoolchildren in STEM subjects by providing their teachers with innovative, research-informed continuous professional development programmes.
The team have provided more than 40,000 hours of training and supported more than 1,000 science subject leaders with academic leads, specialist officers, data analysts and programme administrators working together to sustain delivery and evaluation at scale.
International partnerships are also deepening – SEERIH’s approaches are becoming embedded in collaborative programmes and funding bids across Europe and beyond. And at a policy level, SEERIH continues to contribute evidence to teacher development strategy and national curriculum reform.
PeatFix is an innovative joint project between Manchester researchers and the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust to save the county’s peat bogs.
Pioneered through an Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) between our University and the Trust, its hydroseeding technique successfully re-vegetates steep, degraded peat slopes – critical for reducing carbon emissions, improving biodiversity, and mitigating flood risk.
The partnership – which includes researchers Dr Emma Shuttleworth, former SEED of School and Honorary Professor of Geography Martin Evans and Emeritus Professor of Geography Tim Allott – demonstrates how academic expertise and conservation practice can combine to tackle one of the UK’s most pressing environmental challenges.
For full details of the awards, visit: