Finalists pitched their projects to our expert panel on Tuesday 19th of May and a winner was selected! Chair Andrew McBryde with competition winner Dan Edwards and runners-up Becca Belmonte and Marcin Kedziera. Congratulations to Dan Edwards for being awarded the 2026 IRR Innovator Competition prize! The yearly competition is open to all IRR early career researchers (PhD students, Post Docs and Research Fellows) and Technical staff, with funding prize of £5,000 for the winning entry. The competition has been running annually since 2018 and has 3 main aims; to promote engagement with the translation and commercialisation of research, to provide an upskilling opportunity in communicating science and delivering a pitch, and to seed new early career researcher led translational activity at IRR.Finalists from previous years have gone on to achieve great things. Last year’s winner, Ferran Nadal-Bufi, has had direct engagement with industry on the Antibody Drug Conjugate (ADC) technology developed during his project. Last year’s runners-up, Nisreen Al Namnam, My Linh Huynh and Zahid Mushtaq have gone on secure either funding or take part in incubator and accelerator programmes. The expert judging panel this year comprised Hayley Gooding from Concept Life Sciences, Lissa Herron from Converge Challenge, and IRR’s own Douglas Gibson, a previous IRR Innovator Winner. The event was chaired by Dr Andrew McBryde, Entrepreneur in Residence at Edinburgh Innovations.Dan’s project, Detect-PD, aims to develop a non-invasive diagnostic approach for early detection of parkinson’s disease. He will be presenting his winning pitch again at the IRR Symposium in June. The IRR Innovator competition provided a fantastic opportunity to present my research to a broad audience and think creatively about its future commercial impact. I'm grateful for the insight and comments from the panel and look forward to using the award to progress the project to the next stage. Dan Edwards IRR Innovator Winner 2026 The other finalists presenting at the event were Becca Belmonte, whose project centres on testing novel therapeutic drug targets in difficult-to-treat adult acute myeloid leukaemia, and Marcin Kedziera who pitched a project on rapid diagnostics through intelligent live-cell imaging and AI data generation. Congratulations to both runners-up for their excellent presentations and projects. About Dan Dan Edwards is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Edinburgh Single-Molecule Biophysics group, specialising in the development of approaches to study biological membranes and neurodegeneration. His research focuses on applying advanced biophysical techniques to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying disease. He brings broad experience across academia, the pharmaceutical industry, and government, including work in drug development and science-informed policymaking. This diverse background shapes his interdisciplinary approach to tackling complex challenges in neurodegenerative research. More about the competition on IRR Sharepoint (need UoE Login) Concept Life Sciences Converge Challenge Publication date 25 May, 2026
