Karen McGeough is the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) Manager in the KTP Office in the Research and Enterprise Directorate. Karen's role involves cultivating effective relationships with stakeholders to identify and develop high potential projects, and facilitating and supporting partnership building and proposal development.

Background

Prior to joining the Research and Enterprise Directorate in 2016, Karen worked as a researcher and project leader for over 15 years, developing research proposals and fostering collaborations, alongside project delivery and dissemination. This hands-on experience provided important insights to the research process and has proven invaluable in her professional support roles at Queen’s.

Her first research role was in the QUESTOR Centre at Queen’s, where she worked with UK businesses on a range of commercially funded projects on groundwater and contaminated land remediation, whilst completing a PhD in Environmental Engineering part time .

She joined the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute in 2009 as a Senior Scientific Officer, and contributed to the delivery of large-scale multi-partner projects on agricultural greenhouse gas emission mitigation.

Karen returned to Queen's in 2016 as a Business Alliance Officer in the Research and Enterprise Directorate. She provided specialist project management support to the Head of Business Alliance, academic staff, and business stakeholders, and she helped prepare industry linked research proposals, including for both the Bryden Centre and MRC Proximity to Discovery institutional funding.

Find out more about Karen's career at LinkedIn

Current roles and responsibilities

Karen has worked as a KTP Manager in the Research and Enterprise Directorate for four years. The Knowledge Transfer Partnership Programme is one of the UK Government’s flagship innovation programmes. 

A KTP is a mutually beneficial, three-way collaboration between a graduate or post graduate, an organisation, and a university/research institution. Not only do KTP projects provide businesses with access to academic knowledge, they give academic staff the opportunity to apply their research in a real-world setting, generate research income, publications and create impact. Karen's role involves cultivating effective relationships with stakeholders to identify and develop high potential projects, facilitating and supporting partnership building and proposal development.

Karen takes a hands-on approach to supporting academics in their preparation of KTP funding applications, not only providing guidance but actively contributing to the written proposals by providing critical input on funders’ criteria, preparing financial costings, and giving constructive feedback to ensure the strongest possible applications are submitted. She also oversees many aspects of the KTP post-award activity.

At the heart of every KTP is a graduate known as an Associate, who is recruited to transfer the knowledge from academia to industry. In her 4 years as KTP Manager, Karen has recruited 70 KTP Associates into high quality graduate jobs, and many of these Associates will become the business leaders of the future. 

Contribution to specific research initiative or project

KTPs can act as the catalyst of future key strategic relationships for the University; and Karen strives to ensure Queen’s delivers an exceptionally high-quality responsive professional service, enabling academic staff to focus on embedding their research, allowing the relationship with the industry partners to flourish.

During Karen's time as KTP Manager, Queen’s long-term track record and outstanding reputation as a leading KTP participating university has been sustained.  The Team's operating model continues to be the ‘gold standard’ for KTP management, and is now replicated in many Universities.

Key successes including: Winner of Innovate UK’s ‘KTP Best of the Best’ Award for the Best KTP Support Team; Winner of Innovate UK’s ‘Engineering Excellence Award’; Four of Queen’s Associates have been awarded the prestigious accolade of ‘Future Innovator’ in the last 2 years; extending KTP internationally via the award of an Agri-Africa KTP project in Ghana; and Karen was nominated in the ‘Support for Research’ category of the 2021 VC Prizes, which recognises non-academic staff that have made an outstanding contribution to the pursuit of research.