UCL Mechanical Engineering graduate is triple competition winner for innovative project

UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) has recently named Dr Katherine Wang the winner of its 2022 Healthy Ageing Catalyst Awards, delivered in partnership with Zinc. The award is part of the wider Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge, a global competition founded by the US National Academy of Medicine. Katherine's proposal was chosen out of 1,170 total applications.

The highly competitive award – worth £62,500 – is granted annually to research-based ideas that offer solutions to significant human problems and aim to transform lives as people age. Katherine is among the youngest awardees for her project LymphMotion, a wearable med-tech device aimed at helping alleviate the pain and symptoms of lymphedema, a chronic disease affecting between 140 to 250 million people worldwide.

Katherine’s inspiration for working to address lymphedema – a departure from her PhD research on orthopaedic trauma – is her late uncle, who had developed lymphedema as a consequence of being treated for stage four lung cancer. There was little information provided about lymphoedema at the time, and he had not been offered adequate treatment to alleviate the pain and swelling caused by the disease. Seeking to help improve the lives of other patients with the same condition, Katherine enrolled in a summer school programme delivered by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, where she met with clinicians in the field and developed her vision for LymphMotion. Her project won first prize.

The project has since won multiple other competitions, including the venture programme Conception X, which awarded Katherine £1,000 in 2020, the UCL Innovation & Enterprise competition SPERO 4, which Katherine won in July 2022, and the Materials and Manufacturing in Healthcare Innovation Network (MMHIN) ‘Dragon's Den’ competition, which awarded her £5,000 earlier this year.

On her award win, Katherine said:

““Being at the start of my research career, to be fresh out of my PhD and receive a UKRI-funded award to develop my project and vision is very exciting and humbling to me”, noting that her advice to other students starting out on a similar path is to “not be afraid of trying new things – sometimes they turn out the way they’re meant to be”.