Continuing our Meet the Team series, Elaine Sneddon looks back on a varied week visiting project partners and catching up with colleagues to produce lively content and promote the work of Interface.

“I am a marketing executive within the marketing team at Interface and have quite a varied role from planning and organising events to writing client case studies, to developing campaigns to support business engagement and liaising with partners within the innovation ecosystem to promote what we do.

Things seem to be ramping up again after the “lull” of summer and this week was particularly varied and busy.

Monday

We are in the process of developing new academic content for our website and aim to develop “academic profiles” both written and video, to show different academic career journeys and highlight the benefits to be gained as an academic in engaging with industry whether as a student on a student project, as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership Associate or an Early Career Researcher or as a full-time academic.  I met with my colleague Lesley Judge, Strategic Programmes Executive, to discuss potential interview questions for the profiles and a new case study involving a multi-group project on how to handle visitor management in the tourism sector – we both live in Glasgow and it’s nice to get together face-to- face over a coffee and a scone rather than a Teams call.

Tuesday – as I work part time this is one of my days off which means life admin, visit to physio, lunch with my daughter and we also got our nails done!

Wednesday   

A big part of my role is writing case studies for our website on successful client projects and collaborations that we have been involved in and showing their business journey.  This involves working with the business and the academics involved, collecting information on the collaboration, its outcomes and benefits, acquiring testimonials, and then drafting up the case study and gaining final sign-off.  We also like to create videos to bring these case studies to life and so today my colleague Glen, our digital marketing executive who creates our video content, and I visited Prozymi Biolabs Ltd at the Roslin Institute. We interviewed Ioannis Stasinopoulos, co-founder of Prozymi, his colleagues Niki Christopoulou and Austin Burroughs, along with Dominic Kurian, Facility Manager of the Proteomics and Metabolomics lab at Roslin, and our Business Engagement colleague, Louise Arnold, who has been instrumental in helping Ioannis and his team.

Prozymi Biolabs, a biotech start-up, has developed a pioneering method to craft gluten-safe bread and baked goods using a new enzyme technology that degrades gliadin, the protein that causes food sensitivities. Through collaboration with academic partners and participation in incubator programs, the company is poised to further advance its research and development efforts, paving the way for a new era of gluten-free innovation.

Thursday

Today we had a Marketing Team planning day in the Edinburgh office where we had a packed agenda discussing themes and initiatives for 2024/25, our delivery plan and supporting marketing plan including ideas on how to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of our Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards coming up in March 2025 and Interface’s 20^th Anniversary in August 2025.

For lunch we walked from our offices in Potterrow, through Bristo Square to the Edinburgh Futures Institute and meandered through the Book Festival hoping to get some inspiration from the Edinburgh Fringe to help with our brainstorming.  Some interesting ideas emerged so watch this space.

It was also our colleague Glen’s birthday, so we managed to squeeze in some cake too!

Friday

Friday is another day off for me and the start of my weekend.”

Main photo by Glen Rutter shows the site visit by Interface team members to Prozymi Biolabs Ltd at the Roslin Institute. Elaine Sneddon is on the right.