Beate Ehrhardt, Research Fellow at the Institute for Mathematical Innovation, has been awarded EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account funding (IAA).
The IAA Assessment Panel approved Beate’s project, ‘IAA – Spatially Aware Plate Layouts (SAPL): Incorporating Known Structure into Randomized Plate Layouts’, agreeing to provide funding of up to £47,560 for a duration of 8 months from May 2026.
Multi-well plate experiments are central to biomedical research, yet spatial artefacts—such as edge effects and clustering—can compromise reproducibility and statistical robustness, often necessitating additional experiments, increased uncertainty estimates, and ultimately a larger number of animals in follow-up studies. Spatially Aware Plate Layouts (SAPL) is a novel controlled randomisation framework that integrates spatial constraints into experimental design. Unlike full randomisation, SAPL ensures spatial balance (e.g. control dispersion, row-column balance), improving normalisation and downstream analysis.
About the project, Beate says,
“We have developed a working prototype of SAPL as an open-access web tool requiring no coding expertise (1-year consultancy project). It reduces operator bias and cuts plate design time from one day to 15 minutes. Since July 2025, the functional genomics team at AstraZeneca has integrated SAPL into their workflow. We’ve secured IMI small grant funding to raise awareness (publication, poster presentation) and facilitate usage. IAA funding will support two medium-term goals: generalising SAPL beyond genomics and AstraZeneca, and embedding it into collaborators’ workflows for sustainability. This project builds on my EPSRC-aligned mathematical research and supports the EPSRC priority of transforming healthcare by reducing costs, and reliance on animal testing.“
The EPSRC IAA funding at Bath helps to speed up the contribution that research makes towards innovation across industry, business, charities and the public sector. Since the inception of the award in 2012, the EPSRC has awarded the University of Bath over £6 million and leveraged funds of more than £10 million, to support knowledge exchange and impact activities across our institution.
Congratulations to Beate on her latest award!