Join the Henry Royce Institute for Our Flagship National Conference 2025
3-4th September 2025 | Manchester
Unlocking UK economic growth through materials innovation
Discover the transformative power of materials innovation at our biennial two-day event. The National Conference 2025 will delve into how collaboration between industry and academia is revolutionising materials innovation and driving advancements across sectors.
Materials are at the heart of high-value manufacturing and are critical for addressing society's grand challenges in mobility, healthcare, energy, and more. This conference offers a unique opportunity to engage with experts and explore the pivotal role materials innovation plays in innovation and sustainability.
As a global leader in materials research, Royce is driving and supporting solutions that shape national and regional priorities. By combining world-class expertise, cutting-edge facilities, and technical skills, we assist academia and industry in solving real-world challenges.
Conference Highlights
Our 2025 conference will feature expert speakers from industry, academia, government, and research funding councils. The event will build on the recently launched National Materials Innovation Strategy's core themes, including:
- Energy Solutions: Efficient and sustainable energy generation, storage, transmission, and usage to achieve net-zero goals. "Rising to the net-zero challenge."
- Future Healthcare: Advancing beyond biocompatibility to deliver active medical solutions.
- Structural Innovations: Strengthening infrastructure, the built environment, and transport systems.
- Advanced Surface Technologies: Enhancing product functionality, performance, and longevity.
- Next-Generation Electronics and Sensors: Driving high-performance connectivity for the future.
- Consumer Products and Polymers: Innovating for greener, sustainable packaging and products.
In addition, the conference will address essential cross-sector topics:
- Materials 4.0 – looking at how transitioning to greater use of digital tools will accelerate materials innovation – drastically reducing the lead time to commercialisation
- Sustainability and the Circular Economy – exploring how we create a more resilient economy through materials innovation that has “sustainable by design” at the heart of our supply chains
- Translation and Manufacturing – too often in the UK, groundbreaking materials research is scaled and commercialised abroad, we’ll address the need to secure access to appropriate financing and better coordination across public and private sector funding streams.
- Skills Development - the materials sector faces higher-than-average skills shortages and must rise to the challenge of identifying and closing current and future materials skills gaps, particularly at in the highest priority cross-cutting areas of Materials 4.0 and sustainability
- Policy, Regulations, and Standards - our regulatory environment needs to deliver a supportive, flexible ecosystem for materials innovation by providing clarity, consistency and incentives. The materials community must collaborate closely with policymakers to facilitate these outcomes
Join us to gain insights, foster collaborations, and shape the future of materials innovation.