Blue sky, green thinking
Welcome to EPIC – the Essex Plant Innovation Centre.
The Essex Plant Innovation Centre brings together the research skills, expertise and technologies across our science faculty (Life Sciences, Computer Science and Electronic Engineering) together with the Institute for Analytics and Data Science (IADS) and Essex Business School to address the grand challenges facing farmers, technologists and all those in the agricultural and horticultural sectors.
The Centre aims to deliver and expand our research in these areas as well as our engagement with industry and end users. Combining our expertise in these various areas provides us with the opportunity to explore new opportunities to engage with industry.
Our mission is to take the best of our science to meet these grand challenges by creating synergies across departments and collaborating on solving the important questions facing the food industry. We have the ambition of developing a sustainable funding model for our plant/environmental research fit for the rigours of the emerging UK research environment.
We reach beyond the confines of academia as EPIC has a clear mandate to work with to all parts of the agri-tech and environmental industry to address both fundamental questions and deliver solutions to real-world problems through a productive relationship with academic researchers and business partners.
We’re different because we bring a commercial mind-set to our work. It’s in the simple things that make for great customer service in the business world, and we embody those in our everyday thinking. We’re responsive to your needs. We work hard to make sure you are getting the outputs you want, when you want them. We’re not bound by tradition, and offer fresh perspective and innovation in all we do.
We want to be the people you think of first when you ask the difficult questions.