Engagement
Addressing student food insecurity
Queen Mary and Queen Mary Students’ Union provide a programme of support for students experiencing food insecurity and hunger.
During 2024-25, students could access two food pantries at Mile End and Whitechapel. Both operate as emergency services for Queen Mary students in need of short-term food assistance, with the Whitechapel pantry available 24 hours.
Students facing immediate financial difficulty can also access the Queen Mary Supermarket Voucher Scheme, which normally provides an eligible student with a £25 supermarket voucher for food, toiletries and other essential items.
Queen Mary also provides free access to microwaves, hot water and other basic campus facilities, helping students prepare food and reduce everyday living costs. These measures provide an established programme addressing student food insecurity and direct interventions to prevent or alleviate hunger among students.
Food, fishing livelihoods and community knowledge
Queen Mary works with fishing communities to share and preserve knowledge about food, livelihoods and coastal environments.
Through the 2024-25 Seasoned by the Sea project, Queen Mary supported a collaborative bilingual community cookbook developed with coastal communities from India’s Coromandel Coast.
The cookbook brings together recipes, methods and stories from people whose livelihoods are closely connected to fishing and seafood production, including fishers, fish vendors and coastal food businesses. It also documents the links between food, labour, ecology and coastal environments. This brings the community knowledge into a publicly accessible resource and engagement activity; this project also supports wider understanding of sustainable food systems, fishing livelihoods and the environmental conditions on which coastal food production depends.
Sustainable agricultural technology
In 2024, Queen Mary began a three-year partnership with Saffron Grange Vineyard and Extend Robotics to develop and test technologies for more sustainable and efficient crop production.
The project combines robotics, artificial intelligence, remote sensing and optical imaging to support grape pruning, harvesting and crop-health monitoring. Queen Mary researchers are developing the sensing and analysis technologies with Saffron Grange as the agricultural end user, giving the vineyard direct access to university knowledge, expertise and emerging agricultural technology.
In October 2024, researchers piloted an AI-enabled robotic grape-picking system at the vineyard. The system uses sensors to assess grape ripeness and pressure-sensitive robotic fingers to handle fruit more precisely, supporting improved crop monitoring and harvesting efficiency.
The field demonstration also created a practical knowledge-transfer opportunity between Queen Mary researchers, Extend Robotics and the Saffron Grange vineyard team. The technology was demonstrated in a working vineyard environment and was reported by Fruit & Vine, an industry publication for the UK fruit and wine sector, helping share emerging viticulture technology with a wider producer audience.
Through this partnership, Queen Mary provides a food producer with access to sustainable-agriculture knowledge and university-developed technology, while also creating opportunities for practical exchange between researchers, technology developers and growers.