‘We Are Hallam’ Creating Knowledge pillar focus 11-15 March 2019.
To finish off our CK week it is great to have a number of impressive funding successes to celebrate so far this year.
- Dr Susan Campbell in the Department of Biosciences and Chemistry has been awarded part of a £2.1million grant from Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity and Sparks, the children’s medical research charity, to fund research into the advancement of treatment of Vanishing White Matter Disease (VWMD).
- Professors Christine Le Maitre (BMRC) and Chris Sammon (MERI) have been awarded £1.13m as part of a Horizon 2020 award for ‘iPSpine‘ examining a cell-based approach for the biological repair of degenerate spinal discs. The €14M project is led by the University of Utrecht and involves twenty university, industry and research partners across eight European countries and two international partners in the USA and Hong Kong.
- Professor Mike Coldwell, head of the Centre for Development and Research in Education, is leading an interdisciplinary team of English teaching specialists, statisticians, psychologists and researchers from across the SSH faculty to evaluate REACH Primary. It’s a programme to help young readers improve word recognition and language comprehension. This is our 13th national randomised control trial (RCT) for the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), bringing our income from EEF over the past 5 years to around £1.5m.
- Professor Babak Akhgar and the CENTRIC team have secured four Horizon 2020 awards with a value of £1.2m in the fields of: technologies and migration; cyber-security; Internet of Things platform development and security of water networks.
- Martin Howarth (National Centre of Excellence for Food Engineering) has secured projects with a value of £1.2m from the ERDF (£619k) to support the build and equip the new facility and Innovate UK (£544k) to support the next generation of rice processing which is part of a £32.1m project involving UK and Chinese partners. The project aims to develop a novel, digital milling process, that will intuitively respond and adapt to potential process failures, reduce milled waste and inject an additional amount of high quality rice worth a further £1.2bn to regional farming communities.You can find out more detail about the project here
Over the last couple of years, our PGR bursaries (like the VC bursaries) have focused increasingly on collaborative awards. These have the benefit of allowing us to fund more and engage partners in research projects.
As a university we do need to collaborate more to submit larger, higher value bids and to invest the required time and effort into developing them to give them the best chances of success. But bid writing is a skill that is learnt through experience and, depending on the stage of your career, smaller bids can provide that experience and, if chosen wisely, provide valuable funding to help develop your research programme. Below is a list of some of our successful scholarship awarded across the last two academic years.
Collaborative VC’s and CK scholarships 2017/18, 2018/19
Vice Chancellor’s PhD Scholarships 2017
| Faculty | Title | DoS | Match-funder |
| ACES MERI | Development, verification and validation of automotive interior cabin noise models using coupled multi-physics approach based on ‘Aero-Vibro’ acoustics. |
Harish Viswanathan | HORIBA MIRA Ltd. |
| ACES MERI | High performance polymers: Towards intrinsically-auxetic polymers | Andy Alderson | Michelin |
| ACES MERI | REDUCING ENERGY DEMAND AND EMISSIONS FROM CERAMIC MANUFACTURE | Paul Bingham | Wienerberger Ltd. |
| ACES MERI | The design, preparation and characterization of composite polymer membranes | Francis Clegg | PIL Membranes Ltd |
| D&S | Pathways to reintegration for female offenders in prison | David Best | Key Changes |
| HWB CSER | Characterising player movement on hybrid football surfaces | David James | ADIDAS |
| HWB CSES | Exploring the impact of the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine co-location model on health, social and economic outcomes | Rob Copeland | NCSEM |
| HWB BMRC | Human identification through advanced forensic mass spectrometry of blood and fingermarks | Simona Francese | DSTL |
| HWB BMRC | Bladder tissue engineering using auxetic materials | Christine Le Maitre | Pioneer Healthcare Ltd |
Vice Chancellor’s PhD Scholarships 2018
| Faculty | Title | DoS | Match-funder |
| ACES – MERI | UNDERSTANDING COMPOSITION-STRUCTURE-PROPERTY-PHASE RELATIONS IN HIGH Fe2O3 RADIOACTIVE WASTE GLASSES FOR THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE, USA. | Paul Bingham | US Dept of Energy |
| ACES – MERI | PHOSPHATE SOLUBILITY AND IMPACTS ON PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE GLASSES FOR DECOMMISSIONING OF THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE, USA | Paul Bingham | US Dept of Energy |
| ACES – MERI | Understanding Cold Cap – Glass Melt Migration in Radioactive Waste Glass Melting | Paul Bingham | US Dept of Energy |
| ACES – MERI | Modelling the molecular behaviour underpinning new liquid crystal-based devices | Doug Cleaver | Merck Chemicals Ltd |
| ACES – MERI | Understanding of and optimising peracetic acid-based disinfectant formulations for infection control | Francis Clegg | Sky Chemicals (UK) Ltd |
2018 CK collaborative scholarships
| Centre/Dept Faculty | Title | DoS | Match-funder |
| CRESR
SSH |
Community ownership of assets: understanding the growth in activity and its spatial distribution | Tom Archer | Power to Change |
| E&M
STA |
ENFUSE – Effective Neutron-Spectrometry for Fusion Environments | Robin Smith | Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) UKAEA |
| BMRC
HWB |
Extracellular vesicles: small packages with a big role in bowel cancer metastasis | Nick Peake | Bowel & Cancer Research |
| E&M
STA |
Preventing erosion-corrosion loss of Ta-W spallation neutron source target material | Buddhadev Jana | Rutherford Appleton Laboratory |
| Sport
HWB |
Playing Squash to Improve Health & Wellbeing: Quantifying physiological and psychological demands towards advanced age | Mayur Ranchordas | England Squash and English Institute of Sport |
