Professor Sondipon Adhikari from the School of Engineering at Swansea University has been awarded a prestigious Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society for his nanotechnology research.
Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the awards scheme aims to support universities in enabling them to attract to the UK or to retain, respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.
Professor Adhikari is an international authority on the uncertainty quantification in the computational predictions of complex systems. He is the only academic in Wales to receive a Wolfson Award this year.
The Wolfson Award, which provides funding for five years, will allow Professor Adhikari to take nanotechnology research to the next level by linking the nano scale to the macro scale using novel length-scale bridging approaches.
The project will develop theoretical and computational methods to quantify and model uncertainty across the length scales and will be validated by laboratory based experiments.
A key aim of this research would be to understand how the physics and inherent uncertainty at different scales interact.
There are situations when even a small uncertainty in the nano-scale can bring significant changes in the macro-scale behaviour. Such extreme sensitivity is well known in biological systems where even a small change in the gene can have significant macro-scale effect.
Similarly, the opposite case may also exist, where the macro-scale properties can be fairly insensitive to large uncertainties at the nano-scale. Some nano-composite materials show this type of robust behaviour. The proposed research will shed new lights in these understandings.
If the research is successful, it will positively impact on a number of areas such as the self-assembly process in biological systems and future nano-manufacturing.
The research merit award will allow the promotion and dissemination of the new results and form new multidisciplinary collaborations for the exploitation and further advancement of the scientific methods.
Vice-Chancellor at Swansea University, Professor Richard B Davies said: “This Wolfson Research Merit Award is a well-deserved accolade for an outstanding scholar. I am delighted that the Royal Society has recognised the world-leading qualities of Professor Adhikari’s research and join with all his colleagues at Swansea in congratulating him on this remarkable achievement.”
Professor Adhikari said: “I am absolutely delighted to receive this prestigious award from the Royal Society. Swansea is a truly outstanding place to conduct internationally leading research. This award will enable me to foster further multidisciplinary collaborations. I am looking forward to the next five years of exciting research in Swansea.”
Professor Adhikari has published more than 90 journal papers on his research interests, which include structural dynamics, stochastic nanomechanics and model validation of complex systems. In 2008 he was the recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize worth £70,000, which recognised his outstanding contributions in the field of computational uncertainty quantification. Part of his current research is supported by two Newton International Fellowships, also funded by the Royal Society.
For more information about the The Royal Society, visit: http://royalsociety.org.
For further information about the School of Engineering, visit: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/engineering/.
