Swansea University has secured over three quarters of a million-pounds from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through its Bridging the Gaps scheme, to fund innovative cross-disciplinary research.
The University has been awarded the largest grant of £790,239 from the total £3.5m available through the scheme and was one of only four UK Higher Education institutions to secure funding, despite strong competition from 58 other UK universities. It is also the first time an award under the scheme has been made to a Welsh institution.
The funding will enable academics from six major research areas across the University, including the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities, Engineering, Environment and Society, Law, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences, to build a programme of activities that will stimulate creative thinking, across disciplines that reflect institutional strengths and strategies.
One of the main objectives of the EPSRC’s three-year programme is to dismantle institutional and cultural barriers to cross-disciplinary research, to deliver high-quality projects directed towards the physical, economic and social challenges that face us.
Swansea’s bid – Bringing People Together – grew from a series of pilot-projects, seedcorn-funded by the University, which linked Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities researchers with partners in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) areas to produce innovative and sustainable ways of carrying out cross-disciplinary research.
Some of these pilot projects, which finally led up to the successful Bridging the Gaps bid, included a Geophysics, Engineering and Egyptology collaboration, using radar to investigate an early Egyptian burial ground, and the use of computer simulations to investigate ‘balance of power’ systems in International Relations.
These projects will be among those that can draw on the Bridging the Gaps funding for further development. Other examples areas for collaboration, in line with Swansea University’s research strengths, include the Digital Economy (Future Interaction Technology (FIT), Services Science, Heritage Science, Wireless Technologies, Visualisation), Lifelong Health and Wellbeing (Ageing, NanoHealth, Migration, Criminology, Social Policy, Vulnerable People), Security (Cybercrime, Public Communication, Law, Unmanned Air Vehicles) and Environmental Change (Glaciology, Disaster Management, Migration, Computational Modelling).
The team behind Swansea’s successful Bridging the Gaps bid, led by Principal Investigator Professor Harold Thimbleby, from the Department of Computer Science, will now be issuing a series of calls across the University for collaborative research bids, which will see researchers in Arts and Humanities and others joining with researchers in STEM subjects to produce new models for research.
Professor Harold Thimbleby, the project’s Principal Investigator, said: “The key focus of our bid was on ‘bringing people together’, to develop collaborative research between the Engineering, Physical Sciences, Arts and Humanities, and Social Science communities.
“This Bridging the Gaps funding will empower Swansea researchers to plan and invest in effective people-based activities of their own choosing, though mechanisms including visiting fellows, public lectures, artists in residence, exhibitions, research assistants, staff exchange programmes, and so on. It is very flexible and very exciting.”
Professor Helen Fulton, Co-Investigator and Director of the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities (RIAH) at Swansea University, said: “This is the first time that such a large award under this scheme has been made to a Welsh institution.
“Because RIAH has been set up to promote cross-disciplinary projects, we were able to submit some dynamic and relevant projects for funding under the pilot scheme, and we will now be looking for more projects, which will bring the expertise of Arts and Humanities together with STEM research to produce new kinds of outputs with measurable social and economic impacts.
“RIAH will play a central role in identifying and promoting projects which can apply for funding under the Bringing People Together grant.”
Further information about Swansea University’s Bridging the Gaps project can be found at http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/I00145X/1.
