Pioneer edition 12 - Issued June 2014 - epsrc

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

EPSRC

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the first 10 years 20th anniversary special

CONTENTS EPSRC: the first 10 years 20th anniversary special

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4-9 1994: EPSRC comes into being; Peter Denyer starts a camera phone revolution; Stephen Salter trailblazes modern wave energy research 10-13 1995: From microwave ovens to biomedical engineering, Professor Lionel Tarassenko’s remarkable career; Professor Peter Bruce – batteries for tomorrow 14-19 1996: Professor Alf Adams, godfather of the internet; Professor Dame Wendy Hall – web science pioneer 20-23 1997: The crucial science behind the world’s first supersonic car; Professor Malcolm Greaves – oil magnate 24-27 1998: Professor Kevin Shakesheff – regeneration man; Professor Ed Hinds – order from quantum chaos

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28-31 1999: Professor Sir Mike Brady – medical imaging innovator; Unlocking the Basic Technologies programme 32-35 2000: Plastic electronics: Professor Sir Richard Friend and colleagues invent a new research discipline; Strategic Partnerships: forging ever-stronger links with industry and key collaborators 36-41 2001: Makers in momentum – the Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre programme; Professor Eric Yeatman, microelectronics maestro 42-45 2002: Professor Dave Hawkes – 3D medical imaging for safer surgery; Professor Sam Kingman – using microwaves to crush rocks 46-49 2003: The future is fusion: a step closer to limitless, clean and safe energy; The SUPERGEN sustainable power generation and supply programme

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50-53 All RISE: Introducing the Recognising Inspirational Scientists and Engineers (RISE) Leaders and their nominated rising stars 54-59 Linking thinking: Building a UK network for computational science 60-66 High and mighty: 20 years of EPSRC investment in high performance computing

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67 Sticky science: Inspired by geckos, André Geim and Konstantin Novoselov invent a new kind of super sticky adhesive

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Big numbers Chief Executive Professor Philip Nelson on EPSRC’s 20th anniversary – and two decades of research excellence Twenty years isn’t very long in the world of research, when a discovery or breakthrough can take decades to reach its destiny. But in the 20 years since EPSRC was formed, the rollcall of inspirational leaders, world-leading research and ground-breaking initiatives has been such that we are devoting two editions of Pioneer to tell the story – and then only scratching its surface.

Since 1994, EPSRC has invested around £11 billion in research and doctoral training. By any measure, this is £11 billion well spent.

As an engineer, I am wary of superlatives, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the fact that in 20 years we have awarded research grants to 28,555 applicants.

From Peter Denyer’s development of the CMOS technology integral to most modern camera phones (pages 6-7) to Alf Adams’ pioneering innovations in quantum well lasers – which are fundamental to sustaining the internet as we know it (pages 18-19) – the underpinning support provided by EPSRC and its predecessors has helped shape the modern world. And, as we move further into the 21st century, we’re investing in the future, too, such as through Professor Ed Hinds’ research into cold atom physics, which could lead to a completely new technology, as significant as electronics or optics (page 32).

Add to this the number of grants on which more than one researcher is named as a co-investigator; factor in the research teams and doctoral students taking part in the project – and then add the myriad industrial and other partners who collaborated – and you get a picture of the sheer numbers of people who have benefited from EPSRC support, and who have used it to further research in engineering and the physical sciences, often spectacularly so.

Now here’s something that may surprise you. In addition to the £11 billion invested by EPSRC, a further £1.7 billion has been contributed by research partners from business, the charitable sector and other investors. This is a powerful endorsement of EPSRC’s founding commitments to both research excellence and to strengthening the pathways between fundamental research and its translation into products and services for the good of the UK

PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

economy and society, and for a healthier and more sustainable world. Returning to those 28,555 research proposals, every one of these will have undergone a rigorous process of peer review, facilitated by dedicated EPSRC staff. This would not have been possible were it not for major initiatives begun in 1994 to develop a robust yet flexible process driven by research excellence and developed through close engagement with the research community. As EPSRC enters its third decade, we will continue to work with the research community to develop processes and initiatives that stay true to our Royal Charter of 1994, and ensure that the resources we invest keep the UK at the cutting edge of international research excellence while developing the research leaders of tomorrow. Such is the breadth and scale of our research and training portfolio, this magazine can but provide a snapshot of the people, projects and achievements from the past 20 years, and the influence many of them are now having on the world. If the past two decades are anything to go by, however, the 40th anniversary edition of Pioneer will be very special indeed.

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1994

GENESIS On April 1 1994, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council came into existence. At first glance, the main difference from EPSRC’s previous incarnation, the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), was its remit – which no longer included astronomy; biotechnology and biological sciences; space research and particle physics. In fact, from its inception, EPSRC was a very different beast from SERC (1981-1994) and its predecessor, the Science Research Council (1965-81). In addition to a more focused remit, from Day One EPSRC set about streamlining its core activities, and its staff adopted a more focused approach to everything they did. An example is the early transition to solely electronic research grant applications. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

With an average of 5,000 submissions per year, at a stroke efficiency was dramatically improved, costs came down and staff had more time to support and engage with the research community.

“Our task is to judge the work we support not only on the excellence of its research, but also on its relevance to the requirements of users in industry, commerce and elsewhere.

Interviewed in1994, Chairman, Dr Alan Rudge (pictured), explained EPSRC’s founding priorities:

“The most important form of technology transfer from the science base is the flow of people out of the universities into industry, commerce and government.

“EPSRC has an exciting and challenging mission to support high-quality research in the UK, and to make significant contributions to national competitiveness and to the quality of life. “There are three main objectives: •

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Developing and sustaining a national core competence in engineering and the physical sciences Maintaining a world-class teaching capability in terms of both technical content and techniques Advancing scientific knowledge

March 29: Serbs and Croats sign a cease-fire to end the war in Croatia

“If we only supported long-term curiositydriven research, we would have a badly balanced portfolio. On the other hand, if we only supported short-term research, driven by immediate and obvious relevance, there would be something seriously amiss. “The object is to maintain a well-balanced portfolio – and this is what EPSRC will seek to achieve.” Over two decades, EPSRC has stayed true to these principles, which are enshrined in its Royal Charter of 1994.

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Olympiadane is a chain of rings and was something of a record in the field of supramolecular chemistry. To get the rings together, the Birmingham team, led by Dr Fraser Stoddart, used supramolecular chemistry – where simple pieces are joined to make more complex supermolecules.

Ring cycle In the summer of 1994, capping a decade of intense research, a team of British chemists from the University of Birmingham and Imperial College London worked out the exact structure of a billionth-scale molecular version of the Olympic emblem, called olympiadane, consisting of five tiny interlocking rings of atoms.

Independent advice In 1994, in a move that set the blueprint for EPSRC’s commitment to wider engagement with the academic, business and stakeholder communities, EPSRC set up two independent advisory panels to advise the chief executive on future research areas and their value. The Technical Opportunities Panel (TOP), which mainly comprised academics, and the User Panel (UP), whose main component was industrialists, advised on how EPSRC’s budget could be divided in order to get maximum benefit, and also suggested priorities for many of EPSRC’s research programme areas. The new panel system was so successful it remained largely unchanged for nearly two decades, and was complemented in 2007 by a Societal Issues Panel (SIP) before evolving into a Strategic Advisory Network in 2011, which offered a more flexible advisory model combining multiple stakeholder perspectives.


The techniques devised to create the molecule may shed light on the process by which life arose from relatively simple chemicals. Research such as this could also lead to new smart polymers that respond to their environment, and superfast, nanoscale devices for the computers of the future.

First funding In 1994, EPSRC was allocated £364 million by the government for its first year in existence. It went on to invest £212 million in academic research grants; £72 million in the training of postgraduate students and £52 million in support of the Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories. The responsibility for these facilities was later passed on to the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC). In 2014, EPSRC is responsible for an annual research and training budget of around £800 million. Around 25 per cent of this is allocated to doctoral level training.

Making it In April 1994, EPSRC launched its Innovative Manufacturing (IM) programme, which aimed to bring industry and academia together for the benefit of British manufacturing industry. Joint sponsors of the programme included the Economic and

Magnetic attraction In 1994, Professor Lynn Gladden, from the University of Cambridge, was awarded £360,000 by EPSRC to establish a centre of expertise in the application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy for use by the UK academic process engineering community. NMR spectroscopy is a quality control technique used in analytical chemistry to determine a sample’s content, purity and molecular structure. The grant consolidated Professor Gladden’s reputation as a pioneer in the development of NMR techniques, including translating them from the laboratory into industrial practice. She has since received over 30 research grants from EPSRC. In 2001, Professor Gladden (pictured) was awarded the OBE for her services to chemistry and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004. In 2006, she was appointed to EPSRC’s Council, its senior decision-making body. In 2009, she was awarded the CBE for her services to science. In 2013, Professor Gladden was named as a co-leader of the new UK Catalysis Hub, a £12.9 million EPSRC investment in catalytic science. The Hub is an academic/industrial collaboration focused on supporting UK economic growth while helping reduce CO2 emissions, produce cleaner water and generate more sustainable energy. In 2014, Professor Gladden leads the University of Cambridge’s Magnetic Resonance Research Centre and is also the university’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research.

Social Research Council (ESRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Department of the Environment. The programme marked an important step up towards a ‘joined-up’ approach to fostering multidisciplinary partnerships between the science base and industry that continues to this day.

April 6: The Rwandan Genocide begins. In 100 days some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred

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1994

Going mobile

In the mid1990s, work by VSLI Vision Limited (VVL), a small Scottish electronics company formed to commercialise the work of Professor Peter Denyer and Professor David Renshaw at Edinburgh University, led to the development of electronic chips that can ‘see’ – paving the way for a revolution in mobile cellular technology – the camera phone. Previously funded by EPSRC’s predecessor, the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), and then by EPSRC in 1994, Professor Denyer (pictured) and his team pioneered the development and manufacture of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensor technology now used in almost all mobile phones and also employed in digital cameras, webcams, video-conferencing cameras and the optical computer mouse. Conventional video cameras of the day had separate light sensors that took images and created electronic signals, which then went on to another piece of electronic hardware.

Professor Denyer went on to become a prolific entrepreneur, adviser and mentor to university start-up companies and a serial investor. In 1998, Peter Denyer was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Silver Medal, and, in the same year, together with colleagues David Renshaw, Lu Mingying, and Wang Guoyo, he was awarded the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics for their pioneering research. Accepting the Rank Prize, Professor Denyer said: “Our work was not always so well regarded, certainly in its earliest days when the doubters were many and the believers were... well, just ourselves.” The Royal Society has described Professor Denyer, who died in 2010, as ‘a unique combination of electronics engineer, distinguished academic, inventor, company CEO and multiple entrepreneur’.

VSLI evolved into Vision Group plc and became an early manufacturer of CMOS image sensors, at its peak selling one million cameras a year.

“To say that Denyer ‘invented’ the mobile phone camera,” wrote one obituarist, “would be unfair to the rest of his research team at Edinburgh University and to parallel researchers worldwide... “But, although the camera phone phenomenon was but a twinkle in Denyer’s eye when he started out, he became internationally-recognised as a driving force in the technology known as CMOS which still features in hundreds of millions of mobile phones around the globe.”

By 2006, half of all mobile phones had digital cameras. It is estimated that in 2014 the number of mobile phones globally will exceed the number of people on the planet.

In 2012, Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram, a small business that develops novelty software to make your phone pictures look like old Polaroids.

VSLI’s breakthrough combined image capture and processing on a single chip, and set the stage for Professor Denyer and his team to step into history.


April 18: Cricketer Brian Lara hits a world record 375 runs in one day

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May 10: Nelson Mandela is sworn in as South Africa’s first black president

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1994 Going underground In 1994, EPSRC awarded a grant of £390,000 to an engineering research team at Imperial College London to examine subsidence caused by extension tunnelling. The team was led by soil mechanics expert Professor John Burland, who went on to play a leading role as a member of an international team commissioned by the Italian Government to stabilise the Leaning Tower of Pisa – a feat they achieved in 2001. The team, which was also funded by the Department of the Environment and London Underground, conducted important work that informed the safe construction of London’s new Jubilee extension line. Interviewed in 1994, Professor Burland said: “Research in subsidence has been almost impossible, because it has always happened by the time you get on the scene. The Jubilee extension gives us an ideal opportunity to observe how buildings respond to subsidence.” In addition to the Pisa project, Professor Burland advised on a project to ensure the stability of the Big Ben Clock Tower. In May 2008, engineers announced that the Leaning Tower of Pisa had been stabilised and that they had stopped the building from moving for the first time in its history. In April 2011, the scaffolding was removed. In 2014, Professor Burland is working with London Underground and Crossrail on an EPSRC-sponsored project to assess potential damage to existing tunnels before and after excavation works as part of the multi-million pound London Crossrail project.


May 6: The Channel Tunnel linking England and France officially opens

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Fluid power In 1994, marine energy pioneer Artemis Intelligent Power was formed to commercialise EPSRC-supported research into hydraulic wave energy technology developed by Professor Stephen Salter (pictured) and Dr Win Rampen at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s and 80s. Artemis Intelligent Power performs research, development, and technology licensing associated with Salter and Rampen’s Digital Displacement® (DD) technology, as well as other innovations in the control and transmission of fluid power. Artemis has won numerous industry awards for its energy-saving applications, and continues to work with global companies to develop DD systems and power transmissions for a range of energy-saving


applications, including highway and off-road vehicles. A specially adapted BMW saloon has achieved fuel savings of 30 per cent. In 2010, Artemis Intelligent Power was acquired by Mitsubishi Power Systems Europe (MPSE); it is currently developing a unique gearless power transmission for very large offshore wind turbines. In 2014, Artemis’ parent company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd (MHI), established a new joint venture company with Vestas Wind Systems dedicated to business in offshore wind turbines. Plans for the new company include an early market launch of a turbine incorporating the world’s first Digital Displacement® Transmission.

Artemis has also designed and manufactured valves, electronics and control software for two new wind turbines for Mitsubishi for deployment in the west of Scotland and offshore of Fukushima, Japan. In 2014, Professor Stephen Salter, who received the Sustained Achievement Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2012, remains a director of Artemis Intelligent Power. The device he designed in the 1970s, the Salter Duck, was one of the world’s first wave energy devices and remains one of the most efficient. Professor Salter is Emeritus Professor at the UK Centre for Marine Energy Research at Edinburgh University, supported by the SUPERGEN Marine Energy Consortium, led by EPSRC (see page 48).

August 31: The Provisional Irish Republican Army announces a “complete cessation of military operations”

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1995 Master of logic In 1995, Lionel Tarassenko (pictured in 1995), an EPSRC-funded researcher from the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, developed the core technology behind the Sharp Logicook, the world’s first ‘smart’ microwave oven. It is an early highlight in a remarkable career – particularly in the field of biomedical engineering. Professor Tarassenko’s pioneering work, originally in neural networks and subsequently in machine learning, led to a host of different applications based on pattern recognition – from jet engine diagnostics to patient monitoring. Professor Tarassenko’s research has brought him international recognition for his work in signal processing and biomedical engineering, and he has held the Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of Oxford since 1997. In 2000, he was awarded a Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Six years later he was awarded the Academy’s Silver Medal for his contribution to British engineering. Today, he chairs the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Biomedical Engineering Panel. In 2008, Professor Tarassenko was awarded the Rolls-Royce Chairman’s Award for Technical Innovation for his work


on jet engines. This award followed the Sir Henry Royce High Value Patent Award seven years earlier, in 2001. Also in 2008, Professor Tarassenko became the first Director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME). The IBME hosts a Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation, under the EPSRCled RCUK Digital Economy programme. It also hosts a Centre of Excellence in Medical Engineering funded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC and led by Professor Tarassenko. Commercial success A successful entrepreneur, Professor Tarassenko has founded several spin out companies, including t+ Medical, Oxford BioSignals Ltd and Oxehealth. Awardwinning products include t+Diabetes, a mobile phone-based tool for diabetes selfmanagement; and a system for gestational diabetes management, which have been taken up by hospitals throughout the Oxford region, from Reading to Milton Keynes. In 2006, Professor Tarassenko won the Institute of Engineering & Technology IT Award for Visensia, a data fusion system providing early warning of patient deterioration in critical care. It was the first data fusion system to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Over 137 licences for the product have been sold in the UK and the US in the last two years. In 2013, Professor Tarassenko launched a new iPad-based early warning patient monitoring system for ward-based monitoring in hospital. The system,

January 12: A major earthquake kills 5,092 people in Kobe, Japan

developed under the EPSRC-led RCUK Digital Economy Programme, uses the latest computer tablet technology to record and evaluate patients’ vital signs. The system is being rolled-out across all adult wards in the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust’s acute hospitals, with funding from the NHS Technology Fund and the Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards programme. Origins Lionel Tarassenko’s career-long passion for digital signal processing began in the early 1980s at Racal, before it evolved into Vodafone, which he joined as a graduate, at a time when mobile telephony was still just an idea. His time at Racal included work on the company’s first speech coder, which enabled the spoken word to be captured and transmitted digitally. After three years at Racal, Professor Tarassenko returned to academia to study for a doctorate in biomedical electronics in paediatrics. He has remained in academia ever since, and recently returned to paediatrics-related research to work on the non-contact monitoring of babies’ vital signs using webcams. He describes his move back into universitybased research as the best decision he ever made. Professor Tarassenko says: “I have been very fortunate that my research has made a positive difference to the care of tens of thousands of patients, and has been translated into products which have monitored the efficiency of thousands of jet engines”

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26 February: Barings Bank, the UK’s oldest merchant bank, collapses following £840 million of losses incurred by rogue trader, Nick Leeson

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1995 Full charge batteries, particularly enhancing their ability to store and retain charge.

In 1995, an EPSRC-supported team led by Professor Peter Bruce, from St Andrews University, developed a rechargeable Lithium battery material enabling lighter, more reliable, more efficient and greener batteries than the prevailing Nickel Cadmium (NiCad) type. Over the next two decades, Professor Bruce (pictured) attracted substantial and continuous funding from EPSRC, The Royal Society and internationally. He and his colleagues made important advances in the science underpinning rechargeable Lithium


He is part of a team of four innovative scientists behind research into developing Lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Together, Professors John Goodenough, Mike Thackeray, Bill David and Peter Bruce were able to discover electrode materials resulting in a lower cost and safer alternative to the more expensive Lithium cobalt oxide electrodes, which are unsafe when used in large batteries. As a result, the Lithium manganese oxide spinel became the material of choice for the first generation of modern electric vehicle batteries, used in cars such as the Nissan Leaf and Vauxhall Ampera. In 2007, Professor Bruce was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is one of the pioneers of the Li-air (O2) battery, which can exceed the energy density of rechargeable Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries and could hold the key for next-generation energy storage devices, including for electric vehicles.

April 19: A truck bomb at Federal Building in Oklahoma City kills 168 and injures 500

In 2012, Professor Bruce received the AkzoNobel Science Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in recognition of his outstanding scientific contribution in the fields of chemistry and materials science. In 2014, Professor Bruce FRS, now at the University of Oxford, is working on three EPSRC-funded projects on the materials chemistry and electrochemistry of Lithiumair, Lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries. The project is funded under the Sustainable Power Generation and Supply (SUPERGEN) initiative, part of the RCUK Energy Programme, led by EPSRC. Professor Bruce says: “Lithium batteries are one of the most important technological developments of the past 20 years. The UK has played a central role in this technology. New materials and new electrochemistry will continue to drive the field, leading to new generations of Lithium batteries for use in transport and electricity grid storage.” In May 2014, EPSRC invested £4 million in a new SUPERGEN Energy Storage Hub, led by Professor Bruce (see page 48).

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Intelligent Energy In 1995, EPSRCsupported research into renewable energy, co-led by Dr Paul Adcock and Dr Phil Mitchell, from Loughborough University, resulted in a hybrid battery/fuel cell power source for road vehicles. The fuel cell was used at cruising speeds while a set of batteries provided acceleration. The objective was to create an entirely new sustainable power source that would slot into the same space as existing engines. Interviewed in 1995, Dr Adcock (pictured in 1995) said: “The great thing is that from the driver’s perspective the experience will be just the same as a conventional vehicle.” His optimism was well-founded. In June 1995, together with Dr Jon Moore and Anthony Newbold, Adcock and Mitchell formed university spin out company Advanced Power Sources (APS) Ltd to commercialise their work. In 2001, their work led to the formation of another spin out company, Intelligent Energy, which absorbed APS as part of its strategy. A core team of EPSRCfunded researchers from Loughborough University joined the company at its inception and to this day continues to lead its R&D, providing stability and insight into product development. Today, Intelligent Energy is one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe and is the world’s largest independent fuel cell company.

With 350 staff across operating sites and offices globally; it has established major global partnerships including with the Suzuki Motor Corporation with whom it has formed a joint venture company in Japan. The company retains close links with Loughborough and other major UK universities, and over half its employees hold PhDs. In the last decade it has achieved a host of notable achievements. In 2005, the company unveiled the world’s first purpose-built fuel cell motorbike, which emits only water vapour, is nearsilent and non-polluting. In 2008, the company’s fuel cell technology was used in the first manned flight of a fuel cell-powered aircraft by Boeing. In 2012, a fleet of zero carbon London taxis was used to transport passengers at the London Olympics. The taxi’s hydrogen fuel cell system, hydridised with Lithium polymer batteries, allows the vehicles to operate for a full day without refuelling, and gives them a top speed of 80 mph. In January 2014, in partnership with US retailer and product development company, Brookstone, Intelligent Energy launched the Upp™ personal energy device to power USB compatible portable electronic devices. The device provides at least one week of charge even to the most powerhungry smartphones. In March 2014, Intelligent Energy received £38 million from GIC, the Singapore Government’s sovereign wealth fund, for 10 per cent of its share capital, to build its consumer electronics and distributed power and generation divisions.

Peer review progress In 1995, EPSRC started its new system for the peer review of grant applications by independent experts. The new peer review college comprised 1,650 individuals from academia and industry grouped into 16 colleges of varying size based on EPSRC research programmes. Every research proposal was assessed by at least two college members together with one person from a list put forward by the proposer. After an initial sift based on referees’ reports, small panels drawn from college members put the remaining proposals into peer-ranked order, which went towards the decision about which proposals should be funded. For 20 years the peer review system has evolved and matured, but retains true to its founding values.

Mondex Over a decade before the advent of chip and pin technology and smartphone banking, the cashless society took a step closer in 1995 with the trial launch of Mondex, an electronic purse introduced by NatWest Bank, Midland Bank and BT. The Mondex smart card, which resembled a pocket calculator, was launched in Swindon, where residents had the chance to experience e-purchasing for themselves. Mondex allowed users to transfer cash from bank accounts to the card and back again using card-readers. Behind Mondex was a research team led by Professor Haroon Ahmed at the University of Cambridge’s Microelectronics Centre, who spent three decades of EPSRC/SERCfunded research on the reverse engineering of silicon chips and the inspection of integrated circuits, which they used to test Mondex’s integrity. The team also made important inroads into the integration of sensors and electronics on the same chip. Mondex didn’t catch on, but Professor Ahmed’s research demonstrated the possibility of safe and secure e-banking.


British mountain climber Alison Hargreaves becomes the first woman to climb Mount Everest without oxygen or assistance.

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1996 Legacy of light In 1996, the first DVD players went on sale. But what if they never existed? Imagine a world without the internet, DVDs or barcodes. If it weren’t for one man, Professor Alf Adams (pictured), from the University of Surrey, the technology that made these inventions so widely available, or indeed possible, might never have been invented. Supported by funding from EPSRC’s predecessor, the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Professor Adams’ ground-breaking research into infrared lasers at the University of Surrey in the 1980s paved the way for a host of low-cost and low-power commercial and industrial products without which the modern world could not function. Research underpinned by this technology continues to this day. The internet in particular, which relies on Alf Adams’


strained layer laser technology, has made it possible to send information around the planet much more quickly than was hitherto possible. The internet is physically connected by hugely complex fibre-optic technology underneath the world’s oceans, which it uses to send light from one continent to another. The data carried by these fibreoptic networks is not stored in ‘clouds’ as we might think, but in huge data centres in strategic sites across the globe, the largest of which require the power it takes to light a small city to keep their hard drives spinning and, crucially, keep them cool. According to a 2010 Greenpeace report, two per cent of the world’s electricity usage can now be traced to these data centres. It’s estimated that the internet accounts for around three per cent of the world’s total energy consumption, a figure that is growing exponentially. In 2014, a team at the University of Surrey led by Professor Stephen Sweeney, a

October 3: OJ Simpson is found not guilty in the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman

former PhD student under Alf Adams, are carrying forward Alf’s legacy, and are applying new advances in infrared laser technology to tackle emerging challenges such as the internet’s insatiable need for power. Professor Sweeney, who holds an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, and who leads the Surrey Photonics Group, says: “A key element of my Fellowship is to re-engineer the basic crystalline materials from which the lasers are made. “If our research proves to be correct, then most of the temperature control electronics required by internet lasers could be removed – leading to a substantial reduction in their energy demand.” In 2014, Alf Adams, now Emeritus Professor at Surrey, was awarded the prestigious Rank Prize in optoelectronics for his research into the structure of semiconductor lasers. Although he did not file a patent for his invention, and so has not made a penny from it, he has no regrets.

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November 22: Toy Story is released. It is the first feature-length film created entirely using computer-generated imagery

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1996

Man of steel In 1996, University of Cambridge metallurgist Professor Harry Bhadeshia developed a new, carbide-rich and siliconfree steel alloy for railway tracks, which promised to be tougher and more resistant to fatigue than traditional materials. The alloy had remarkable properties: as well as being enormously resistant to wear itself, it also reduced wear on the train wheels, which was almost unheard of. Professor Bhadeshia received support for his basic research into steel from EPSRC. Every year, 17 million people pass along rails made from Harry Bhadeshia’s steel, which form the backbone of the 31-mile Channel Tunnel rail link, Europe’s busiest railway. In 2009, the SKF University Technology Centre on Steels was set up in Cambridge, with Professor Bhadeshia as its head. The Centre continues to pioneer research in advanced bearing technology for aircraft engines, with major support from industry, supplemented by EPSRC. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

In 2011, the UK Ministry of Defence unveiled a new type of vehicle armour, using another of Professor Bhadeshia’s inventions. The armour is made from super bainite, the strongest low-alloy steel that has ever been produced, more than six times stronger than conventional steel. It is also the world’s ﬁrst nanostructured material to be manufactured in bulk. Now, with sponsorship from the Ministry of Defence, and with EPSRC input, Professor Bhadeshia is attempting to design a kind of steel that has what he calls an “impossible combination of properties”.

realising that a good way of carrying out long-term work is to put it out to universities. But academics benefit too – industry gives us an awareness of critical issues which we couldn’t get just from reading academic papers.” Computer modelling has also come on enormously, and is integral to Professor Bhadeshia’s research. He says: “I think of computer modelling as being like electron microscopes, which we also use a lot of. It helps to cut out the variables, and identify where new knowledge is needed.”

The new steel will be strong enough to be ballistic and blast-resistant, but also capable of being welded, meaning it will be possible to make large things out of it, such as military vehicles.

Since 1990, the Material Algorithms Project (MAP), funded by SERC/EPSRC and led by Professor Bhadeshia, has been particularly important in this field, freely distributing algorithms useful in generating computer models of materials.

Over the last 20 years, Harry Bhadeshia has seen significant changes in his field. He says: “The intensity of research has increased enormously; with industry

Professor Bhadeshia says: “MAP is now the largest free source of these algorithms in the world. Without EPSRC’s support, it would not have been possible.”

March 16: Mike Tyson knocks out Frank Bruno in the third round to win the world heavyweight boxing title

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The Hall story In 1996, Professor Wendy Hall, from the University of Southampton, was awarded a fiveyear EPSRC Senior Fellowship to develop the multimedia assistants of the future. One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, Professor Hall has been at the forefront of this multifaceted discipline ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas including digital libraries, the development of the Semantic Web, and the emerging research discipline of Web Science – the science of the World Wide Web. In 2006, Professor Hall was a founding director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative, a global forum for scientists and scholars to collaborate on the first multidisciplinary scientific research effort specifically designed to study the Web at all scales of size and complexity. In 2008, Professor Hall was elected President of the Association for Computing

Machinery (ACM), the world’s leading community of computer scientists. In 2007, among over 20 EPSRC research grants she has received, Professor Hall established with Professors Leslie Carr and Nigel Shadbolt a Web Science Network for researchers from different technical and social science research disciplines to develop a research agenda. Among the network’s activities are exchange schemes for doctoral students and collaborative workshops. In 2009, Professor Hall became a Dame Commander of the British Empire. In the same year she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Also in 2009, Professor Dame Wendy Hall became principal investigator of the new EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Web Science, based at the University of Southampton and led by Professor Leslie Carr. The centre has evolved into the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Web Science Innovation, which Dame Wendy will lead from its inauguration in October 2014. Throughout her career, in addition to playing a prominent role in the development of her subject, Professor Hall has helped shape science and engineering policy and education and has also championed the role of women in science, engineering and technology.

form of transport cause sickness. In seasickness, for example, the up and down motion is to blame; in road vehicles the horizontal motions – braking, accelerating and cornering – tend to cause discomfort.

Good vibrations In 1996, Professor Mike Griffin, from the University of Southampton’s Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, developed procedures for predicting seasickness. These were subsequently incorporated into international standards used by ship designers and shipping operators. Professor Griffin’s team’s earlier study of ships, coaches and small passenger aircraft identified which motions in each PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

A second tranche of EPSRC funding enabled Professor Griffin and his colleagues to research the design of vehicle seating arrangements and also the prediction of motion sickness. In 1999, after surveying over 3,000 coach passengers, the team concluded that people are more likely to feel sick during road travel when a vehicle is cornering or making a similar manoeuvre.

Running on auto In 1996, a collaboration between a University of Portsmouth research team and manufacturer Cetrek led to the development of a ‘smarter’ autopilot for motor boats, trawlers and small ships. The device used a ‘fuzzy logic’ controller, designed by Dr Martyn Polkinghorne from the University’s School of Manufacturing, Materials and Mechanical Engineering, to learn about its own performance and make allowances for heavy cargo, the weather and changing tides. The device used self-organising techniques to ensure the vessel arrived at its pre-set destination efficiently. During sea trials the system was 50 per cent faster than a standard autopilot when taking a 90 degree turn. Dr Polkinghorne and his new autopilot were subsequently featured on BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World.

Quiz masters In 1996, two members of a team that triumphed in the final of BBC Television’s University Challenge, Nick Bradshaw and Jim Totty, were PhD students supported by EPSRC. The key to their success was simple, according to Nick Bradshaw, and was all down to the nature of the scientific mind. Interviewed in 1996, he said: “I think there are more science students who can answer arts questions than there are arts students who can answer science questions.” In 2014, Nick Bradshaw (below middle left) is Vice President of Equity Derivative Development at Barclays Capital.

However, when passengers are provided with a good view of the road ahead feelings of motion sickness are reduced – suggesting that travel sickness could be significantly reduced by improved forward external vision.

December 10: The General Motors EV1, the first production electric car of the modern era, is launched and becomes available for lease

17

1996

Flake’s progress In 1996, Professor Brian Wilshire from the University of Wales, Swansea, developed ‘magnetic flake’ powders that would allow scene-of-crime officers to study fingerprints without having to brush them with fine powder, which could lead to smudging. The powder consisted of tiny iron flakes with an organic coating that helped it stick to the greasy residue in a fingerprint. A key element of the process was the use of magnetism to remove excess powder, PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

preserving the delicate ridge lines that make each print unique. The technology was successfully trialled by the UK Forensic Science Service and led to the launch of a spin out company to commercialise Professor Wilshire’s research, K9 Scene of Crime Equipment Ltd, (later Crime Scene Investigation Equipment Ltd). In 2014, staffed by ex-members of the police and security services, the company has developed a wide product portfolio,

June 23: The Nintendo 64 goes on sale in Japan

ranging from inking systems and casting materials to fire and explosive detection systems. The company’s Magneta Flake™, manufactured specifically for the recovery of latent fingerprints, is fast becoming the first choice preference with many law enforcement agencies. A ‘dark’ form of the flake, for use on lighter surfaces, has been developed in conjunction with the University of Central Lancashire with additional funding from EPSRC.

18

Going electronic In 1996, EPSRC began successful trials that resulted in the introduction of full electronic submission of research proposal forms. With an average of 5,000 grant applications from researchers received each year since 1994, the initiative dramatically improved efficiency, drove down costs, and enabled EPSRC staff to spend more time on supporting the research community and devote less time on paper-led administration.

Car control In 1996, Professor Cliff Burrows, Director of the Fluid Power Centre at the University of Bath, was awarded £445,000 by EPSRC to study driveline controls in cars; focusing on maximising efficiency and reducing emissions. The research built on a project funded by the Department for Trade and Industry, Ford, Lucas and Johnson Matthey. A key element of the project was a constantly variable transmission, which effectively made gear changing stepless, so the engine could work at peak efficiency across a wide range of operating conditions, improving fuel economy.

In 2001, Professor Burrows was made Director of the newly established EPSRC Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre at the University of Bath (see page 36). In 2001, Professor Burrows received the OBE.

Man on fire In 1996, a team led by Dr Dougal Drysdale at the University of Edinburgh’s Fire Safety Research Group used an EPSRC-funded research grant to develop mathematical models to predict the way fires develop in buildings and in tunnels. The team also used EPSRC funding to build test apparatus to measure the upward spread of flames on walls. Dr Drysdale went on to write the seminal reference text on fire protection engineering, An Introduction to Fire Dynamics, in 1999. In 2014, Dr Drysdale is acknowledged as a leading international authority in his field.

He said it In the long term there will be all-electric cars which will have a tiny internal combustion engine driving a generator to provide power to electric motors in the wheels. Interviewed in 1996, this prediction was made by David Davies, Director of the Human Sciences and Advanced Technology Research Institute at the EPSRC-supported Loughborough University of Technology,

In 2012, nearly two decades after making this statement, David Davies is bang on the money, when UK car manufacturer, Lotus, unveiled its Evora 414E hybrid vehicle. The fully working concept vehicle was developed in collaboration with a consortium of EPSRC-supported engineers. The Evora (pictured) uses a hybrid electric drivetrain. Electrical energy


July 4: Hotmail, a free internet e-mail service, is launched

is provided to the battery by a compact, lightweight, low-cost, 1.2 litre petrol engine and generator. Each drive wheel is connected to an electric motor which allows for independent rear-wheel control. The Evora’s battery can be charged overnight using a conventional domestic mains supply. Further innovations include regenerative braking control and adaptable suspension designed to both increase fuel economy and enhance the driving experience. The work is part of the FUTURE vehicles consortium comprising seven universities and 10 industry advisers and is funded under the £10 million Low Carbon Vehicle Integrated Delivery Programme, funded by EPSRC and the Technology Strategy Board. The team estimate that cars featuring this technology will be on sale by the end of this decade.

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1997

Hot wheels On October 15 1997 Thrust SSC set a new World Land Speed Record of 763 mph and, in doing so, broke the sound barrier. An EPSRC-supported team of scientists played a vital role in the project. Words: Phil Davies PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

February 23: Scientists in Scotland succeed in cloning an adult mammal, dubbed Dolly the Sheep

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Behind this feat was a team led by World Land Speed Record-holder Richard Noble, with RAF jet fighter pilot, Andy Green, behind the wheel. Playing a crucial part in Thrust’s supersonic success were Professors Nigel Weatherill, Ken Morgan and Dr Oubay Hassan, a team of EPSRC-supported researchers from the University of Wales, Swansea. The team, having previously worked with the likes of NASA, Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace, were approached by Richard Noble who asked them to use their computational modelling techniques to help design Thrust SSC. Through the use of two Cray Research supercomputers, one at Edinburgh University, supported by EPSRC (see PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

page 44), and the other at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Swansea team used their aviation design software to refine the concept of rear-wheel steering. This involved the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – numerical methods and algorithms to analyse the flow of fluids. Following computer simulations of the run, the team discovered a potential issue: the shockwaves generated when breaking the sound barrier.

the Thrust SSC design team develop and construct a viable design for the 16.5 metre, 10.5 tonne car. There was still a world record to beat. Team Thrust then travelled to Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where they successfully smashed the 1983 World Land Speed Record held by Richard Noble himself with the 663 mph Thrust 2, and zoomed into the record books.

Not only would the shockwaves ricocheting off the ground and back at Thrust make the supersonic vehicle slow down, they could prove disastrous, causing it to flip and crash.

In 2008, EPSRC became a founding sponsor of the BLOODHOUND SSC project, Richard Noble’s latest land speed record attempt. The plan is hugely ambitious – to design and build a car capable of exceeding 1,000 mph (see page 65).

After two years of testing and exhaustive computer modelling, the Swansea researchers succeeded in helping

Professors Hassan and Morgan are providing their expertise in computational fluid dynamics to the project.

May 2: Labour wins the UK General Election

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1997

Black gold

In 1997, an EPSRC-supported team from the University of Bath, led by Professor Malcolm Greaves, collaborated with Petroleum Recovery Institute, Calgary, Canada, on an innovative project to release ‘heavy’ oil and bitumen trapped in underground reservoirs. These crude oils are very difficult to recover because of their high viscosity.

second, horizontal well from where it rises to the surface. With EPSRC’s support, the research led to an ‘add-on’ catalytic process, known as CAPRI.

“We’ve seen this project go from something that many people said would not work into something we can have confidence in, all in the space of the last 18 months.”

In 2006, Petrobank Energy and Resources, Calgary, started the first THAI field pilot at Conklin in the Athabasca Oil Sands region of Alberta, Canada, the largest single petroleum resource on the planet.

Over the next decade-and-a-half, Professor Greaves, who began research into the technology in 1990, continued to refine the revolutionary Toe-to-Heel Air Injection (THAI™) system.

Interviewed in 2007, Professor Greaves said: “It’s been a struggle to get the invention from an idea to a prototype and into use. For most of the time people weren’t very interested because heavy oil was so much more difficult and expensive to produce than conventional light oil.

In 2014, THAI is undergoing commercial development at Kerrobert in Saskatchewan, Canada. Meanwhile, a team led by Professor Joe Wood, from the University of Birmingham, including colleagues at the universities of Nottingham and Manchester, are using high pressure experiments and specialised computer modelling software to simulate the detailed behaviour of the THAI-CAPRI process for in-situ catalytic upgrading of heavy crude and bitumen.

The THAI process injects air into the oil deposit down a vertical well and then ignites it. The heat generated in the reservoir reduces the viscosity of the heavy oil, allowing it to drain into a

“But with light oil now hitting around $100 a barrel, it’s economic to think of using heavy oil, especially since THAI can produce oil for less than $10 a barrel.

In addition to heavy oil reservoir research, the team are investigating light oil applications, where air can be used as an injectant gas for medium and high pressure reservoirs. Emeritus Professor Malcolm Greaves, who is an adviser on the project, says: ”In-situ upgrading of heavy crude, which is one of the main objectives of THAI/ CAPRI, is a massive advance for the oil industry. If it can be done effectively, it could save billions of dollars on refinery upgrades in the UK alone.” At the University of Bath, Emeritus Professor Greaves is conducting studies of downhole gasification in light oil reservoirs for improved oil recovery and hydrogen production/storage – generating a largescale source of hydrogen for the future hydrogen economy.


August 31: Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in a car crash in a road tunnel in Paris

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Material gains With EPSRC funding, in 1997 Dr Jon Binner, from the University of Nottingham, developed a way to dramatically speed up production of advanced ceramic components for use in high-tech applications such as military jet engines. By reducing production time to hours rather than months, and hence reducing costs, the microwave treatment process opened up exciting possibilities for ceramic matrix component (CMC) processes in a much wider range of industries such as car manufacturing and mining. The far-reaching project is one of over 20 EPSRC research grants related to ceramics and advanced materials awarded to Professor Binner, who in 2013 assumed the presidency of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, a major engineering institution with 18,000 members. Also in 2013, Professor Binner, now based at Loughborough University, received a five-year EPSRC grant to lead a project to develop materials for extreme environments, a collaborative programme between Loughborough, Imperial College London and Queen Mary, University of London.

Taking the heat In 1997, an EPSRC-supported research team at the University of Nottingham, led by Professor Saffa Riffat, developed a novel heat pump for heating and cooling buildings. Heat pumps collect heat from the environment instead of producing energy from burning fuel.

of Nottingham, in partnership with Roger Bullivant Ltd, to pioneer a process that turns the foundation piles of new buildings into heat exchangers for ground source heat pumps. The process has the potential to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

In the 2000s, Professor Riffat, now President for the World Society of Sustainable Energy Technologies, led an EPSRC-sponsored team at the University

In 2010, the research project won the Manufacturing & Process category at The Engineer magazine’s Technology & Innovation Awards.

Friendly fire

Faradays fire up

In 1997, Dr Jim Lesurf, from St Andrews University, working with consumer and defence conglomerate General Electric Company and the Defence Research Agency, developed a low-cost system to help NATO forces avoid shooting their own side during a war.

In 1997, EPSRC introduced its pilot Faraday Partnerships – a forerunner of the Technology Strategy Board’s Knowledge Transfer Accounts. Aimed at improving the interaction between UK research and industry, the programme provided funding for academic research teams to forge partnerships with industry, particularly SMEs.

Dr Lesurf’s project saw the development of a target identification device that would give allied vehicles the same radio signature as a warm rock or a tree. It built on his basic research in the fields of millimetrewave and terahertz technology, supported by EPSRC. Dr Lesurf led the mm-wave group at St Andrews before his retirement in 2004. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

In total, 24 partnerships were funded under the initiative, which was run by the Department of Trade & Industry with funding from the UK Research Councils, with some partnerships evolving and flourishing to this day.

September 15: Two US students register a domain for a new kind of website. They call it Google

The Faraday Packaging Partnership, for example, brokers packaging technology and expertise for the academic and commercial spheres. The organisation sums up its winning formula with the following maxim: Nail the problem. Find the brains. Present the facts. Exploit the outcomes. Another successful partnership, 3D-MATIC, which reconstructs 3D objects and scenes from photographic data, led to the foundation of the Computer Vision & Graphics Group at the University of Glasgow, led throughout by Dr J Paul Siebert.

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1998

Making people better In 1998, EPSRC awarded an Advanced Fellowship to Professor Kevin Shakesheff, from the University of Nottingham, to continue his work in the emerging field of regenerative medicine – creating new advanced materials and technologies that help stem cells form human tissues. Building on this research, Professor Shakesheff (pictured) co-developed 3D scaffolds that can be injected into the body without the need for surgery, and which leave no solvents or toxic by-products. The scaffolds are made from biodegradable polymers which, once inside the body, transform into an open-pored structure like a sponge, creating an environment for cells as well as for naturally occurring substances capable of stimulating cellular growth known as growth structures.

Century; an award followed in 2001 by inclusion in the MIT Technology Review List of the World’s 100 Top Young Innovators. In 2001, Professor Shakesheff formed spin out company Regentec Ltd to commercialise his research, developing a family of injectable scaffolds that solidify within the body. In May 2014, Regentec rebranded as Locate Therapeutics, after securing investment from precious metal and technology group Heraeus Holding, which will help take the company to its next stage of development. In 2002, Kevin Shakesheff and Steve Howdle formed Critical Pharmaceuticals to bring their research to market. The company, which won the 2002 UK Research Councils Business Plan Competition, is thriving to this day, and is developing unique biological drug products including controlled-release scaffolds.

Transforming the treatment of disease Among Professor Shakesheff’s commercial achievements, he has designed new materials which have since been licensed by three companies and which are being developed as products in Europe and the United States. Professor Shakesheff says: “Regenerative medicine will transform the treatment of many of today’s ‘incurable’ diseases. But it’s going to take a long time and if we try to go too fast we will set the field back by many years. The reason for this is that regenerative medicines are very complex. “My hope is that, within a decade, regenerative medicine will be able to create many products and treatments that have both commercial and clinical benefits. “The final product will be a living entity that is probably personalised for just one patient.

In 2006, Professor Shakesheff became Director of the Centre for Biomolecular Sciences at Nottingham. Under his leadership, the centre has expanded into a multidisciplinary £25 million institute. Much of the centre’s research falls within EPSRC’s remit.

“We know how to reprogram cells to become stem cells; we have technologies such as 3D printing and advanced materials that can build those cells into organ structures, and we understand a lot of the cell and tissue biology that allows tissues to form and repair.

Professor Shakesheff, together with Professor Steve Howdle, also from the University of Nottingham, found a way to process scaffolds outside of the body using carbon dioxide. Using this process enables scaffolds to form at low temperature and so preserves the growth factor and cells attached to them.

Since 2009, Professor Shakesheff has been co-Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Regenerative Medicine. He is also Director of the UK Regenerative Medicine Platform Hub in Accellular Technologies, both at the University of Nottingham.

“I can’t see any fundamental barrier that will stop future generations being able to grow a personalised organ. Specifically, I hope to see, and help, stem cells being used to reverse the damage that occurs to the heart after a heart attack, restore patient health after a stroke and repair ageing joints.

Continuous achievement

as one of the UK’s 10 most inspirational scientists and engineers in the EPSRC RISE awards (see page 52).

The work was stimulated by an EPSRC Adventure Fund, which allowed the researchers to apply for funding at a much earlier, speculative stage.

In 2000, Professor Shakesheff was named Royal Institution Scientist for the New


In 2014, Kevin Shakesheff was named

“I would very much like these technologies to be the foundation of commercial and clinical success in the UK.”

May 23: The Good Friday Agreement is accepted in a referendum in Northern Ireland with 75 per cent voting yes

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PIONEER 09 Winter 2013

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1998 Mighty atom In 1998, for a few seconds, a corner of a lab in Brighton became the coldest place in the universe. Dr Malcolm Boshier and colleagues at the University of Sussex’s Centre for Optical and Atomic Physics used lasers and magnets to trap and cool 100,000 rubidium atoms to just a few hundred-billionths of a degree above absolute zero (273 degrees Celsius). Even the coldest parts of outer space are millions of times warmer than the temperature reached at Sussex. When atoms are cooled to such low temperatures, strange things happen. The temperatures created what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first time it had been achieved in Britain. It has been described as a new state of matter.

A BEC occurs when super-cooled atoms slow down, lose almost all of their energy, and are effectively frozen in space. The atoms then all behave identically to form what can be likened to a giant ‘superatom’ visible to the naked eye and big enough to photograph, yet which still follows the laws of quantum mechanics. The BEC has become an important tool for investigating quantum behaviour, and could lead to new and exotic kinds of instruments such as fantastically sensitive microwave antennas, super-accurate GPS navigation technology and quantum information processors. Professor Ed Hinds, the centre’s director, and the project’s principal investigator, played a pivotal role in supporting Professor Boshier’s activities, and then in taking the research forward. In 1999, Professor Hinds was awarded an EPSRC Senior Fellowship to further his research into cold atom physics. He has since

received over 20 EPSRC research grants, including a 2002 Basic Technology grant (see page 30) to develop ‘atomic chips’. This was followed by a Basic Technology Translation grant. Interviewed in 2005, Professor Hinds said: “By manipulating cold atoms, either individually or as a cloud or as a BEC, we hope to develop a completely new technology which will be as powerful as electronics or optics, but based on the flow of cold atoms instead of the flow of charged particles or photons.” Among notable achievements since then, Professor Hinds pioneered on-chip integration of cold atom physics, most prominently demonstrated by creating a Bose-Einstein condensate on a permanentmagnet chip. In 2006, Ed Hinds became a Royal Society Research Professor, under a scheme that allows senior researchers to devote their full time to research. The award, he says, “made all the difference in letting me drive this technology forward”. In 2008, he won both the Institute of Physics Thomson medal and prize and the Royal Society Rumford Medal. In 2013, Professor Hinds FRS, now Director of the Centre for Cold Matter at Imperial College London, received the Faraday Medal from the Institute of Physics. In 2013, the UK Government committed £270 million over five years towards the development of quantum technologies. Approximately £234 million was allocated to EPSRC. In 2014, Malcolm Boshier is Scientific Director of the Quantum Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, and part of a team attempting to harness atoms provided by a Bose-Einstein condensate to build new devices such as ultra-sensitive miniature sensors.


February 15: Comic Relief is born, beginning with the first Red Nose Day

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Stardust Meanwhile, in another part of the galaxy, in 1998 an EPSRC-funded research team led by chemist David E. Williams from University College London designed an experiment that looked at the energy of chemical reactions where hydrogen and other atoms join together to form simple, small molecules.

Laser vision In 1998, Dr Steve Rothberg and colleagues Alan Hockwell and Jeremy Coupland, EPSRC-supported researchers from Loughborough University, won a major prize at the Metrology for World Class Manufacturing Awards.

The research helped to show that reactions which take place in cosmic dust could help explain why there is so much water in deep space.

Technology, said: “There are so many applications for this technology, from displays on mobile phones or video recorders to sophisticated, full-colour flatpanel displays. “I believe this will eventually result in a quantum leap in opportunities for this technology. It is going to change the way we do things.” In 2000, the partnership with Seiko-Epson led to the world’s first full colour active matrix inkjet printed polymer LED display. It measured around five square centimetres and was just two millimetres thick. In 2007, CDT was acquired by long-term collaborator Sumitomo Chemical Company and in 2011 it was valued at £21 million.

Thin thinking In 1998, Cambridge Display Technology (CDT), a company formed to commercialise organic light emitting diode (OLED) technology, announced it was planning to develop a full-size flat-plastic colour display in collaboration with Seiko-Epson. The company’s portfolio and vision attracted investments from the rock band Genesis, technology venture capitalist Herman Hauser and Lord Young. Interviewed in 1998, Dr Andrew Holmes, a co-founder of Cambridge Display PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

In 2010, Cambridge Display Technology, whose co-founders include Professor Sir Richard Friend (see page 32) and Professor Donal Bradley, won a prestigious Technology & Innovation Award from The Engineer magazine for a project to create high quality white light using polymer organic LEDs (P-OLEDs). In 2014, CDT is a world leader in the research, development and commercialisation of P-OLED technologies. Among many potential applications these technologies could result in cheaper, brighter, clearer displays with wide viewing angles and ultra-fast response times.

Metrology, loosely described as the science of measurement and application, is crucial to everything we do – from determining the amount of fuel in a tank to measuring the length of a piece of wood. It is crucial to manufacturing. The Loughborough team won their award for the development of a new kind of laser measurement system that took the technology into new realms. In the same year... A team led by Professor Julian Jones at Heriot-Watt University developed an award-winning technique to control focus for laser welding. Laser welding, used across the manufacturing sector, requires highly precise tolerances, typically within an accuracy of plus or minus 1mm. Heriot-Watt’s Dr Duncan Hand and Dr Frank Haran played a key role in the project. Together they realised it was possible to use the light emitted by the welding process itself as a basis for gauging if the laser is in focus. The research team’s breakthrough, in collaboration with industrial partner Lumonics UK, was largely made possible by the EPSRC-funded Laser Engineering Manufacturing Applications initiative involving research groups at Heriot-Watt and Liverpool University. In 2014, Professor Julian Jones is VicePrincipal of Heriot-Watt University; Duncan Hand is Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Laser-based Production Processes at Heriot-Watt; and Frank Haran is Senior Engineering Manager, Honeywell Process Solutions, Canada.

December 10, Sir John Pople, who spent his career in the United States, wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

27

1999

Imaging innovator In 1999, Professor Mike Brady, from the University of Oxford, launched start-up company, Mirada, to commercialise his EPSRC-supported research into medical imaging. In 2001, further spin-out activity involving two of Professor Brady’s companies led to the launch of Mirada Solutions, which became a leading developer of software solutions and analytical tools for medical imaging. In 2003, Mirada Solutions was acquired by CTI Molecular Imaging for $22 million, and in 2005 was purchased by Siemens Healthcare. In 2008, following a management buyout, which included acquisition of the technologies and customer base at the core of Mirada’s earlier developments, the company relocated to Oxford. Now Mirada Medical, it is a prominent global brand in medical imaging software. Professor Brady is a non-executive director. The success of Mirada is just one chapter in a remarkable story of innovation and evolution for Professor Brady, who has had a hugely successful research career ranging from developing automated sensor-guided vehicles to the detection of breast cancer.

which provides navigation and positioning products and services, received a Queen’s Award for export achievement. In 1995, Professor Brady’s career took a sharp turn, when he moved into medical imaging. From 2001 to 2003, Professor Brady was Director of the EPSRC/MRC Interdisciplinary Research Centre in medical imaging and signals at the University of Oxford (see page 35), and in 2002 he helped create the programme for the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre at Oxford, a new initiative to train the interdisciplinary researchers of tomorrow. In 2004, Professor Brady was knighted for his services to engineering. He continues to play a key role in breakthroughs in image analysis, working with new technologies and techniques such as positron emission tomography, MRI and computer tomography (3D X-rays), which have revolutionised the way we look inside our bodies. In one EPSRC-supported project, he developed a mathematical physical model of the passage of X-rays through tissue to explain the creation of a mammogram. This enabled the matching of one mammogram against another – a major step forward in the early detection of breast cancer.

In the 1980s Professor Brady founded MIT’s world-famous robots laboratory before going on to lead the Robotics Research Laboratory at Oxford, developing innovations such as collision-avoidance in robots.

Professor Brady’s entrepreneurial flair includes both the creation of spin out companies, and activities devoted to the commercialisation of science. For many years he served on the board of Isis Innovation, which manages technology transfer and academic consulting for the University of Oxford.

He formed his first spin out company, Guidance Control Systems (GCS), in 1991 to commercialise EPSRC-supported research at the robotics lab. In 2006, GCS,

In 2014, Professor Brady, who has received over 30 EPSRC grants during his career, leads the Department of Oncological Imaging at the University of Oxford.


January 1: The Euro currency is introduced

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January 23: Nikon launches its D1 three megapixel digital SLR camera, costing US$6,000

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1999 Basic functions In 1999, the foundations were laid for the cross-Research Council Basic Technology Programme, led by EPSRC. The aim of the programme was to give technology research the same status as scientific research, and to develop new technologies with the potential to be adapted across all areas of science, ultimately leading to new industries of the future. The 10-year programme resulted in over 50 funded projects with a total investment of over £165 million. From April 2005, the programme was solely funded by EPSRC. Because science is essentially convergent, bringing many methods together to answer a single question, while technology is more divergent (in that it can be applied in many fields), the Basic Technology Programme focused on supporting risky new technologies of wide application. The programme’s many highlights included a four-year 2006 project led by physicist Professor Kishan Dholakia at the University of St Andrews, working alongside biologist Dr Frank Gunn-Moore, also from the University of St Andrews, which resulted in breakthroughs in the use of ultrasound PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

and laser sciences for generic non-invasive healthcare therapies.

out company, Cortexica Vision Systems, in 1999.

In 2010, Professor Dholakia’s team developed a new method to create minute self-healing holes in cell membranes to enable targeted drug delivery to cells and tissue at will.

Launched with the help of Imperial Innovations, Cortexica pioneered visual imaging technology that mimics the way the human brain identifies images – resulting in an app-based product range that goes from strength to strength, including fashion, shoe and accessory search apps.

Interviewed in 2010, Dr Gunn-Moore said: “As a biologist I never thought I would end up working in the physics world. This work came from a chance conversation with Kishan. It truly is amazing that the light syringe we created has come so far so fast, and we are able to perform experiments we never thought would be possible four years ago.” In 2012, Professor Dholakia was awarded a £4.5 million EPSRC Programme Grant to ‘Challenge the Limits of Photonics’. The investment is one of many EPSRC grants he has received since 1999, as he helps pioneer a new scientific field. Another project, led by the late Professor Maria Petrou, from Imperial College London, demonstrated the true ethos of Basic Technology; with fundamental science progressing to technology development and on to formation of a spin

February 12: President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the United States Senate in his impeachment trial

Another project funded under the initiative saw £7 million invested in far-reaching research led by Professor Tom McLeish at Durham University to unlock the full potential of plastics. The project was part of what became a successful 20-year collaboration between academics and industry experts to explore how better to build ‘macromolecules’ – the basic components of plastics. In 2011, Professor McLeish and his team made a breakthrough that should ultimately allow experts to create the ‘perfect’ plastic with specific uses and properties by using a high-tech recipe book. It will also increase our ability to recycle plastics (see page 64).

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Clear thinking

He said it Industry needs doctoral-level recruits who are adaptable and active right from day one so that they can fit in with team objectives. They must be able to talk about what they can do and communicate their skills to people who come from different disciplines. Professor Tony Ledwith, EPSRC’s second chairman, interviewed in 1999. With a background in industry, Professor Ledwith, a former member of EPSRC’s governing body, emphasised the importance of building closer academic/industrial ties – which EPSRC champions to this day.

In 2011, in keeping with its commitment to ensure doctoral level recruits are given the opportunities they need to flourish in industry, EPSRC commissioned a major independent survey of leading research-intensive companies on the economic and social impact of PhD-holders they had recruited. The survey, the first of its kind, involved 86 of the UK’s largest researchintensive companies, including Airbus, Augusta Westland, Jaguar Land Rover, Rolls-Royce, Unilever and Vodafone. Among its many findings, the study showed that:

•

83% of employers said PhD holders had improved the company’s position relative to competitors

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60% said PhD recruits are integral to commercial success

•

63% actively target PhDs when recruiting

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74% said PhD recruits achieve high impact results within two years of joining

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66% targeted PhD recruits with industry experience

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92% of PhD recruits get up to speed more quickly after joining compared to graduates

•

73% highly rate PhD recruits’ influence on standards and good practice

In 1999, Professor Mohammed Sarwar, from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, led new research that culminated in significant improvements in the production of glass containers.

Around 33 per cent of all doctorate holders whose PhDs and related doctoral qualifications were supported by EPSRC continue into academia, while nearly half find employment in business and public services.

Working with industrial container manufacturer PLM Redfearn, the research team found a way to reduce the weight of some glass containers by 33 per cent without compromising quality or strength.

Manufacturers, finance and IT companies are the biggest employers of doctoral graduates in engineering and physical sciences, representing around 75 per cent of those going into industry and public services. In addition, these sectors contribute nearly one third of Gross Value Added to the UK.

A further benefit was that the process had a consequent effect on energy consumed during manufacture and transportation.

Stiff records Many new technological innovations stand or fall on the precision of their engineering. For example, mirrors and lenses used in space programmes must have nearperfect lenses; and for the next generation of car engines improved fuel efficiency and reduced emissions will depend on components that have been engineered to minute tolerances. To achieve precise nanoscale surface specifications, in 1999 an EPSRCsupported team at Cranfield University, led by Professor John Corbett, developed a new breed of machine tool, dubbed Tetraform C, based on a tetrahedral frame. Interviewed in 1999, Professor Corbett said: “We need tools capable of producing PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

ever-higher tolerances – repeatedly. And for ultra-precision engineering we need ultra-stiff structures. The tetrahedron is one of the stiffest geometries known, because of its high symmetry and ‘closed loop’ form.” The Cranfield team’s tool achieved worldrecord stiffness, enabling it to grind brittle materials such as glass and ceramics in a ‘ductile’ fashion. The benefits of ultra-precision machines such as these are already feeding directly into many important areas of technology, from the manufacture of more reliable car engines to making silicon integrated circuits with nanometric accuracy and repeatability.

December 31: Boris Yeltsin resigns as President of Russia, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the acting President

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2000 Flexible friends In 2000, Professor Richard Friend (pictured), Professor Henning Sirringhaus and Stuart Evans formed Plastic Logic Ltd to commercialise their EPSRCsupported research at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. The company’s formation built on the team’s 1989 invention of polymer organic light-emitting diodes (P-OLEDs), developed with colleagues at the university’s chemistry department and with EPSRC funding. Their genius spawned an entirely new industry – plastic electronics – and the subsequent creation of a new research field where plastics are made to emit light. Plastic Logic was the first to fully industrialise the mass production of plastic electronics in the world’s first factory dedicated to the technology, achieving production yields of plastic electronic displays comparable to the LCD industry. With a host of potential applications – from flexible electronic displays and paper-thin tablet computers, to ultra-efficient lighting and low-cost, long-life solar cells – it is estimated the global market for plastic electronics will grow to over £80 billion by 2020. The research also created manufacturing processes that combine the power of electronics with the pervasiveness of printing. The story since has been one of constant achievement, supported by EPSRC through research grants and dedicated manufacturing and innovation centres focused on plastic electronics, large area electronics and related research.


Since 2009, the Technology Strategy Board has invested some £40 million, unlocking more than £100 million of R&D activity, including academic research into new plastic electronics technologies. In 2007, the EPSRC-funded Cambridge Innovation and Knowledge Centre (CIKC) in Advance Manufacturing Technologies for Photonics and Electronics was launched, providing additional support for Professor Friend’s research team and other innovators in the field. This was complemented in 2013 by the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Large-Area Electronics, also at Cambridge. In 2009, Plastic Logic and electronic display spin out company Liquavista collaborated on a project to develop flexible electronic displays that support full colour and video – allowing products such as electronic newspapers that can show moving images. In 2010, Professor Sir Richard Friend, who was knighted in 2003, Professor Neil Greenham and Professor Henning Sirringhaus co-founded Eight-19 Ltd to develop organic solar cell technology for manufacture. The company’s unique proposition includes off-grid pay-as-yougo-style mobile phone technology for the developing world – powered by solar cells based on printed plastic. Eight-19 was formed to commercialise technology developed at the CIKC in Advance Manufacturing Technologies for Photonics and Electronics, one of seven EPSRC-supported Innovation and Knowledge Centres focused on facilitating the commercial exploitation of academic science and technology in partnership with industry. In 2011, Plastic Logic announced a major US$700 million investment from Russia’s

January 6: US students Jerry Yang and David Filo launch Yahoo

RUSNANO, focusing on building a massproduction factory for thin, light and flexible plastic-based e-paper displays. In 2012, Professor Sir Richard Friend joined EPSRC’s Council, the senior decisionmaking body responsible for determining EPSRC policy, priorities and strategy. In 2012, Eight-19 was crowned Small Business of the Year and won the Renewable Energy Project of the Year award at the BusinessGreen Leaders Awards for its work on the Indigo pay-asyou-go solar system. In 2013, The University of Cambridge’s EPSRC-supported Graphene Centre signed a research collaboration agreement with Plastic Logic on graphene in flexible plastic electronics. A major element of the agreement is to develop ‘wonder material’ graphene as a transparent, conductive layer for plastic backplanes for unbreakable LCD and flexible OLED displays. In 2013, Plastic Logic joined forces with Intel® and Queen’s University Belfast to develop Papertab, a flexible, 10.7” plastic touchscreen tablet resembling a sheet of paper. Stuff magazine named Papertab its Innovation of the Year at its 2013 Gadget Awards. In 2013, the Plastic Electronics Leadership Group revealed that the UK sector involved 33 universities and 134 companies; had generated annual revenues of £234 million; and employed 1,950 people in industry and 575 in academia. Professor Friend says: “EPSRC was quick to provide critical support at the start of our research and has since been effective in funding the UK community across chemistry, physics and engineering, so that the UK community has been consistently world-leading.”

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May 4: Ken Livingstone becomes the first Mayor of London

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2000

Perfect partners In 2000, a ground-breaking strategic partnership in combinatorial chemistry with UK pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Wellcome (now GSK) resulted in joint funding for 10 state-of-the-art mass spectrometers in UK universities – and marked the beginning of an enduring, highly productive relationship with GSK. It was the first of EPSRC’s flagship Strategic Partnerships with major companies and other research funders and users; providing access to world-leading knowledge, highly-trained people and high specification equipment that is directly utilised by industry. The new partnership accelerated the UK pharmaceutical sector’s understanding of combinatorial technologies, helped advance analytical processes used in drug development, and provided the UK with an


internationally-leading capability hitherto unavailable either in UK universities or in industry. Subsequent EPSRC/GSK investments included installation of new analytical equipment at the universities of Southampton and Swansea, open to industry and academics alike. In 2008, EPSRC and GSK co-invested in a five-year, £10 million drug discovery and development project. In 2012, the two organisations announced they would jointly support a department (chair) in sustainable chemistry at the University of Nottingham. GSK’s Director of Academic Liaison, Dr Malcolm Skingle, says: “Working with EPSRC changed the cultural mind-set within GSK such that our chemists now

June 19: Tiger Woods wins golf’s US Open by 15 shots, a record for all majors

think more broadly about the scientific challenges they are attempting to address. “Our strategic partnership has stimulated areas of research within academia and, conversely, has introduced new ideas to the industrial chemists through two-way exchange of information.” In 2014, EPSRC’s portfolio of Strategic Partnerships includes a range of international blue chip industries including BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Procter & Gamble, Jaguar Land Rover, and, more recently, Tata Steel in 2014. Over 40 per cent of the research supported by EPSRC is collaborative with industry. You can find out more about EPSRC’s Strategic Partnerships in Pioneer 13, published later this year.

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Famous five

Life model

In 2000, EPSRC co-invested £50 million in five new Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations (IRCs) focused on new applications for information technology, computer science and communications in businesses, homes and hospitals.

In 2000, University of Surrey-based EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow, Professor Adrian Hilton, developed new computer imaging technology that allowed internet users to create much more ‘lifelike’ models of themselves.

The investment saw the creation of five university-based centres and marked a step change in how interdisciplinary research is facilitated and fostered, through long-term academic/industry collaborations. Four of the new IRCs, funded in full by EPSRC, tackled issues such as developing ultra-fast communications using optical technology; embedding computers into everyday objects and environments; improving knowledge management to prevent information overload; and improving the dependability of computerbased systems. The fifth IRC, funded by EPSRC and the Medical Research Council, examined how to transform medical images and data into useable clinical information. Twenty universities and over 40 companies were involved in the new IRCs, which also brought to the fore the leadership talents and innovative research capabilities of the centres’ directors: Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt (knowledge management); Professor Tom Rodden (embedded computing); Professor Wilson Sibbett (optics); Professor Cliff Jones (computer system dependability); and Professor Mike Brady and Professor Dave Hawkes (medical imaging), all of whom have made pioneering contributions in their respective fields. Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations (IRCs) EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations (IRCs) are centres of internationally-acknowledged scientific and technological excellence, with sufficient critical mass to make a significant impact in areas of key future industrial relevance to the UK.

Able to walk, run and jump, these avatars, which could be imported into computergenerated scenes using standard 3D modelling packages, gave users a clearer impression of whom they are dealing with online, and thus enhanced internet safety. In 2003, Professor Hilton (pictured) was awarded a five-year EPSRC Platform Grant to develop his research into Visual Media, and to build a team to pursue long-term research in visual content production, interaction and information retrieval. In 2009, the research, which included a project to develop 3D representations of real faces for realistic animation, was followed by a second five-year EPSRC Platform Grant. In 2013, Professor Hilton, now Director of the Centre for Vision, Speech & Signal

The software they developed takes detailed measurements of the shopper’s body via a personal web-cam. Whether shoppers are pear, apple or hourglass-shaped the new software makes it easier for them to order the correct size. The software, co-developed with London College of Fashion, Bodymetrics and digital creative agency Guided, works like a virtual tape measure, taking accurate measurements and advising the user on which size garment to buy on a participating retailer’s website. A launch of the system is anticipated within two years. Also in 2013, Professor Hilton received a five-year EPSRC Programme Grant to pioneer a new-generation 3D sound system which creates the live concert or sports experience from the comfort of the listener’s living room. The programme is in collaboration with the universities of Southampton and Salford, the BBC and UK industry.

Cool news Between 2000 and 2003, EPSRC-funded research at the University of Sussex led to major improvements in the longevity and safety of the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) which currently provide about 75 per cent of the UK’s nuclear energy generating capability.

IRCs generally involve several universities together with industrial partners, and are funded through large, long-term grants, typically around £10 million over six years.

Estimates at the time suggested that if the 14 UK operating AGRs closed unnecessarily early, it could lead to losses running into billions of pounds, threaten the UK’s carbon dioxide emission targets and widen the nation’s energy deficit.

Recent investments include IRCs in Early-Warning Sensing Systems for Infectious Diseases; Bionanotechnology; Tissue Engineering; Quantum Information Processing and Ultrafast Photonics.

The research also informed the scale of the decommissioning process required for the first generation Magnox reactors.


Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey, together with members of his team, co-developed a web-based system that could revolutionise the way we shop for clothes online.

July 25: An Air France Concorde supersonic passenger jet crashes just after take-off from Paris, killing all 109 aboard and four on the ground

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2001 Makers in momentum In 2001, British manufacturing received a boost with the launch of 12 EPSRC Innovative Manufacturing Research Centres (IMRCs). The centres were the first in a series of investments focused on getting more science and technology out of the lab and into the factory. Each IMRC built on work already being done in areas such as rapid prototyping; e-business; recyclable materials and modular construction methods. During the programme’s 10-year lifespan, 15 separate IMRCs were launched, each addressing a series of manufacturing challenges. EPSRC invested a total of £192 million in the centres, supplemented by £207 million in industrial support from over 700 collaborators.

PIONEER 09 2013 12 Winter Summer 2014

By 2011, the programme had created over 1,300 doctoral level manufacturing engineers. It had also created 160 new jobs; safeguarded a further 230 jobs and brought 20 new technologies to market.

Another project, at the University of Bath’s Innovative Design and Manufacturing Research Centre, led to the development of greener, faster and more efficient food packaging processes.

Laser focus

In collaboration with an independent food and drinks research centre and industrial partners, the team developed an improved ‘form-fill and seal’ food packaging process for foods such as rice, confectionery, pasta and crisps.

One of the centres, based at Heriot-Watt University, pioneered the development of revolutionary planar waveguide CO2 lasers, in collaboration with research groups at the University of Hull and industrial partner Rofin-Sinar UK. Now manufactured by major international companies for applications in industry and medicine, including glass patterning, fabric decoration, and inscribing date codes on consumer products, global sales of these advanced laser products now exceed US$1 billion.

Project leader, Dr Ben Hicks, says: “The project has shown that reducing costs and saving the planet can go hand-in-hand. “Using the lessons learned from this research, 39,000 tonnes of waste could be diverted from landfill per year. Based on the current level of landfill tax, this would save £1.9 million in taxation alone.”

September 11: Two passenger planes hijacked by terrorists crash into New York’s World Trade Center causing the death of 2,752 people

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PIONEER 09 2013 12 Winter Summer 2014

October 7: The US invasion of Afghanistan starts with an air assault and covert ground operations

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2001 MEM’s the world In 2001, Dr Eric Yeatman, Professor Richard Syms and Dr Andrew Holmes, from Imperial College London, cofounded Microsaic Systems plc to take their EPSRCsupported research to market. The company’s core product was a desksized mass spectrometer instrument that can measure the masses and relative concentrations of atoms and molecules in substances. The device was based on micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology developed at Imperial. MEMS is a technology that uses integrated circuit methods to produce tiny mechanical devices such as sensors, valves, gears, mirrors, and actuators in the form of semiconductor chips. MEMS devices generally range in size from 20 micrometres (20 millionths of a metre) to a millimetre, and usually consist of a central unit that processes data, and components such as micro-sensors that interact with the surroundings.


In the 1990s, Dr (later Professor) Yeatman (pictured) co-founded one of the UK’s first research groups into micro-electromechanical systems at Imperial, helping position the university as a world leader in the field. In the 2000s, Microsaic went on to develop and market a range of next-generation mass spectrometry (MS) instruments for the analysis of gaseous, liquid and solid samples. A key feature of Microsaic’s MS systems is that they are much smaller, consume less energy, and have lower running costs than conventional instruments. EPSRC support for Professor Yeatman’s work has included successive Platform Grants, enabling him to co-invent a number of new research methods and help position Imperial College London as a world leader in the field of MEMS and related technologies. In 2011, Microsaic was admitted to the London Stock Exchange. In the same year, Professor Yeatman, who was the company’s chairman throughout the 2000s, was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal. He was made a Fellow of the Academy in 2012, and through the Academy acts as mentor to several young academic entrepreneurs.

October 23: Apple releases the iPod

Also in 2011, Professor Yeatman became co-director of the Digital Economy Lab at Imperial College London. He is also principal investigator of the Lab’s flagship project Digital City Exchange. The Digital City Exchange is a five-year multidisciplinary research programme where researchers are exploring ways to digitally link utilities and services within a city, enabling new technical and business opportunities. The programme is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy Programme, led by EPSRC. Professor Yeatman has acted as a design consultant for several international companies, and as technical advisory board member to two venture capital funds. In 2014, Professor Yeatman’s research interests are in energy sources for wireless devices, radio frequency and photonic MEMS, and sensor networks. Professor Yeatman says: “High valueadded tech products such as scientific instruments are an area where the UK can and does have a strong competitive position internationally. “EPSRC support is a vital enabler of the developments underpinning this strategically important research field.”

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Straight talking In the fast-changing world of smart consumer electronics, in 2001 a team of computer experts from Imperial College London, Jeff Kramer, Jeff Magee and Naranker Dulay, developed a new computer language that enables manufacturers to keep reusing software components in products at no extra development cost. Working with software architects at Phillips, the team customised the system for electronic products. Interviewed in 2001, Professor Magee said: “The previous way that TV sets were built gave much less flexibility and involved much more rewriting of software.” Phillips deployed 300 of its software engineers to work on the system, leading to commercial success.

Keeping mum In 2001, Dr Serpil Acar, a Loughborough University-based specialist in engineering design for women, and in mathematical modelling of the spine, began a three-year EPSRC-supported project to develop a new seatbelt for pregnant women. Working with car makers Jaguar, Ford and Nissan, over the next decade Dr Acar’s SeatbeltPlus project evolved into an awardwinning patented design. A prototype was

Called to account In 2001, after extensive consultation with the research community, EPSRC introduced a new initiative, Doctoral Training Accounts (DTAs), which offered a more flexible approach in the way it funds doctoral training by passing the funds to universities to allocate rather than issuing them direct to students. The new DTAs opened up a wide range of options in the way funds were used to achieve the high quality of student training demanded in an increasingly competitive doctoral training market. EPSRC required universities to make commitments relating to the quality of supervision offered to doctoral students. It also expected students to receive broadening skills. In 2014, the Doctoral Training Account was renamed across all seven UK Research Councils as Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) but still retains its flexible approach in return for high quality doctoral training from universities. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

developed at Loughborough and tested in specialist crash test laboratories. In 2014, Dr Acar is founder of the Biomechanics and Injury Prevention research group at Loughborough and also leads the Interdisciplinary Computing Research Division. The Loughborough team are now in discussion with commercial partners to bring SeatbeltPlus to market. It could retail for as little as £10.

Hear today In 2001, Cardiff University researcher Dr John Culling developed a low-cost hearing test that can be done in the home to help people detect hearing loss earlier. The test worked by measuring a person’s ability to pick out conversation from background noise and on standard audio equipment. In 2010, Dr Colling developed innovative sound-mapping software based on human hearing to help architects design out unwanted noise. The maps showed hotspots where conversations would not be intelligible if the room were busy. Architects can then adjust their designs to reduce reverberation until the hotspots are eliminated and audibility is maximised. The new software is intended to be used in conjunction with standard architectural computer programs widely employed in room design. The research could also help in the future development of hearing aids and cochlear implants.

October 25: Windows XP is released

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2001

Natural marvels In 2001, Alex Parfitt, an EPSRC-supported PhD student at the University of Bath, working with a team led by Professor Julian Vincent, used mechanisms found in nature to devise an adaptive deployable camouflage system for the Ministry of Defence, which co-funded the project. The team developed a gel that mimics the ability of cuttlefish to blend into their surroundings. Interviewed in 2001, Parfitt, a postgraduate biologist in the university’s department of mechanical engineering, said: “The beauty of the cuttlefish system is that it uses the light surrounding the fish to camouflage it.


“Because the idea has come from biology, it is a reliable, low-energy system. We have developed a gel-based system that mimics this behaviour and are applying it as a cover for camouflaging large military vehicles.” In 2003, Alex Parfitt joined BAE Systems where he continued his work in bioinspired technology. A recent project saw the development of night sight technology inspired by the Xenos peckii fly, a tiny parasite that has 50 separate lenses in each of its raspberry-like eyes. Each of the lenses produces a different image, which when meshed together forms a single panoramic view in the fly’s brain.

BAE Systems scientists have recreated this effect with bug-eye – a camera with nine lenses – and about the size of a mobile phone camera lens. This digital device has 60 degrees of peripheral vision and is small and light enough to fit onto a helmet, which could help soldiers spot an enemy out of the corner of their eye and doubles their level of vision from previous equipment. It has been suggested that the technology could be adapted for use in CCTV cameras able to survey a wide panorama of crowded spaces, or perhaps developed as a tool to help with keyhole surgery.

December 15: The Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens after 11 years and over £20,000,000 to fortify it, without fixing its famous lean

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Meet the new boss Interviewed in 2001, John O’Reilly, EPSRC’s recently appointed chief executive, addressed an area of perennial concern that remains equally true in 2014, commenting: “One of our challenges is that the demand for research funding massively exceeds our ability to fund, and in many areas there are more good applications than we can fund… “What we must do is ensure that our money goes into supporting the best research. But this does not mean the resources will be spread thin, with equal shares around – that is not the mode of operation of EPSRC, nor should it be.”

Plasma makes perfect In 2001, Professor Christopher Whitehead and Dr David Glover, from the University of Manchester, co-founded Plasma Clean Ltd to commercialise core technology Professor Whitehead invented during his EPSRC-funded research into plasmas. Plasmas are sometimes described as the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases. For example, the core of the sun is in a plasma state. Professor Whitehead’s research led to plasma technology that can blast apart

£140 million for e-Science In 2001, EPSRC joined forces with the six other UK Research Councils in the three-phase £140 million e-Science Programme, which it went on to lead. The funding supported a range of projects designed to position British science at the forefront of research into computing technologies (see page 57). In 2005, the e-Science Core Programme leader Professor Tony Hey became Microsoft’s Corporate VicePresident of Technical Computing and, in 2011, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research Connections.


the chemicals responsible for the smell of decomposing waste. In 2014, Plasma Clean is one of the country’s leading developers of air purification solutions. With a nationwide network of approved specialists, the company provides costeffective grease, odour and smoke control for a wide range of environments, including commercial kitchens, washrooms, food storage, public waiting areas, and food and commercial waste sites.

Order from chaos In 2001, EPSRC Senior Fellow Laurence Eaves won the prestigious Guthrie Medal and prize of the Institute of Physics. In parallel with his work into quantum chaos, Eaves and his team studied how electrons can ‘tunnel’ through materials when a magnetic field is present. This led to the development of a new technique, magneto-tunnelling spectroscopy. The technique provides physicists with a new way to measure the structure of low-dimensional semiconductor materials, such as quantum wells, which are at the heart of the modern semiconductor laser diodes used in telecommunications and DVD players. It could also help in the development of the next generation of transistors and lasers (see page 27).

January 26: An earthquake hits Gujarat, India, causing more than 20,000 deaths

Mobile monitor In 2001, Professor Bryan Woodward and Dr Fadlee Rasid, from Loughborough University, began development of a unique system which uses a mobile phone to transmit a person’s vital signs, including the complex ECG heart signal, to a hospital or clinic anywhere in the world. The system enabled a doctor to observe remotely up to four different medical signals from a freely moving patient. Signals that could be transmitted included ECG, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and body temperature. The technology marked an important advance in telemedicine and is thought to be a world first.

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2002

3D vision In 2002, Professor Dave Hawkes and colleagues at King’s College London (KCL) developed 3D medical imaging technology that enabled surgeons to steer clear of vital regions and yet still work close to them.

During an operation it is essential that the surgeon is aware of critical structures, blood vessels or nerve fibres that need to be avoided. By taking MRI and X-ray computed tomography scans of the patient pre-surgery, the team developed a 3D representation of the area that the surgeon could follow on a computer screen during surgery. To avoid surgeons needing to glance between patient and screen, Professor Hawkes later co-devised with Dr Philip Edwards a way to insert 3D images into the surgical operating microscope’s field of view. The microscope displays the image just where the surgeon is looking, helping them ‘see through’ overlying tissue and visualise the exact area they plan to operate on. If the surgeon is searching for a tumour, for example, the image indicates how far away it is. The system became highly useful to neurosurgeons. The team have since made major advances in 3D modelling of soft tissues, developing novel treatments of the liver, breast, lung


and prostate. A 1992 SERC grant enabled Professor Hawkes, with PhD student Derek Hill and postdoctoral student Daniel Rueckert, to develop the widely used and highly cited image registration technology that underpins much of this work. In 2003, Professor Hawkes became Director of the EPSRC/MRC-funded Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration on Medical Images and Signals, a joint initiative between University College London, Imperial College London, the University of Oxford and KCL. In 2004, Professor Hawkes co-founded IXICO to bring aspects of his research to market. The CEO of this London Stock Exchangelisted company, which provides imaging solutions to the pharmaceutical industry, is Derek Hill, his former PhD student. In 2005, Professor Hawkes moved his team to UCL, forming the UCL Centre for Medical Image Computing. He was awarded a fiveyear EPSRC Programme Grant in 2009. In 2014, Professor Hawkes, who has led or co-investigated 39 EPSRC research grants since 1992, co-leads the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Medical Imaging at UCL and also heads the university’s Centre for Medical Image Computing. He is co-Director

January 9: Michael Jackson receives the Artist of the Century award at the American Music Awards

of the UCL/KCL Centre for Cancer Imaging funded by EPSRC and Cancer Research UK, and co-leader of an EPSRC/Wellcome Trust smart surgery project in liver surgery. In June 2014, he was named as coinvestigator of a £10 million EPSRC/ Wellcome Trust project to develop instruments and visualisations to assist surgeons operating on the fetus for spinabifida and other congenital problems while still in the womb. Professor Hawkes says: “EPSRC’s support over more than two decades has enabled me to build a significant research programme. Most importantly, it led to other support that pushed several innovations through to clinical trial and commercialisation. “This work has achieved wide-ranging impact in areas such as neurosurgery, the study of disease progression in dementia, image-guided biopsy and focal ablation – which is poised to significantly change the management of patients with prostate cancer. “There is now a significant body of worldleading medical image computing research at UCL, KCL, Imperial and Oxford that can trace its roots back to the initial investment

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Shrewd thinking In 2002, an EPSRC-supported team from the universities of Sheffield and the West of England began work on a whiskered robot inspired by rodents. Interviewed in 2002, Sheffield’s Professor Tony Prescott said: “For most rodents, whiskers are at least as significant as eyes are to sighted humans.” The robot was designed for use in environments hazardous to humans – such as natural disaster zones and fire sites – which are often cramped, full of dust and smoke, and offer limited visibility.

The team went on to develop SCRATCHbot, which ‘feels’ its way using rat-like whiskers, and subsequently won the 2009 Best of What’s New Award from Popular Science magazine. In 2012, the team’s next creation, Shrewbot, was inspired by the four-centimetre long Etruscan shrew, one of the world’s tiniest mammals, and used ‘active touch’ rather than vision to navigate its environment. In 2013, inspired by their rodent research, Professor Prescott’s team developed a ‘tactile’ helmet, which could provide firefighters operating in challenging

And the Emmy goes to ...

conditions with vital clues about their surroundings. The helmet was fitted with ultrasound sensors that detect the distances between the helmet and nearby walls or other obstacles; and was exhibited at the 2013 Gadget Show Live event.

Advancing doctoral training In 2002, EPSRC launched its first Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs). What began as a pilot programme to support doctoral training in the life sciences evolved into a major initiative for training the interdisciplinary researchers of tomorrow in strategically important areas.

In 2002, Professor Andrew Zisserman and Professor Andrew Fitzgibbon received an Emmy Award, the US TV industry’s equivalent of an Oscar, for their work on Boujou, a 3D camera tracker used in special effects movies such as the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises. Boujou was borne out of an EPSRC-funded research project at the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering in the 1990s. In 2014, Andrew Fitzgibbon is a member of the Microsoft Research Group in Cambridge. A recipient of a Silver Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering, in 2013, he was a core contributor in the development of Kinect for Xbox 360. In 2014, Professor Andrew Zisserman is Principal Investigator at the University of Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group and a world-renowned computer scientist. He began his academic career as a member of Professor Mike Brady’s Oxford Robotics Group in the 1980s (see page 28) and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007.


March 30: Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother dies aged 101

Such was the success of the early CDTs, which evolved from EPSRC’s pioneering Engineering Doctorate initiative in the 1990s, there are now 115 centres spanning EPSRC’s portfolio. CDTs bring together diverse areas of expertise to train engineers and scientists with the skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle today’s evolving issues. They also create new working cultures, build relationships between teams in universities and forge lasting links with industry. Students receive a programme of taught coursework to develop and enhance their technical interdisciplinary knowledge, and broaden their set of skills. Alongside this they undertake a challenging and original research project at doctoral level. Combined governmental and partner funding for CDTs is now £962 million, including £31 million in capital investment. It is the UK’s largest investment in postgraduate training, involving over 5,500 students in areas of key importance to the UK economy and society. You can find out more about CDTs in Pioneer 13, published this autumn.

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2002 New wave crushes rock In 2002, Dr Sam Kingman (pictured), from the University of Nottingham, made a breakthrough in his EPSRC-funded research into using microwave radiation to break up mineral-bearing rocks. Traditional crushing and grinding of rocks to extract minerals is massively energy inefficient. Typically, only one per cent of the energy input into rock grinding actually causes size reduction. Dr Kingman’s process uses bursts of microwave radiation to crumble the rock, prior to grinding. Most rocks need just a fraction of a second to weaken them sufficiently


before grinding, when they will fall apart easily. Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining companies, supported the research from its outset. In 2006, Professor Sam Kingman was awarded a personal chair at Nottingham, making him one of the youngest professors in the UK. He later became Director of the National Centre for Industrial Microwave Processing (NCIMP). In December 2013, the University of Nottingham and Rio Tinto agreed a £6 million, five-year partnership to develop the next generation of innovative technologies for the mining industry. The programme is centred around a new facility at Nottingham, the Rio Tinto Centre for Emergent Technologies. Its Research Director is Professor Kingman.

October 30: Freeview television service begins transmitting in parts of the UK

Engineers at the centre are researching new ways of separating ores based on the properties of individual rocks, meaning that waste material with no valuable minerals contained within it can be rejected prior to energy-intensive further processing. Professor Kingman says: “Over 20 granted patents, 28 PhD students graduated, more than 80 journal papers published, and many tens of millions of pounds of industry investment across numerous sectors all across the world can all trace their roots to my EPSRC first grant project. “Without the support of EPSRC, none of this would have happened, I am still to this day extremely appreciative of the support I have been given.”

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Mussels mastered In 2002, EPSRC-supported researchers at the University of Cambridge, led by Dr David Aldridge, developed an elegant solution to the problems caused by freshwater zebra mussels, which are a major pest, clogging pipelines in water treatment works and power stations, and costing millions of pounds each year to remove. The conventional solution is to poison the mussels with chlorine, but the team developed a greener, more targeted approach that neatly overcame one of chlorine’s major drawbacks – zebra mussels can taste it in the water and close their shells, surviving for three weeks before opening up again, meaning chlorine must persist over this time to be effective. Working with Dr Geoff Moggridge from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Cambridge, the team developed a way to poison the mussels, 4cm-long creatures which lay up to 30,000 eggs per year, by tricking them into swallowing a dose of toxin packaged to resemble a pellet of food. The research led to the formation of a spin out company, BioBullet, which developed potassium chlorine as the lethal ingredient.

Medallion man In 2002, Professor Chris Hull, a theoretical physicist from Imperial College London, was awarded the prestigious Dirac medal and prize by the Institute of Physics for his decade-long research into superstring and M-theory. The prize followed an EPSRC Senior Research Fellowship, awarded in 1996. In 2012, Professor Hull was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2013, Professor Hull (pictured in 2002) was awarded an EPSRC Programme Grant to lead research into new geometric structures from string theory, alongside co-investigators Jerome Gauntlett, Amihay Hanany and Daniel Waldram. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

Together with Bristol firm, TasteTech, BioBullet developed a pellet that is both mussel-palatable and waterproof.

The research has been of great interest to the UK water industry, with at least four companies funding the research to date.

Interviewed in 2002, Dr Aldridge said: “The beauty is that we engineer the coating materials so that the pellet dissolves and degrades, and the entire product degrades within hours of going in the water.

In 2010, following approval by the Drinking Water Inspectorate, trials began with Anglian Water Services Ltd to use the pellets in the UK for potable water systems.

“There’s also no impact on the wider biodiversity living in rivers and streams that might receive the outflow water.”

In the same year, the company secured funding of £500,000 from the Technology Strategy Board, match-funded by Anglian, Thames Water and TasteTech.

British steel In 2002, Dr Mary Ryan from Imperial College London and Professor David Williams from University College London solved the mystery of why stainless steel can unexpectedly fail. The metal is not meant to corrode, but it can, and when it does the results can be disastrous, whether it’s a hole in your dishwasher or a failed industrial plant. ‘Stainlessness’ is created by alloying iron with chromium. As the steel ingot cools after it has been made, tiny sulphur-rich impurity particles, about 10 millionths of a metre in diameter, solidify at a lower temperature than the steel, remaining molten for a time after the metal has solidified. Using an advanced new microscope the team found a region around the impurity particles with significantly less chromium than the rest of the steel. During cooling of the steel the impurity particles ‘suck’ chromium out of the steel

December 22: Joe Strummer, lead singer of the seminal British punk band The Clash, dies at age 50

around them, creating a tiny nutshell of steel that is not stainless. Corrosion of this layer, just one 10 millionth of a metre thick, is enough to trigger the main attack. In 2011, Professor Mary Ryan was awarded the Institute of Minerals, Materials and Mining’s Rosenhain Medal and Prize in recognition of distinguished achievement in materials science for her outstanding contribution to applied electrochemistry and corrosion.

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2003 Fusion for the future In 2003, EPSRC assumed responsibility for the UK fusion programme, with £48 million in funding allocated via the Office of Science and Technology. Fusion, the process by which the sun produces heat and light, has the potential to provide an almost limitless clean, safe, renewable energy source for future generations. The EPSRC grant was awarded to the UK Atomic Energy Authority at its Culham site in Oxfordshire. The grant underpinned the UK’s involvement in the EURATOM Joint European Torus (JET) project, also at Culham; the development of the UK’s own fusion device, MAST; and research on the materials needed for a fusion power station. Today the UK fusion programme is centred on the innovative MAST experiment and employs around 150 people. While the MAST remains the UK’s flagship programme, the UK continues to run JET and is also developing materials and technology facilities. The fusion programme as a whole employs around 1,000 people. The fusion reactions that turn hydrogen into helium in the core of the sun produce a lot of energy and could be used as the basis for a power station on Earth. However, making this process efficient is difficult as additional energy is required to get the nuclei close enough to fuse together. Formidable engineering and scientific challenges need to be addressed. One way of achieving fusion is to trap a plasma with a magnetic field and heat it up in a doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak. The JET programme at Culham is the world’s largest tokamak experiment. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

The plasma in the centre of JET reaches temperatures of 100 million degrees, about 10 times hotter than the centre of the sun. These high temperatures are not a safety concern because the amount of fuel inside the tokamak is extremely low, weighing about as much as a postage stamp. In 1997, JET produced 16 mega watts of fusion power, a world record that still stands today, but 24 mega watts of heating power were needed to do this. Calculations predict a bigger tokamak is required to break even. A new international tokamak experiment, called ITER, is under construction in Cadarache, France. Three times bigger than JET, it is expected to produce 10 times more fusion power than heating power – considered proof that it is possible to build a viable fusion power station. To match ITER’s designs, JET’s vessel walls have been changed from graphite to a combination of tungsten and beryllium. New results with these materials in place are helping scientists and engineers to prepare for ITER’s first operation in 2019. In 2014, the Culham centre announced it will try to set a new world record in nuclear fusion by the end of the decade – when it plans to run JET at maximum power, and reach the coveted breakeven goal where fusion yields as much energy as it consumes. Words: Jack Snape Jack is an operational research analyst at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He is a former EPSRC-sponsored PhD student in Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy at the University of York, and a Postgraduate Fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology Education.

August 2003: Ground-breaking social networking website MySpace is launched – one year before Facebook

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2003 Power rangers In 2003, SUPERGEN, the UK’s flagship initiative in sustainable power generation and supply, was launched. The ambitious multidisciplinary research initiative, led by EPSRC, covers a vast green energy landscape, taking in areas such as climate change, fossil fuel extraction rates, emissions control, and increasing public awareness of environmental concerns. SUPERGEN aims to contribute to the UK’s environmental emissions targets through a radical improvement in the sustainability of the UK’s power generation and supply. Focusing on collaborative research projects between industry and academia, the initiative began with an investment of £25 million in four consortia: Marine Energy, Networks & Power Control, Hydrogen Energy & Storage and Biomass & Biofuels. Over the next decade, SUPERGEN, which stands for Sustainable Power Generation and Supply, built into a network of eight consortia and six hubs, supported by over £100 million of investment, offering a major route for industry involvement in academic research.

the several dozen university departments involved, along with their numerous industrial partners, the consortia have broken new ground in the way they have approached their subjects. Rather than working on specific, discrete projects in isolation, the SUPERGEN projects look at entire topics; an approach which has led to expansion into areas such as extending the life of power plants, advanced photovoltaic materials and asset management. An example of the benefits of this approach is research overseen by the Excitonic Solar Cells Consortium. Tasked with developing a new class of solar cell based on organic materials, the consortium’s research inspired complementary technologies using the same low temperature processing techniques used to prepare flexible organic light emitting diodes.

Tim Jones and Ross Hatton, working with Molecular Solar Ltd, a company they formed to commercialise their work, pioneered the development of a new type of flexible, organic solar cell. Molecular Solar achieved a record voltage for the cell, which could soon be used in a wide range of consumer electronics – from e-readers to mobile phone chargers. Centres flourishing under the SUPERGEN initiative include the UK Centre for Marine Energy Research at Edinburgh University (see page 9).

At the University of Warwick, a SUPERGEN-sponsored research team led by Professors

As well as developing an array of technology now being furthered by


February 17: London introduces congestion charging

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He said it So far I have been lucky only twice – with our gecko experiment and the one using diamagnetic levitation. So that’s once every five years. According to these poor statistics I do not expect anything before 2008. Fortunately, one cannot predict or plan even minor discoveries.

Nobel for MRI pioneer In 2003, Professor Peter Mansfield, from the University of Nottingham, and Paul Lauterbur were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)”.

He went on to secure a place at Queen Mary, University of London – and never looked back, going on to develop rapid imaging techniques, thus facilitating images that can distinguish between healthy and cancerous tissue.

Since their launch in the 1980s, MRI scanners, which create detailed images of the body to assist in the diagnosis of medical conditions, have transformed diagnostic medicine and saved the lives of many thousands of people.

Now Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham, Peter Mansfield has received UK Research Council support throughout his career, including from EPSRC and its predecessor the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC).

Despite being told at 15 he would never become a scientist as he had no qualifications, on leaving school Peter Mansfield enrolled in evening classes to get the qualifications he needed.

Today, there are more than 20,000 MRI scanners globally, and over 70 million scans are performed each year. The annual market value for the technology is estimated to exceed £5 billion by 2015.

Professor André Geim, from the University of Manchester, interviewed in 2003, on science that hits the media spotlight. One year later, together with Dr Konstantin Novoselov, André Geim made history by isolating ‘wonder material’ graphene. In 2010, Geim and Novoselov received the Nobel Prize for their graphene research – and were made Knights of the Realm in 2011. You can find out more about this remarkable story in Pioneer 13, in autumn 2014. In the meantime, turn to page 66 for more on the gecko experiment.

Piston power In 2003, a team of researchers at the University of Birmingham’s School of Manufacturing and Engineering designed and built a fully working single piston micro engine that could be balanced on the tip of your finger.

longer than a mobile phone battery. So you might only need to charge the phone twice a year, not twice a week.”

He was, of course, speaking in the heady days before the advent of energy-sapping, daily-charging smartphones.

The project hit the mainstream news headlines – and saw team member Mike Ward gracing Richard and Judy’s sofa at ITV to describe the team’s innovative research. The idea behind the project was bold: that a micro engine powered by hydrocarbon fuel would have over 200 times the energy capacity of a typical battery. Interviewed in 2003, Dr Kyle Jiang, who led the EPSRC-supported project, said: “If you ask a group of mobile phone users which part of the phone they dislike the most, 10 out of 10 will say the battery. “What we realised was that a micro engine powered by a cartridge of fuel such as methane or propane could last 30 times PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

April 14: The Human Genome Project is completed with 99 per cent of the human genome sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99 per cent

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ALL RISE The results are in. The Recognising Inspirational Scientists and Engineers (RISE) Awards, which mark EPSRC’s 20th anniversary, in partnership with the Royal Academy of Engineering, celebrate the incredible innovation that has taken place over recent decades by honouring some of the exceptional individuals who made these achievements possible.

The selection process drew nominations from universities, industrial partners, professional bodies and learned societies, and resulted in a distinguished assembly of established leaders and future leaders in the making. The calibre of the nominees was exceptionally high, with a number already recognised as Fellows of the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering and Academy of Medical Sciences, whom the RISE judging


panel have recognised in the awards as RISE Fellows. In this special 20th anniversary edition of Pioneer we turn the spotlight on the 10 RISE Leaders, whom the judges believe will be standard-bearers for engineering and the physical sciences over the coming decades. The 10 RISE leaders have been paired with distinguished individuals from the world of public affairs, science and business. Their

role will be to communicate the importance and impact of their research, helping their partners become champions for science. The RISE leaders have also nominated their Rising Stars, tipped to lead internationally excellent research in the future, and who will attend the final RISE awards ceremony, together with the RISE Leaders and RISE Fellows, at the House of Commons in June 2014.

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over 75 staff and students, the centre has an active grant portfolio of over £20 million, and is regarded as one of the university’s most strategically important assets.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili OBE Jim Al-Khalili is Professor of Physics and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Surrey. In 1994 he was awarded a five-year EPSRC Advanced Fellowship, during which he became established as a leading expert on nuclear reaction theory involving exotic (halo) nuclei. His publications on the subject have now amassed over 1,000 citations. Professor Al-Khalili is an active science communicator, writer and broadcaster. He was an EPSRC Senior Media Fellow between 2006 and 2011 and is an awardwinning presenter of scientific programmes on TV and radio. For the past three years he has presented BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific. Professor Al-Khalili says: “I am proud to have achieved what I have and to have been able to establish myself both as an academic researcher and teacher as well as a respected author and broadcaster. A generation ago, this double life would simply not have been possible.” Professor Al-Khalili, whose RISE Champion is the Shadow Science Minister, Liam Byrne MP, has nominated Dr Radu Sporea, from the University of Surrey, as his Rising Star.

Professor O’Brien holds a 10-year Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, one of only two to be awarded. He has received over 18 major prizes for his work and holds three patents for quantum technologies. He says: “Quantum technologies are destined to fundamentally change our lives, affecting health, quality and security. Potential applications include the ability to design and create new materials and pharmaceuticals at a fraction of today’s costs; ultra-secure communications; sensors of unprecedented precision; and computers that are exponentially more powerful than any current supercomputer for some tasks. The first commercially available quantum devices are only now beginning to emerge.” Professor O’Brien, whose RISE Champion is Danny Finkelstein, Executive Editor and Chief Leader writer of The Times, has nominated Peter Shadbolt, from the University of Bristol, as his Rising Star.

Jeremy O’Brien is Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Bristol and is internationally recognised for his pioneering research and leadership in quantum information science and technology. He is founding director of the University of Bristol’s Centre for Quantum Photonics. With PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

Professor Haas, whose career in communications engineering started with Siemens AG in Munich, set up a company to exploit Li-Fi technology, which promises to be cheaper and more energy-efficient than existing wireless radio systems. TIME magazine named Professor Haas’s work as one of its 50 Best Inventions in 2011. Professor Haas, who established the Li-Fi R&D Centre at the University of Edinburgh, has presented his work on visible light communications internationally. His TEDGlobal presentation on Li-Fi has been watched on YouTube over 1.5 million times. Professor Haas says: “The time I spent in industry helped me greatly in gaining a thorough understanding of the needs and the vision of the communications industry and has enabled me to ensure that my research remains relevant beyond academia.” Professor Haas, whose RISE Champion is Jonathan Leigh-Smith, Head of Partnerships and Strategic Research at BT, has nominated Dr Lev Sarkisov, from Edinburgh University, as his Rising Star.

Professor Harald Haas Professor Haas, Chair of Mobile Communications at Edinburgh University, pioneered research into using light sources to transmit data – a technology he named Li-Fi. In contrast to wi-fi, which uses radio waves to exchange data, Li-Fi uses LEDs for

Professor Jeremy O’Brien

high speed data communication.

Professor Jenny Nelson Jenny Nelson, Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, became Imperial’s first Greenpeace Fellow, in 1989, when she joined the university to work on the application of quantum semiconductor structures to solar photovoltaics (PV). In an Imperial career spanning 24 years, she has gone on to lead her own PV research group, who have advanced solar energy research across disciplines and countries through productive collaborations. Many of the team have progressed to independent careers in the science of solar energy and energy materials.

(Continued on next page)

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has been recognised by international awards from the Pharmaceutical Sciences World Congress, the Royal Society and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. Among his achievements, he has designed new materials which have since been licensed by three companies and which are being developed as products in Europe and the United States.

(Continued from previous page) Professor Nelson says: “We need to understand and improve the performance of materials, devices and systems to make solar power more accessible and affordable, and so help accelerate the transition to a low carbon energy supply. “For scientists, this means working across disciplines to connect with those working on energy storage, distribution, policy and economics, and it means finding ways to identify the most critical problems to address. The overall challenge is making it all happen quickly enough.”

Professor Shakesheff says: “My hope is that, within a decade, regenerative medicine will be able to create many simpler technologies and treatments that have both commercial and clinical benefits. Using injected cells to repair parts of organs, such as heart tissue after a heart attack, or using stem cells to find new classes of drugs are realistic breakthroughs by 2020.”

His work, part of a worldwide effort to cure major diseases by growing tissues, PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

Professor Williams, a Royal Academy of Engineering Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow, says: “A key challenge is how to progress the excellent science being done in labs into clinical practice, so I am grateful for having the opportunity to collaborate with clinicians, which has led me to develop new approaches to treat clinical problems.” Professor Williams, whose RISE Champion is Professor Sir Mark Walport, Government Chief Scientific Adviser, has nominated Dr Paolo Paoletti, from the University of Liverpool, as her Rising Star.

Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga Professor Rachel Williams

Kevin Shakesheff is Professor of Advanced Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering, and Co-Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Regenerative Medicine at the University of Nottingham. He has played a major role in shaping pharmaceutical science, regenerative medicine and interdisciplinary research at Nottingham.

Professor Williams’ development of a silicone oil tamponade for the treatment of retinal detachment has led to a patent and a clinical product which is now used clinically worldwide.

Professor Shakesheff, whose RISE Champion is Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust, has nominated Dr Marianne Ellis, from the University of Bath, as his Rising Star.

Professor Nelson, whose RISE Champion is Zac Goldsmith MP, has nominated Dr Piers Barnes, from Imperial College London, as her Rising Star.

Professor Kevin Shakesheff

successful, their work could form the basis of a new treatment strategy for patients suffering from severe loss of vision.

Rachel Williams has over 20 years’ experience in the design and development of advanced materials for medical applications. As head of ophthalmic bioengineering within the department of Eye and Vision Science at the University of Liverpool, she and her team are working with ophthalmic surgeons and industry partners to treat sightthreatening conditions such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), cataracts and retinal detachment. Among their research, the team are developing a synthetic membrane on which to grow retinal pigment epithelial cells, or their equivalent, that can be transplanted under the retina in the eye of a patient with age-related macular degeneration. If

Professor Quian Quiroga is Director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience at the University of Leicester. The centre is the hub of a network of collaborations within the UK and worldwide. He is also head of the Bioengineering Group in the university’s Department of Engineering. His main research interest is in the study of the principles of visual perception and memory, and in the development of advanced methods to study neural data and clinical applications. His most renowned scientific achievement is the discovery of concept cells in the human brain, which play a key role in memory formation. These findings have led to new lines of research into how perception and memories are represented in the brain. Professor Quian Quiroga, whose discovery of concept cells was selected as one of

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the Top 100 Scientific Stories by Discover magazine in 2005, says: “In the long term we hope our research will help our understanding of, and eventually find new treatments for, pathologies like Alzheimer’s disease. There is also the opportunity to contribute to the understanding of epilepsy and its treatments.”

Professor Lee Cronin

Professor Quian Quiroga, whose RISE Champion, Professor John Perkins, is Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, has nominated Dr Hernan Rey, from the University of Leicester, as his Rising Star.

Professor Cronin is Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow. Between 2006 and 2011 he held an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, and in 2009 he received a Wolfson-Royal Society Merit Award. In the same year he was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Professor Stephen Haake Professor Sadie Creese Sadie Creese is Professor of Cybersecurity in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. With an extremely broad portfolio of cybersecurity research, her experience spans time in academia, industry and government and embraces mathematical and computer sciences, psychology, management studies and the school of government. Professor Creese, who featured in the 2014 Sunday Times/Debrett 500 Most Influential people in the UK list, is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of the Internet and has also engaged widely with government including giving evidence on cybersecurity to select committees. Prior to joining Oxford, Professor Creese was Director of e-Security within The University of Warwick’s International Digital Laboratory. She has also worked for Qinetiq, the defence, aerospace and security company, where she developed, established and directed the UK Cyber Security Knowledge Transfer Network. Professor Creese says: “Cybersecurity research is both intellectually rewarding and offers the potential to bring new solutions to meet incredibly important challenges.” Professor Creese, whose RISE Champion is James Quinault, from the Government Cabinet Office, has nominated Jason Nurse, from the University of Oxford, as her Rising Star. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

In 1996, Professor Haake founded the Centre for Sports Engineering Research at the University of Sheffield, laying the foundations for the development of sports engineering as a field of academic study. The Centre, which Professor Haake continues to lead, and which relocated to Sheffield Hallam University in 2006, is now the largest of its kind in the world with around 40 staff and PhD students. His research group was made a UK Sport Innovation Partner in 2008 and worked with teams that secured 24 Olympic medals in London 2012. Professor Haake, who holds an EPSRC Senior Media Fellowship, is founding Chairman of the International Sports Engineering Association and organiser of seven of the International Conferences on the Engineering of Sport. He is also Director of Research for the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine which works to improve the public health and wellbeing. Professor Haake says: “One of our biggest challenges is that of sedentary behaviour, which contributes to chronic illnesses such as cardio-vascular disease, diabetes and others. Sports engineering in the next decade needs to help find solutions to this global problem.” Professor Haake, whose RISE Champion is Sir John Armitt, former Chairman of EPSRC, who also chaired the Olympic Delivery Authority, has nominated Dr Jon Wheat, from Sheffield Hallam University, as his Rising Star.

Professor Cronin heads a world-leading interdisciplinary research group of over 50 members, with a unique range of expertise, bringing together inorganic chemists, chemical engineers, complex system modelling, evolutionary theory, robotics and artificial intelligence. The Cronin Group’s work includes highly speculative ‘blue-skies’ projects as well as research focused on real-world applications such as the development of inorganic fuels for water splitting, and the use of configurable robotics for the programming of drug discovery and novel materials. The group also has an ambitious aim of creating life from self-replicating, evolving inorganic chemical cells known as iCHELLs. Professor Cronin says: “One of the biggest questions left, the origin of life, and the possibility of new life/alien life, is a wonderfully inspiring and thought-provoking question well within the remit of the chemist/ chemical engineer. “As a research group, our aim is to engineer/discover routes to artificial life. These routes may also be relevant to determining the origin of life.” Professor Cronin, whose RISE Champion is Dave Allen, Senior Vice President of Respiratory Research at GlaxoSmithKline, has nominated Dr Oren Scherman, from the University of Cambridge, as his Rising Star.

Linking thinking Since its inception in 1994, EPSRC has been at the frontline of support for computational science, investing in major research programmes across the research spectrum – from designing supersonic cars to modelling DNA. In this special report, BBC journalist Roland Pease describes the breadth of EPSRC’s support for computer hardware and software systems – a journey that takes us from supercomputers capable of billions of calculations a second to the development of a national computational science infrastructure for the benefit of researchers and industry alike.

June 28 2012 was a wet day in Newcastle. Very wet. Storm clouds loomed over the city, and in just two hours nearly two inches of rain poured onto its streets. It was the kind of event that only happens once every 120 years. But a team of engineers in Newcastle had already seen what was going to result. Only months earlier Professor Chris Kilsby, Dr Vedrana Kutija and Vassilis Glenis of Newcastle University had ground through gigabytes of data to simulate just those conditions. “Actually, we’d wondered if we’d got something wrong in the computer calculations,” Chris Kilsby admits. “Two metres of flooding seemed an extreme prediction, but it turned out we were right.”

green spaces and other details, the mindblowing calculations needed to produce accurate predictions would require a top-ofthe-range computer.

The accuracy of the predictions wasn’t just a vindication of this pioneering EPSRCsponsored research into flood risk, it was also a testament to the power of high performance computing (HPC), and its potential to help mitigate the effects of some of the most pressing problems facing humanity, such as climate change and the spread of infectious disease.

Professor Kilsby says: “We wanted to test the flexibility of doing cloud computing. The great thing is you just pay for what you need. If you want to run the model a hundred times, it’s easy to scale it up. For academics, we found this makes an excellent alternative to the heavily subscribed central facilities. And for commercial partners, this might be the most effective way to run the processor-heavy simulations we develop.”

With the whole of Newcastle divided up on a two-metre grid, recording roads, buildings, PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

But instead of booking time at a state-ofthe-art HPC facility such as the EPSRCfunded HECToR supercomputer in Edinburgh (see page 60), Chris Kilsby got out the departmental credit card and paid to run the simulations on the Elastic Cloud EC2 network run commercially by Amazon. It was an experiment in another way of doing academic computing, which EPSRC supports together with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of a suite of initiatives to provide academic and business users with the right kind of computing power as and when they need it.

Chris Kilsby’s was one of 11 projects supported through an EPSRC initiative to test how cloud computing could supplement the more conventional provision, and illustrates EPSRC’s forward-looking attitude to academic and commercial access to computing research and facilities in the 21st century. “The job of EPSRC is straightforward – it’s to take tax payers’ money and convert it into the very best ideas that have impact for the long-term future of the UK,” explains Lesley Thompson, Director of Science and Engineering at EPSRC. “It’s impossible to do that without thinking about the role that computing plays in making all that happen.” Gesturing to an iPad on the desk in front of her, she continues: “Twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that I’d have this sort of device in the research lab to write my notes in. Nor would I have had a PC in the lab powerful and flexible enough with which to conduct my research – from modelling, imaging and number-crunching to speaking with co-researchers in other parts of the country via Skype; sharing data over broadband or reading research papers via the internet. (Continued on page 56)

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Computational science

The Difference Engine In 1823, the brilliant mathematician, Charles Babbage, secured £1,500 from the British Government to build his Difference Engine, one of the earliest automatic calculators and a landmark in the pre-history of the computer. Babbage’s design came over 100 years before Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science, devised his hypothetical ‘automatic machine’, in 1936, which contained the DNA for the world’s first digital computer. Building costs for Babbage’s visionary machine spiralled to £17,000 (the price of two 19th century battleships), tempers frayed and the Difference Engine was never completed; neither was another Babbage design, for a programmable Analytical Engine, which featured all the conceptual elements of the modern electronic computer. In 1991 the London Science Museum unveiled the fruits of its six-year project to build a Babbage Engine to original designs (pictured) to explore the viability of Babbage’s schemes. It worked. In 2014, the UK Government announced it is investing £42 million in a world-class data science research institute dedicated to Alan Turing – famous for his wartime code-breaking work but also a pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence. The Turing Institute will collaborate with e-infrastructure and Big Data investments across the UK research spectrum including the Open Data Institute, the Catapult Network and ARCHER, the EPSRC-funded National High Performance Computing Facility (see page 61).


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medical research without looking at the relationship between genomic data and population data.”

(Continued from page 54) “Today, collectively, the e-infrastructure – the computers, the networks, the wi-fi, the software, the hardware and the people – is an absolutely integral part of the research methodology.”

Proving that it can keep up with the rapidly changing face of digital electronics, the myGrid consortium is now developing a version of the interface and its associated products to run on smartphones and tablets, so researchers can access vital data while on the road, or at conferences.

As well as supporting a series of worldclass supercomputers to tackle specific challenges such as predicting weather patterns or designing new materials, EPSRC has driven forward a number of major investments in long-term computational research programmes on behalf of all the UK Research Councils, including, notably, the £140 million e-Science Programme at the beginning of the century (see opposite page). EPSRC also has a firm eye on the future, publishing in 2014 a roadmap which aims to understand and maximise opportunities across the UK e-infrastructure landscape – for all researchers in engineering and physical sciences, including the commercial sector. Among the success stories, Lesley Thompson points to myGrid, an initiative which, she says, “underpins most bioinformatics research in the UK, and also illustrates the value of the physical and engineering sciences to all of the health and life sciences.”

MyGrid’s widespread use across the country clearly justifies its description as part of the UK’s scientific e-infrastructure – a resource hundreds of teams resort to – to support their research.

Lesley Thompson, Director of Science and Engineering, EPSRC

MyGrid was a product of the e-Science initiative in the early 2000s to seize on the advantages of grid computing and translate them into the biological sciences (see page 57). The myGrid interface supports a suite of bioinformatic programmes which use computer science, mathematics and information theory to model and analyse biological systems. MyGrid enabled researchers to perform virtual experiments, collaborate on and share workflows, and access a wide range of databases. The success of myGrid, according to Lesley Thompson, underlines how far approaches that were once the preserve of physical sciences have diffused throughout the community. She says: “It is inconceivable now to think of doing social science research without access to big databases, and the comparative studies that birth cohorts and so on give you; and it’s also inconceivable that you would do PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

“Today, collectively, the e-infrastructure – the computers, the networks, the wi-fi, the software, the hardware and the people – is an absolutely integral part of the research methodology.”

But Lesley Thompson explains that software in general should also be seen in a similarly holistic light. She says: “Historically, we’d worry about buying the biggest computer and not worry about the software. Now that’s changed, and we’re putting a lot of effort into software.” That shift of focus has been encouraged by successes like DAME, software developed under the e-Science initiative in partnership with Rolls-Royce to support the enginemaintenance programme it sells to airlines (see page 58). DAME searches in-flight engineperformance data, such as pressure and temperature, for signatures of unusual behaviour. The DAME system is trained for long periods to learn combinations of readouts that are normal, so that atypical patterns readily stand out, alerting

engineers that a service may be needed. As Lesley Thompson explains, the data sets don’t have to be engine metrics: “You can apply the same software technology to looking at medical conditions, or to analysing road traffic flows.” Under the DAME project, which was funded under the EPSRC-led e-Science Core Programme, the team successfully developed AURA, a breakthrough technology that mimics the brain’s ability to make sense of massive amounts of data. Lesley Thompson says EPSRC has long made a conscious effort to support this side of computing, with specific investments in software funding that might otherwise be overlooked during routine peer review. Software sustainability is another area EPSRC continues to invest in – ensuring that what software researchers write today remains usable for years to come, despite changes in computer architecture or suppliers. Susan Morrell, EPSRC’s Head of Research Infrastructure, says: “The support of people in the e-infrastructure eco-system is as important, if not more so, than the capital investments we make. People with transferable skills make the computers productive and useful, and so support for staff and training will need to be central to future investments.” Computer scientist Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol describes EPSRC’s focus on sustainability as “absolutely right, it’s a brilliant programme”, adding that the UK is a world leader “envied in the US” for its forward-looking approach. As Pioneer went to press, EPSRC announced it is investing a further £4 million in research to support the development of software for computational science and engineering. Lesley Thompson insists support for e-infrastructure will continue to be a core part of EPSRC’s research and training provision for the coming decades, as it has for the past 20 years. The future, however, is never certain in the fast-moving world of computational research. Lesley says: “There may come a time when there’s a tipping point in technologies. For example, when cloud computing

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The UK Research Councils e-Science Programme In 2002, EPSRC joined forces with the six other UK Research Councils in the three-phase £140 million e-Science Programme, designed to position British science at the forefront of research and doctoral training into computing technologies. Loosely described, the programme aimed to make new scientific discoveries by analysing extraordinarily large

takes over, or when quantum computing becomes a practical reality and displaces all high-performance computing infrastructure. “Quantum would be a completely disruptive technology – and none of the software we have would work. That’s an interesting problem. “In the coming years we will be investing £240 million in research into quantum technologies, in line with the Government’s Industrial Strategy, so while we will continue to invest in and develop current state-of-the-art new technology; there will PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

quantities of data accessed over the internet using large-scale computational resources.

Programme, and also coordinated related activities.

A key aim for the multidisciplinary programme was to develop nextgeneration infrastructure in information and communications technology (ICT). Among key initiatives, the e-Science Programme built a network of e-science centres linked to regional Grid centres. EPSRC was responsible for the e-Science Core

The programme resulted in over 140 stakeholder collaborations, 30 licenses or patents, and 14 spin out companies. Industry took up over 103 key results. In addition, the programme attracted £20 million in industrial collaboration and £7.1 million in cash and in in-kind industry transfers.

come a time when it, too, goes the way of the dinosaurs. Perhaps earlier than we might think.”

Professor Kilsby is upbeat about taking on the challenge, despite its complexity. He says: “The Somerset Levels cover a huge area of land, and predicting where flooding may occur is made more difficult by the complicated network of drains and the additional problem of coastal flooding from the seaward side.

Meanwhile, UK researchers are kept busy using today’s machines to process the floods of data churned out by the latest science. And the data of floods. Having proven the value of their detailed inundation models in Newcastle, London and Melbourne, Professor Chris Kilsby’s team at Newcastle are keen to turn their attention to the flood plain that has been most in the news this year, the Somerset Levels.

“But we know our models can handle it. Putting them to work on the Somerset Levels would be a great way to test the potential of expensive new flood management measures before they’re built.”

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Nothing like a DAME An example of how research into new e-technology can have a direct impact on industry is the Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment (DAME) project at the University of York. Under project leader Professor Jim Austin, DAME brought together four partner universities with Rolls-Royce and Data Systems and Solutions to develop cuttingedge e-technology to reduce engine maintenance times and improve the interoperation of the maintenance team. The technologies developed are now used on Rolls-Royce Trent engines.

Under the DAME project, which was funded under the EPSRC-led e-Science Core Programme, the team successfully developed AURA, a breakthrough technology that mimics the brain’s ability to make sense of massive amounts of data. The team set up spin out company, Cybula Ltd, to market its pattern recognition software, and to further develop the application of its work in areas such as power generation, wind energy systems and medicine. The company has an annual turnover of £500,000, 13 staff (growing to 17 this year) and a pipeline of two years’ contracts with customers including EDF Energy and Asda.

The project was co-funded by the Department for Transport, which wanted to see how the company’s FREEFLOW technology could be used to improve management of the UK road network. FREEFLOW uses clever pattern recognition to spot traffic jams without requiring expensive teams of staff to monitor feeds from roadside cameras. One team member, Professor Lionel Tarassenko, a pioneer of neural network technologies, formed a spin out company, Oxford BioSignals, to develop generic technology for intelligent data acquisition and advanced signal interpretation. Applications of the technology include innovative sleep diagnostics systems and patient health monitoring software. Industrial applications, which have been adopted by companies such as RollsRoyce, span aero engines, railways, pipelines and energy. In 2001, Professor Tarassenko’s research into jet engine health monitoring was awarded the Rolls-Royce Chairman’s Award for Technical Innovation. In 2008 he received the Sir Henry Royce High Value Patent Award (see page 10). In 2011, Professor Austin’s Advanced Computer Architectures (ACA) group at York University, which developed AURA, won Outstanding Engineering Research Team of the Year in the prestigious Times Higher Education Awards. Professor Austin says: “We have benefited from a consistent and talented team over 10 years, supported through EPSRC and Technology Strategy Board grants. “This support has allowed us to build the deep expertise needed to solve the hard problems industry faces.”


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Fighting the scourge of sleeping sickness – with software A multidisciplinary international research team, including EPSRC-sponsored University of Manchester scientists, have found two genes that may prove of vital importance to the lives and livelihoods of millions of farmers in a tsetse fly-plagued swathe of Africa the size of the USA. The team’s research is aimed at finding the biological keys to protection from a singlecelled trypanosome parasite that causes both African sleeping sickness in people and a wasting disease in cattle. Sleeping sickness affects an estimated 300,000 Africans each year, eventually killing more than half of them. Another devastating blow comes in animal form, with sick cattle costing farmers and herders huge losses and opportunities. The annual economic impact of ‘Nagana’, a common name in Africa for the form of the disease that affects cattle, has been estimated at over £3 billion.


The research brought together a range of high-tech tools and field observations. Professor Andy Brass and his team in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester needed to screen a multitude of genes to identify variants that give resistance to the deadly parasitic disease. They managed to capture, integrate and analyse the highly complex set of biological data by using software called Taverna, developed by Manchester computer scientist Professor Carole Goble CBE and her team working on the myGrid project, which was funded under the EPSRC-led UK e-Science Programme (see page 57). The automated data analysis enabled by Taverna was essential. Professor Brass says: “The Taverna workflows we developed are capable of analysing huge amounts of biological data quickly and accurately.

“Taverna’s infrastructure enabled us to develop the systematic analysis pipelines we required and to rapidly evolve the analysis as new data came into the project. We’re sharing these workflows so they can be re-used by other researchers looking at different disease models. “Without Taverna, we would have been looking where others had already looked. But because we had the tools to look more widely, we spotted things that had been missed. That’s pretty exciting.” As a result, the team identified two key genes, and breeding trials have started with one of these to see if new lines of resistant cattle can be raised. Professor Brass says: “This breakthrough demonstrates the real-life benefits of computer science and how a problem costing many lives can be tackled using pioneering systems.”

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PIONEER 12 Summer Spring 2014 2014

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High and mighty

From predicting global weather patterns to developing new drug therapies to modelling aircraft aerodynamics, supercomputers are the thoroughbreds of computational science, used to crack some of the most challenging research problems. Roland Pease explains EPSRC’s role at the heart of UK high performance computing since 1994. On June 20 1994, Ian Lang, the then Secretary of State for Scotland, turned on the most powerful supercomputer in Europe. The brand new Cray T3D, housed at the Edinburgh Parallel Computer Centre (EPCC) boasted 256 processors and could do 40 billion calculations a second, placing it 16th in the top 500 global rankings. Nothing like it had been seen in the UK before. The newspapers had a field day, predicting the new £8 million computer offered scientists the chance to unlock some of the universe’s most intractable problems. Today the Cray T3D would be outclassed by an average notebook computer – that is what exponential improvement brings over two decades. But at the time the T3D, managed on behalf of the UK Research Councils by EPSRC, marked a step change in scientific computing in the UK, and in the use of supercomputers, which are considered vital to solve research challenges involving huge amounts of data. For example, they are used to predict the behaviour of each of the billions of atoms present in a potential cancer drug, to determine its effectiveness. Other uses include carrying out complex calculations in diverse areas such as simulating the Earth’s climate, calculating the airflow around aircraft, and designing novel materials. Professor Arthur Trew, head of the EPCC,


says: “Traditionally, progress in science has been made through theory and experiment, but an increasing range of problems now require to be simulated computationally. “The thrill in 1994 was introducing a radically different technology to hundreds of researchers. T3D brought high performance parallel computing to the masses.” Setting the standard T3D set a standard for national high-end computing which has been sustained largely by EPSRC, with contributions from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) on behalf of all UK research councils, by a series of increasingly powerful machines. The latest of which, ARCHER, was inaugurated, also in Edinburgh, in March 2014. With 76,000 high-speed processor cores (compared to the two cores of a standard desktop PC), and 300 times T3D’s capacity, ARCHER, which is owned and managed by EPSRC, can crunch through a million billion calculations a second, 40,000 times faster than its venerable predecessor. With the extra power, researchers can be more ambitious than ever. Simon McIntosh-Smith of Bristol University, one of the team that helped procure ARCHER, got an early chance to put the mammoth machine through its paces, simulating the structure of a monstrous molecular nanocage that chemists at the university recently synthesised and hope to use in drug delivery as well as to mimic cellular chemistry.

Professor McIntosh-Smith says: “The cage contains 40 million atoms, yet using just a part of ARCHER’s capacity we were able to show how all those atoms moved and interacted. It’s mind blowing stuff. Now that ARCHER is fully operational, we’re planning to see how pores in the cage flex, and how other molecules can move in and out, which is what you’d need in a drug delivery system.” Theoretical chemists have long depended on the fastest computers to unravel the complexities of molecular behaviour, and have been hungry for each step forwards in performance. In the 1990s, quantum calculations could handle hundreds of atoms, now with new approaches they can do tens of thousands, says Professor Mike Payne of the University of Cambridge, whose CASTEP programme is a mainstay of the field. Used to discover improvements in catalysts, batteries, metallurgy, semiconductors and many other commercially significant materials, CASTEP illustrates supercomputing’s role as a ‘third pillar of science’ alongside theory and experiment, a phrase coined by Nobel laureate Kenneth Wilson. “Programmes like CASTEP complement experiment,” says Mike Payne. “Whenever an experiment is ambiguous about, say, the structure of a pharmaceutical compound, you do the calculations to sort out the alternatives.” Since its launch, CASTEP has achieved worldwide cumulative sales of US$30 million.

(Continued on page 62)

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Supercomputers, like Formula One cars, require specialised expertise to use, and were created to solve specialised challenges involving huge amounts of data. You wouldn’t drive a McLaren F1 car to the shops (Continued from page 61) Not that every calculation requires the best machine in the land. The improvement in computer performance, tracked by the wellknown Moore’s law, means that calculations that were unimaginable 20 years ago, possible on a top-10 machine a decade ago, can now be achieved on the kind of computer a large university can invest in. Simon McIntosh-Smith says: “Access to high performance computing for research is pyramid-shaped, which EPSRC has helped to form. It begins with the research team’s departmental provision within its university. The next tier is access to the EPSRC-supported network of regional high performance computers, such as the N8 facility in the north of England. Next comes the national facility, ARCHER, and finally you can request use of the best machines in Europe through PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. Everything is interconnected.” Dr Lesley Thompson, EPSRC’s Director for Science and Engineering, says: “The PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

really important thing about connected e-infrastructure is that the right computers can talk to the right people; that they can access the right software, and they’re also connected with the right class of computer. “It’s worth bearing in mind that supercomputers, like Formula One cars, require specialised expertise to use, and were created to solve specialised challenges involving huge amounts of data. You wouldn’t drive an F1 car to the shops.” The provision isn’t just for academics. Even with T3D in 1994, industry contributed £1 million towards expanding and improving the hardware and to supporting partnerships with university teams. Today, while many large industrial sponsors benefit from the UK’s national computing facilities through joint research projects, Lesley Thompson wants to see more SMEs and start-ups making use of them too – something she is working on as a member of the UK E-infrastructure Leadership Council (ELC), jointly chaired by Science Minister David Willetts.

Comprising leading academics, industrialists and representatives of bodies such as the Met Office, the ELC advises government on all aspects of e-infrastructure including networks, data stores, computers, software and skills. In 2012, the ELC published its Strategic Vision for UK e-infrastructure. Among ‘next steps’ arising from the report, the ELC committed to developing a detailed plan for private sector engagement in the e-infrastructure, working with the Technology Strategy Board. This will include detailed talks with large corporations, SMEs and trading partners. Lesley says: “If you’ve never used high performance computing or have never accessed academics who can help you with your software problems, how do you find out who’s got the door you can open? So the idea behind the report, which EPSRC is supporting, is to establish a kind of dating agency to connect people to the right resource as well as to the right people, who can help connect them to the infrastructure.”

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20 years of high performance computing Some of the most challenging research problems can only be tackled using the most powerful computer systems available. For example: •

Designing life-saving drugs

•

Predicting weather patterns

•

Simulating global ocean currents

•

Predicting the spread of epidemics

•

Modelling how air flows off aircraft and other vehicles

•

Studying how the smallest particles interact

•

Design of materials and processes for use across industry

•

Exploring fundamental questions about the forces of nature, such as through creating large-scale simulations of galaxy formation and evolution

Because problems such as these span the spectrum of research, in the 1990s a coordinated National High Performance Computing Programme was set up on behalf of all the UK Research Councils and managed by EPSRC, which has since played a pivotal role in the nation-wide provision of high performance computing. Highlights include:

1994 In 1994, EPSRC selected the University of Edinburgh to host Europe’s fastest supercomputer, the Cray T3D, capable of 40 billion arithmetical operations per second, and harnessing 256 processors. The system was accessed across the UK`s high-speed academic network. This was followed by a Cray T3E system, which ran until 2001.

2002 The UK National Supercomputing Service for academic research was established. The service was supported by the UK Research Councils and run by the HPCx consortium, comprising the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester and the Research Councils’ Daresbury Laboratory. HPCx was the flagship UK academic supercomputer from 2002 to 2007.

2008 A second national supercomputing service, HECToR (High-End Computing Terascale Resource), was installed at the University of Edinburgh. Managed by EPSRC on behalf of contributing UK Research Councils, the £113 million machine was one of the most advanced supercomputers in the UK. Capable of performing over 114,000 calculations a second for every man, woman and child on Earth, HECToR occupied an area of two tennis courts and had a memory of 90 Terabytes, equivalent to over 180,000 iPhones. To match HECToR’s one Petabyte of disk space for storing data, an iPhone would have to hold 200 million tracks, and it would take until the year 3155 to listen to each track just once. HECToR was made available to UK academics across Britain who remotely accessed the system. Among notable achievements made possible by HECToR, scientists developed new gels which can be tuned for applications such as personal care, foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals; helicopter rotor wake simulations essential for designing new aircraft; and one of the

largest-ever models of the North Western European Continental Shelf.

2014 In 2014, HECToR was replaced by ARCHER (Academic Research Computing High End Resource) – over three times more powerful than HECToR but also one of the greenest supercomputers ever built, using a stateof-the-art water-cooled housing enabling ground-breaking performance and scalability while maximising energy efficiency. Combined with the newly-installed UK Research Data Facility on the Edinburgh campus, ARCHER provides a service unique in the UK. Harnessing the might of some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers with one of the UK’s largest data-store and analysis centres, the facility will provide important support for Big Data applications. In addition, the UK Research Data Facility, although associated with ARCHER, will serve both ARCHER users and any users of high performance computers, regardless of Research Council remit. Support for ARCHER (and previously HECToR) users is also provided by a dedicated team. Training courses are available for all levels of user – from basic introductions to high performance computing, to advanced techniques and application tuning. Training courses are free to UK academics whose work is covered by the remit of the participating Research Councils, EPSRC, and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Others may attend on payment of a course fee.

“The thrill in 1994 was introducing a radically different technology to hundreds of researchers. The Cray T3D brought high performance parallel computing to the masses.” Professor Arthur Trew (pictured), head of the Edinburgh Parallel Computer Centre at Edinburgh University, which has hosted EPSRC-supported supercomputers for over 20 years. In 1994, the Cray T3D supercomputer boasted 256 processors and could perform 40 billion calculations a second, placing it 16th in the top 500 global rankings. Today it would be outgunned by an average notebook computer.


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Numbers game From predicting the effects of new drug types to unravelling the secrets of plastic, high performance computers are vital across the research spectrum – as demonstrated in three very different R&D projects. The relationship between the chemistry of large polymer molecules and the properties of the plastics they make has been hard to untangle because of the sheer complexity of their molecular structure and their interactions. The software, developed by Professor Tom McLeish of Durham University and colleagues, had “cut the Gordian knot” according to one expert commentator when key results were published in Science in 2011, meaning the team had solved a seemingly impossible problem.

Virtual plastics Designer plastics that can be conceived, synthesised and tested entirely on a computer have been made possible thanks to 20 years of EPSRC support.

“Polymers are nature’s chosen technology,” Professor McLeish said in an interview in Pioneer in 2010. “All biomolecules consist of long chains. Our work will help mankind match that approach.”

has generated a series of scientific and computational tools which, an impact study showed, have allowed the plastics industries in the UK and Europe to design new materials based on an understanding of their fundamental molecular structure, rather than through extensive observation and experimentation. One industrial partner reported: “These tools give us a competitive edge that is essential in today’s environment.” The long-term aim, says Professor McLeish, is to “develop new plastics for almost every conceivable manufacturing application.”

The £8 million EPSRC-funded Microscale Polymer Processing (MuPP) project

Improved chemical-resistant films and coatings, revolutionary nano-composites whose lightness makes them ideal for use in aircraft engines, and harder-wearing solar panels, are just some of the possibilities the MuPP team foresees.

Professor Mulholland says: “An important aim in developing a safe, effective drug is understanding how it will be broken down in the body.

The research was conducted under the Collaborative Computational Project for Biomolecular Simulation (CCPBioSim), funded by EPSRC.

“This process would be made cheaper, quicker and safer if we could predict reliably how a candidate drug reacts in the body – for example, by using computers.

CCPBioSim is developing a software suite and scripts for performing multi-scale simulations using commonly available third party software and programs from the CCPBioSim community.

Pharma on a chip A virtual test tube developed by computational chemists at the University of Bristol, working with pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the biomedical discovery firm Vernalis, could help reduce the risk of side effects with future drugs. Professor Adrian Mulholland, who holds an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, and colleagues have developed a computational model to show in atomic detail how the antiinflammatory drugs ibuprofen, diclofenac and the blood-thinning agent warfarin are broken down by a group of enzymes called cytochrome P450s, which play an important part in the metabolism of drugs. Cytochrome P450 comes in many forms, and each can potentially interact with any particular biomolecule in many ways, so understanding in detail whether potentially harmful metabolites will be formed is an important aspect of understanding a drug’s toxicity profile. PIONEER 12 Summer 2014

“This study uses molecular modelling methods which are able to describe chemical reactions in large and complex enzymes such as cytochrome P450s. Our results agree well with experiments, and point to how modelling of this sort can help in developing predictions of drug metabolism.” Their hope is the approach will speed future drug development by screening out poor candidates at an early stage. The research was co-funded by EPSRC and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

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Blood and Thrust Supercomputer calculations performed by researchers at Swansea University’s Department of Aerodynamics were vital to the design of BLOODHOUND SSC – the supersonic car at the heart of an EPSRCsupported World Land Speed Record attempt led by Richard Noble.

Professors Hassan and Morgan are also providing their expertise to the BLOODHOUND SSC project, to help ensure a successful aerodynamic design (see inset). Wing Commander Andy Green will pilot the vehicle.

The supersonic car is due to make its first attempt to break the sound barrier next year in South Africa, and to reach 1,000 mph in 2016. To reach those speeds safely, every detail of the machine’s surfaces has had to be examined. That is where the computational simulations of Dr Ben Evans, Dr Chris Rose and colleagues have proved so important. Ben Evans says: “Wind tunnels have massive limitations. BLOODHOUND SSC is a car, so it’s rolling on the ground and there are no wind tunnels where you can simulate a rolling ground with a car travelling faster than Mach 1, faster than the speed of sound. Our job is to make sure the vehicle stays on the ground, and that the drag is as low as possible.” With EPSRC funding, the team ran aerodynamic simulations over five years which resulted in significant changes to the vehicle’s front wheel configuration, the shape of the nose, the jet engine intake shaping, rear wheel fairings and wing shape and size. Controlling the rear of the car turned out to be more of a problem than keeping the nose down.

The current World Land Speed Record is held by RAF pilot Andy Green, driving Thrust SSC, which broke the sound barrier in 1997. The Thrust SSC project was led by Richard Noble, and EPSRCsupported academics, Professors Nigel Weatherill, Ken Morgan and Dr Oubay Hassan, at Swansea University played a pivotal role in the vehicle’s computational modelling (see page 20).


Picture courtesy Siemens NX

The design is now frozen, and construction close to completion, but the researchers say their work is not finished. They are continuing to explore the effects, for example, of the supersonic shock wave from the car on the sandy surface it will be driving over.

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Sticky science

Words: Gemma Hulkes

Whether scooting up walls, darting across ceilings, or just hanging around in a perpendicular kind of way, geckos have superhero qualities Spiderman can only dream of. In 2003, the lithesome lizards were the inspiration behind a super sticky ‘gecko tape’, a synthetic material created by EPSRC-sponsored researchers at the University of Manchester, Professor André Geim and Dr Konstantin Novoselov. Professor Geim, a noted innovator, had a long-standing practice of gathering his research team for what he labelled ‘Friday night experiments’ – where they would try unusual things. On one of these evenings the team looked at how to replicate the adhesion found on a gecko’s foot. Geckos have millions of tiny keratin hairs on the surface of their feet which they use to climb with; the hairs act together to create formidable adhesion. Geim’s group mimicked this by creating a synthetic hair-covered film. Their gecko tape clung so well to a surface, the team postulated that a human so-equipped could hang by one hand from a ceiling, just like a gecko.

Typical of their restless spirits, however, Geim and Novoselov moved on to new research. Another Friday night experiment one year later led to the isolation of wonder material graphene, in 2004. The secret to ‘discovering’ this natural marvel? Adhesive tape, once again, which they used to peel away layers of graphite until they arrived at a single layer of carbon, one atom thick. What was left, graphene, has astonishing properties and seemingly unlimited potential applications – from superfast computer chips and broadband to flexible touch screens and a new generation of water purification devices. Six years later, Geim and Novoselov received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on graphene, which you can read more about in Pioneer 13, published this autumn.

This new adhesive material generated excitement in a variety of science and engineering fields, and led to considerable exposure in the popular media, which speculated on the gecko tape’s potential applications – from new types of car tyre to robots that can climb walls.

PIONEER 0912 Winter 20132014 PIONEER Summer

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About EPSRC

Total value of EPSRC’s research portfolio:

£2,400,000,000

Total number of doctoral students supported since 1994:

60,000

Total research projects invested in since 1994:

28,550

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the UK’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC invests around £800 million a year in research and postgraduate training to help the nation handle the next generation of technological change. The areas covered range from information technology to structural engineering, and mathematics to materials science. This research forms the basis for future economic development in the UK and improvements for everyone’s health, lifestyle and culture. EPSRC is committed to excellence and impact, supporting a research base and skills portfolio that meets key challenges of the 21st century, such as supporting an ageing population and meeting the need for sustainable energy. To this end, EPSRC has pioneered ways to stimulate research and encourage multidisciplinary collaboration. Research supported by EPSRC is judged by peer review to be of the highest quality and straddles the boundaries of scientific disciplines – ensuring there is a balance between discovery-led research and challenge-led research across its portfolio. EPSRC works with around 2,000 companies and partner organisations. Around 40 per cent of supported research is collaborative with industry. By ensuring the early engagement between industry and the research base, the fruits of EPSRC’s investments can be maximised, helping to keep the UK at the forefront of global research and innovation. www.epsrc.ac.uk Follow us on: www.twitter.co.uk/EPSRC You can find out more about EPSRC and how you can work with us by visiting our website: Pioneer is made by: as well as keeping up to date byEPSRC works alongside other Research Councils www.epsrc.ac.uk following us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ which have responsibility in other research areas. epsrc Editor: Mark Mallett ([email protected]) The Research Councils work collectively on issues of Design: Rachael Brown ([email protected])

common concern via Research Councils UK.

Contributors: Phil Davies; Gemma Hulkes; Grace

To provide feedback on this magazine, and to subscribe to print and/or electronic versions of Pioneer, please e-mail [email protected]

Palmer; Roland Pease; Matt Shinn; Jack Snape [email protected] Contact: 01793 444305/442804

Pictures courtesy of thinkstock.com unless otherwise stated. Printed by RCUK’s in-house service provider


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Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Leading edge

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10 UK infrastructure

Engineering Engineering and and Physical Physical Sciences Sciences Research Research Council Council

the next 50 years

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