30 projects have secured funding from UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) bilateral collaboration with the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
This funding was made available to develop new and existing partnerships between researchers in the UK and Switzerland. This includes areas of mutual importance between the 2 countries, with UKRI investing almost £500,000 in the partnership.
Reducing barriers
The UKRI and SNSF partnership reduces barriers to collaboration that researchers encounter and facilitates cooperation on the 2 countries’ shared research priorities.
Successful projects of the coordinated opportunities from the 2 organisations focused on 4 themes:
- synthetic biology
- languages
- materials
- the life and physical sciences interface
Artificial intelligence and big data are cross-cutting themes of the programme.
The funding will support:
- travel for researchers to the UK and Switzerland
- access to facilities
- workshops and networking
- exchange of knowledge, ideas and best practice
Successful projects
The opportunities have supported 30 projects with some projects already starting, and the remainder to begin in the coming months. In total, 21 projects are funded by UKRI and 9 projects are funded by SNSF.
The projects include:
- investigating virus-like particle vaccines
- the language used to describe and discuss sustainability in Latin America
- developing a new tool for eye imaging
- finding sustainable alternatives for plastics
Increasing collaboration
This funding opportunity follows on from the Memorandum of Understanding signed by UKRI and SNSF in February 2022 to support increased bilateral cooperation between researchers in the UK and Switzerland.
Beyond these opportunities, both partners intend to further foster collaborations between researchers in the UK and Switzerland.
Further information
UK-Switzerland partnering award competition winners
Languages: the impact of multilingualism on the vocabulary and stylistics of medieval English
Principal investigator: Dr Sara Pons-Sanz, University of Cardiff
Project partners: University of Zurich, University of Geneva
Between individuality and accent identity in speech
Principal investigator: Dr Patrycja Strycharczuk, The University of Manchester
Project partners: University of Bern
Languages: languages of sustainability in Latin America
Principal investigator: Dr Paul Merchant, University of Bristol
Project partners: University of Leeds, University of St Gallen, University of Zurich
Languages: contact- induced structural change
Principal investigator: Dr Hannah Gibson, University of Essex
Project partners: SOAS University of London, University of Lausanne
Aerial additive manufacturing: robotic construction of cantilever structures with aerial vehicles
Principal investigator: Professor Mirko Kovac, Imperial College London
Project partners: Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science Technology), ETH Zurich, EPFL School of Architecture Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering
Materials: investigating ion transport in oxide thin films for energy applications
Principal investigator: Professor Stephen Skinner, Imperial College London
Project partners: Paul Scherrer Institute
Electron dynamics in biological relevant media
Principal investigator: Professor Jonathan Marangos, Imperial College London
Project partners: Paul Scherrer Institute, ETH Zurich
Energy materials: flexible photovoltaics for ambient IoT applications
Principal investigator: Dr Marina Freitag, Newcastle University
Project partners: Swiss Federal Inst of Technology (EPFL)
UKRI Switzerland partnering awards for a UK-Swiss engineering biology meeting
Principal investigator: Professor Yizhi Cai, The University of Manchester
Project partners: University of Lausanne
Fusing medical images and CFD for precision vascular interventions (medicare)
Principal investigator: Professor Vanessa Diaz, University College London
Project partners: University Hospital Bern
Principal investigator: Dr Zhixin Liu, University College London
Project partners: BICI London
Thin film lithium niobate photonic sensors for biochemical detection
Principal investigator: Professor Cyril Renaud, University College London
Project partners: CSEM Neuchatel
Materials: soft functional materials for bio-robotics
Principal investigator: Professor Fumiya Iida, University of Cambridge
Project partners: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Principal investigator: Professor Christopher Marrows, University of Leeds
Project partners: University of Glasgow, EPFL, University of Basel, Paul Scherrer Institute
Principal investigator: Professor Heather Harrington, University of Oxford
Project partners: EPFL
Alloy development and advanced mechanical evaluation and experimentation: (ADAM&EVE partnership)
Principal investigator: Professor Russell Goodall, The University of Sheffield
Project partners: EPFL
Principal investigator: Professor Roman Borisyuk, University of Exeter
Project partners: University of St Andrews, EPFL
Cryo-electron tomography of CO2-fixing pyrenoids to guide synthetic assembly
Principal investigator: Dr Luke Mackinder, University of York
Project partners: University of Basel
Principal investigator: Dr Marco Palombo, Cardiff University
Project partners: University of Lausanne, Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM)
Principal investigator: Professor Matthias Marti, University of Glasgow
Project partners: University of Zurich
Optical projection tomography for plant imaging
Principal investigator: Dr Adrien Chauvet, The University of Sheffield
Project partners: Haute école du paysage, d’ingéni et d’architecture de Genève (HEPIA)
Switzerland-UK partnering award competition winners
Connecting urban physics and data-driven design for wellbeing
Principal investigator: Yongling Zhao, Chair of Building Physics D-MAVT ETH Zurich
Project partner: University of Cambridge
Principal investigator: Simon William Townsend, Department of Comparative Linguistics Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution University of Zurich
Project partner: University of Exeter
Unravelling the mechanism of uranium reduction by a decaheme c-type cytochrome, MtrC
Principal investigator: Margaux Molinas, Laboratoire de microbiologie environnementale EPFL, ENAC,IIE, EML
Project partner: University of Essex
EUV emission following intense laser-particle interactions
Principal investigator: Loren Ban, Laboratorium für Physikalische Chemie D-CHAB ETH Zürich
Project partner: Imperial College London
Sustainable solution for circular plastics: new materials and markets
Principal investigator: Catharina Rebecca Bening, Group for Sustainability and Technology ETH Zurich
Project partner: University of Cambridge
Testing the use of analogy in morphological productivity
Principal investigator: Tamar Johnson, Computational Learning and Linguistics Linguistics University of Geneva
Project partner: University of Edinburgh
Novel polarisation components and phase transitions in the domain walls of ferroelectrics
Principal investigator: Marios Hadjimichael, Département de Physique de la Matière Quantique (DQMP) Université de Genève
Project partner: University College London
Principal investigator: Gowtham Soundarapandiyan, Applied Materials Group Laboratory for Neutron Scattering and Imagin Paul Scherrer Institut
Project partner: Cranfield University
Systems-level understanding of mucosal immunity using virus-like particle vaccines
Principal investigator: Milad Radiom, LFO ETH Zürich
Project partner: University of Cambridge
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