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The University of Strathclyde has won a £5m award to expand its groundbreaking research into nanometrology - the ability to measure and characterise molecules.
The prestigious Science and Innovation Award announced today is made up of £2.8m from the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), £1.5M from the Scottish and Higher Education Funding Councils and £0.5M institutional support.
The project is led by Professor David Birch, Head of the Department of Physics, in collaboration with Professor John Pickup's team at King's College London School of Medicine. The Strathclyde team includes Professor Duncan Graham, Pure and Applied Chemistry, and Professor Martin Dawson, Strathclydes Institute of Photonics.
These awards aim to address the shortage of academics capable of leading future research in areas of strategic importance to the UK, and will lead to the recruitment and support costs of at least three lecturers, six research fellows and six PhD students, across the two institutions.
The global market for nanotechnology is predicted to reach $1 trillion by 2015. However, without the ability to measure and characterise molecules at the resolution of a nanometre (one thousandth millionth part of a metre), much of the predicted potential of nanotechnology will go unrealised. The new field of measurement science, nanometrology, is still in its infancy but is widely seen as crucial to bridging the molecular measurement gap needed for the next level of nanoscale innovation.
For example, one of the many challenges is not only to measure on such a small scale, but also to be able to do this on molecules in their natural environment and track their dynamics at a level that even single-molecules can be studied, perhaps one-day non-invasively inside the human body to detect the early onset of disease.
The generic nature of the research means it will find diverse applications which span materials manufacture as well as molecular science and medicine. The Science and Innovation programme in nanometrology will find new directions to help shape the future of areas of importance such as disease pathology, diagnostic tools in nanomedicine and the design of new structural materials, while facilitating knowledge transfer into the healthcare, chemical and instrumentation industries.
The project will be focused around the new Centre for Molecular Nanometrology, set up at Strathclyde in 2005 with over £2m investment. The Centre combines capabilities in physics and chemistry based on novel molecular properties for emitting and scattering light as means of revealing molecular structure and dynamics on the nanometre scale.
Taken together these new developments contribute further to the enhancement of the international standing of Scottish science brought about by the recent Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) and ScotCHEM collaborative initiatives