EU funding will support Birmingham led research on radically new technologies, March 2016

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Image source: “Pixabay”

Two project proposals submitted by two Birmingham universities have been awarded with Horizon 2020 funding to support research on radically new technologies. Horizon 2020 is incredibly competitive with the success rate of 1.4%. In 2014/2015, a total of 822 proposals were submitted for the €40 million call on “Novel ideas for radically new technologies“. By the end of the third and last cut-off, only 13 project remained to be prepared for grant agreements.

It is remarkable that two Birmingham universities – Aston University and the University of Birmingham, have been selected to coordinate two such projects.

  • First project MESO-BRAIN, led by Aston University, targets a transformative progress in photonics, neuroscience and medicine by developing 3D human stem cell derived neural networks to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia and trauma. This research is led by Professor Edik Rafailov. Grant value: €3.22, subject to grant agreement approval.
  • The second project, NEURAM, led by the University of Birmingham is set to establish a new discipline – visual genetics – to visualize nuclear processes in the brain of living organisms in real-time to be utilized for example in early stage disease diagnosis, cancer detection, and toxicity studies. The research is led by Professor Attila Sik. Grant value: €4.27M.