IEF
Funder: Horizon Europe
Duration: November 2025 - October 2029
PORTAL is pioneering an innovative, threat-agnostic framework to preempt cascading losses and establish resilience benchmarks with fit-for-purpose adaptation measures to proactively mitigate negative impacts on Port Infrastructure and interdependent Socio-eCOlogical systems (PISCO). PORTAL’s vision is important as ports handle 75% of the EU's trade, and face rising climate challenges, with $7.5 billion in global annual losses due to multi-hazard risks. In doing so, we deliver more resilient, inclusive and environmentally friendly PISCO. We do this through innovation, as we will deliver an interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder inclusive, and scalable approach to optimise PISCO’s resilience and sustainability, with emphasis on people’s needs and environmental benefits. PORTAL integrates cutting-edge technologies such as digital twins and generative AI (GenAI) to enhance sustainable adaptation strategies. This is achieved through tailored designs of win-win solutions, e.g Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), in inclusive and gamified PISCO. To achieve this vision, PORTAL includes a comprehensive training and capacity building programme embedded within its research, innovation, and dissemination activities. PORTAL leverages interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral secondments to enhance the skills of researchers and professionals through knowledge transfer. We facilitate decision-making to incentivise resilience strategies of PISCO operators, foster a safer environment and advance career development of participants, in line with EU policy goals for digital and green transition. PORTAL outputs include an advanced communication platform empowered by predictive tools, immersive training environments using augmented and virtual reality, and a library of actionable adaptation measures. These tools will empower diverse stakeholders identified through the empirical analysis of Socio-Ecological System (SES) to collaboratively improve environmental sustainability and strengthen resilience.
Funder: Sanhe Machinery Tools Ltd
Duration: October 2025 - September 2028
Funder: European Research Council
Duration: -
Funder: RoFAR (Roche Foundation for Anaemia research - Switzerland)
Duration: -
Funder: EPSRC
Duration: September 2025 - August 2028
Funder: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Duration: September 2025 - September 2033
Funder: EPSRC - Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: September 2025 - August 2030
Funder: Research Councils UK
Duration: June 2025 - September 2025
UKFin+ grant
Funder: British Council
Duration: June 2025 - June 2027
Wohl Clean Growth Alliance:
Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: April 2025 - September 2025
ProGYS+ is an EPSRC-funded Impact Accelerator Project focusing on ‘Engagement’. Building on the successful outcomes of the Impact Accelerator project for ‘Readiness’, ProGYS, and the H2020 project, PortForward, ProGYS+ aims to engage with representatives from the two customer groups of The Green Yard Scheduler (GYS). These include TERMAVI the operator of the Vigo’s container terminal and the provider of their Terminal Operating System (TOS), in coordination with the Port Authority of Vigo. This overarching aim will be achieved by adjusting and piloting the GYS and its integration with Vigo’s TOS for implementation by TERMAVI. Effective implementation of the GYS at the Port of Vigo will provide strong evidence for engagement and negotiations with the TOS provider regarding a licensing agreement. Furthermore, the positive piloting results at Vigo will support negotiations with other ports using the same TOS to adapt it as an add-on, even if they do not desire integration.
Funder: Innovate UK
Duration: October 2024 - March 2025
This 6-month feasibility study, a collaboration between Greenjets Ltd and BrunelUniversity London, investigates whether a scalable AI-driven design toolset canrapidly and accurately design customised commercial drones powered byGreenjets' superior sustainable electric jet engines. Customised commercial drones offer optimised performance for various use casesacross diverse industries, extending drone applicability, and reducing energyconsumption and emissions compared to other vehicles. An early-revenue UK SME, Greenjets has pioneered sustainable electric jetengines for commercial drones that are safer, quieter and more efficient thancompetitors. But maximising their potential calls for a holistic drone designapproach, where all three main drone elements (propulsion, airframe and energysource) are considered in tandem. Such an approach is too costly and time-consuming via traditional (i.e. human) design processes, and does not guaranteeoptimal designs. This is why this project will investigate the feasibility of developing a scalable AI-accelerated design and customisation process that accurately and rapidly deliversunique fit-for-purpose sustainable commercial drone designs. Successful post-project development of this process will deliver significant designoptimisation and customisation benefits, time-saving and cost-savingopportunities, and generate cutting-edge sustainable fit-for-purpose drone designsthat help commercial drones reach their full potential---predicted to deliver£45billion to the UK economy, save businesses £22billion, generate 650,000+ jobsand cut 2.4million tons of carbon emissions by 2030.
Funder: InnovateUK
Duration: April 2024 - March 2025
This project seeks to eliminate GHG emissions for vessels by carrying out pre- deployment trials of a novel ultra-efficient Shoreside Power from Optimised Hydrogen Lifecycle (SPOHL) system for cold-ironing with long-duration, bulk energy storage to balance the seasonal variation in renewable energy systems. The project targets the specific themes of "shoreside storage and bunkering of low and zero carbon fuel" and "charging infrastructure and management for electric vessels" , "shore power solutions, such as enabling docked vessels to turn off their conventional power supply for ancillary systems" , "shoreside renewable energy generation at the port to supply vessels" , and "low carbon fuel production, such as hydrogen, methanol, ammonia" . This project will solve critical challenges of providing flexible, reliable, resilient, highly varying electrical power supply to vessels and port infrastructure for docked vessels rather than having them powered by onboard auxiliary and main diesel or carbon producing combustion engines. The project aims to showcase the best possible end-to-end electrical and cost efficiency basis for the use of hydrogen as a medium to long-term energy flow pathway, in part through lab demonstration of best-in-class hydrogen production, storage and conversion technologies (as above) but also through analysis and optimisation of potential energy flow scenarios underpinned by data collection at a number of ports (including but not limited to Belfast, Felixstowe, Rochester).
Funder: InnovateUK
Duration: April 2024 - March 2025
Thanks to the commercial availability of future fuel technologies, as well as innovative Energy Saving Devices (ESDs) which are driving a reduction of power required for ships, it is now realistic to design a zero-emission vessel that is ready for adoption by the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Industry. This industry requires additional, more versatile & emission-free vessels to keep up with the growing workload, increasingly varying work scopes, and to help the industry move closer to realising the goals of the Clean Maritime Plan, Operation Zero, and other COP26 targets. This project aims to design and plan for the construction of a zero-emission Offshore Service Vessel, that has the versatility to perform services over multiple sectors of the ORE & aquaculture industries, (e.g., maintenance, research surveys, installation, decommissioning, crew transfer etc.).
Funder: UKRI Innovate UK
Duration: March 2024 - August 2025
Funder: Institute of Communities and Society, Brunel University
Duration: January 2024 - June 2024
Raqqa, the infamous capital of the so-called caliphate, still bears the brunt of terror. Syria still bears the brunt of war, displacement and economic strangulation. But Raqqa had a different history and heritage before the destruction unleashed. Syria didn’t used to be synonymous with war. The purpose of this pilot project is to collect, document and reveal these alternative histories through the life and works of the late Professor Sulayman Khalaf, who was born to a nomadic heritage in Raqqa, became the first Syrian anthropologist, and whose work have contributed immensely in the anthropology of Syria and the broader Middle East. Exploring his life and his works, this project aims to develop a digital archive and to pilot a documentary film about Sulayman Khalaf’s life, and through this, an alternative story of heritage, culture and hope in Syria.
Funder: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: January 2024 - December 2026
Funder: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Duration: December 2023 - March 2024
Funder: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Duration: September 2023 - March 2030
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council
Duration: September 2023 - August 2024
Funder: Innovate UK
Duration: September 2023 - August 2025
Next Generation Plant-Based Meats: Optimising Nutritional Value and Sustainability through Ingredient Selection and Processing
Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: August 2023 - March 2025
Funder: EPSRC
Duration: August 2023 - December 2026
Funder: Korea National Research Foundation
Duration: June 2023 - May 2026
Funder: British Academy Newton follow-up grant
Duration: May 2023 - May 2024
War keeps gnawing away at the textures of social life in the Middle East. As victims of political violence are mourned, as martyrs are celebrated, and as others leave to seek better lives abroad, death, loss, and disappearance remain at the forefront of everyday life. And yet, people in Syria, Kurdistan, and beyond keep dreaming of revolutionary change and imagine novel forms of political belonging. Building on our respective expertise working with Kurdish and Druze communities, this collaborative research project aims to shed light on the temporalities that death engenders in the context of statelessness and stalled sovereignty. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship conceptualizing death as productive of social life and political community.
Funder: Royal Society
Duration: March 2023 - March 2025
Funder: British Council
Duration: January 2023 - December 2025
The Wohl Clean Growth Alliance Grants
Funder: Institute of Communities and Society
Duration: -
The Price of Water is a performative portrayal of the experiences of refugees having fled their war torn country to seek what they imagine to be the ‘grace of safety’ in Europe, transitioning through a processing centre in Greece. This vivid dramatisation reflects on the roles of host and guest, good and bad refugees, the entanglements of migration and smuggling business, experienced in the two female performers’ quietly haunting recital of memories and hopes. The research and guiding concepts for this work relies on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece and in Syria, but they have wider resonances today during the current crisis of the war in Ukraine. The performance will inform a grant application on the consequences of war, exploitation and displacement through investigations of different modalities of capitalist invasion: the sudden and irreparable change of social relations and the policing/government of life..
Funder: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: October 2022 - September 2028
Funder: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: October 2022 - September 2027
Funder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: October 2022 - March 2023
Implement and Evaluate MTS Open Banking CorDapp prototype in HSBC sandbox
Funder: British Council
Duration: September 2022 - December 2024
Funder: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council
Duration: June 2022 - August 2022
Funder: The Worshipful Company of Coachmakers
Duration: June 2022 - August 2022
Funder: Department for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy
Duration: May 2022 - May 2025
Funder: British Council
Duration: April 2022 - March 2003
Exchange the successful model of EV Forecourts in UK to KSA for supporting research, knowledge, and innovation in emerging electric vehicles (EV) technologies. Initialise and maintain networking between universities and EV makers in KSA. Address the challenges of implementation of electric vehicles technologies via research, training and curriculum development.
Funder: British Council
Duration: April 2022 - December 2025
Funder: Department for Transport
Duration: March 2022 - September 2022
Funder: Department for Business Energy & Industrial Strategy
Duration: March 2022 - August 2022
Funder: Economic & Social Research Council
Duration: February 2022 - July 2023
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council
Duration: February 2022 - July 2023
Funder: ATHENA SWAN AWARD, Brunel University London
Duration: January 2022 - December 2022
Can sectarianism exist without the nation-state? Can statelessness open up or inhibit the possibilities of political resistance and freedom? Critical scholarship on sectarianism in the Middle East, including my own book on sectarianism within the pre-war Syrian state, locate sectarian belonging within the contingencies and struggles of modern Middle Eastern state formation. But, contemporary crises, such as the devastating war in Syria, the socio-economic crisis in Lebanon, and the right-wing expansionism in Israel, seem to shake the foundational assumptions of states and belonging in the region. By exploring the political resistance among the stateless Syrians, who belong to the Druze sect, in the Israeli-Occupied Golan Heights, this project turns the question of sectarianism on its head. Stateless since the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights during the Six-Days War in 1967, the Syrian Druze have persevered dispossession and occupation and they continue to fight for their liberation and return to Syria. Indeed, they appear to be an example of defying sectarian stereotyping, and the contemporary widespread sectarianisation of political belonging in the region and the rise of populism among rural communities world-wide.
Funder: H2020-EU
Duration: January 2022 - January 2024
To combat climate change, green and eco-friendly resources along with advanced digital technologies are being developed. The construction industry is also facing significant changes in its scale and distribution. With the EU facing resource constraints, new innovations are urgently needed. The EU-funded DigiMat project aims to satisfy this need by promoting a greener circular economic model for production and consumption. Specifically, the project will develop a novel 3D printing technology to design and develop environmentally friendly cementitious feedstock using construction and demolition waste as well as other industrial by-products suitable for structural load-bearing building blocks.