Funding
Research at the ATI is supported by competitively secured grants in excess of £30M since its inception. We have won many grant awards funded by EPSRC, EU, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, Leverhulme Trust, Wolfson Foundation, industry and charities.
A few of our grants are highlighted here:
The Ion Beam Centre (IBC) won a European integrated infrastructure initiative grant for ion beam facilities SPIRIT. This connects the top ion beam labs in Europe and provides expertise and access to facilities to the European Community and associated member states. Furthermore, in addition to providing transnational access and participating in joint research activities, the IBC is responsible for the networking within the project and co-ordinates the quality assurance and training programmes. The IBC won another grant recently to build the world’s first scanning ambient pressure secondary ion mass spectroscopy (MeV SIMS) facility which will be capable of imaging with sub micron spatial resolution. This equipment will be built over the next two year period and then will be open for external users who will be able to apply for access to the use the new equipment.
Professor Ben Murdin is leading the largest EPSRC photonics grant awarded in responsive mode. In a joint Surrey-UCL programme entitled Coherent Optical and Microwave Physics for Atomic-Scale Spintronics in Silicon (COMPASSS), they will develop methods for encoding information in a single electron, orbiting a single impurity atom in a silicon crystal. The technology for manipulating that information with terahertz speed by its magnetic connection with adjacent impurity electrons will also be developed. The experiments will be carried out using the Free-Electron Laser FELIX facility near Utrecht.
The Surrey Photonics Group was awarded another large EPSRC project, UK Silicon Photonics. In this £5m project, the consortium will address integration of photonics and electronics devices for optical interconnects and fibre to the home applications.
Professor Stephen Sweeney has been awarded funding as part of the National Science Foundation (USA) Materials World scheme. This £1m project brings together leading researchers from the University of Surrey, Arizona State University and Michigan University (USA), Philipps University, Marburg (Germany) and the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University (Canada) to investigate a new class of semiconductor materials which incorporate Bismuth. The project is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (USA), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada).
A grant of close to 1m Euros was awarded to Professor Ravi Silva and colleagues by energy giant E.ON as part of their world wide competition ‘Application of Nanotechnology in the Energy Business.’ The three year project led by Professor Silva aims to utilise the nanotechnological expertise of the institute in the design, fabrication and characterisation of the organic-inorganic hybrid solar cells.
We have also been successful in being awarded prestigious research fellowships: EPSRC Leadership Fellowship (Professor Stephen Sweeney), EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (Dr Steven Clowes), Royal Academy of Engineering/ESPRC Fellowship (Dr Kosmas Tsakmakidis), Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (Dr Hidetsugu Shiozawa), Newton International Fellowship (Dr Xia Chen).
