The UK is at the forefront of the development, adoption and export of Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) technologies: offshore wind (OW), wave and tidal energy. To sustain this advantage, the UK must spearhead research and innovation in ORE, which will accelerate its adoption and widen the applicability of these technologies. Many organisations across the industry-academia spectrum contribute to ORE research and development (R&D) co-ordination and the ORE Supergen hub strategy will take a leadership role, integrating with these activities to guide and deliver fundamental research to advance the ORE sector. The role of the Supergen ORE hub is to provide research leadership for the ORE community to enable transformation to future scale ORE. The hub will articulate the vision for the future scale ORE energy landscape, will identify the innovations required and the fundamental research needed to underpin the innovation. It will also generate the pathway for translation of research and innovation into industry practice, for policy adaptation and public awareness in order to support the increased deployment of ORE technologies, reducing energy costs while increasing energy security, reducing CO2 emissions and supporting UK jobs. The hub will work closely with the ORE Catapult (ORECAT) and become well-connected with industry, government, the wider research community in the UK and internationally. It will bring together these groups to assemble the expertise and experience to define and target the innovations, research and actions to achieve the ambitious energy transformation envisioned for the UK. The new Supergen ORE hub will continue to support and build on the existing internationally leading academic capacity within these three research areas (OW, wave and tidal technology), whilst also enabling shared learning on common research challenges. The ORE hub will build a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach, which will bring benefits through the sharing of best practice and exploitation of synergy, support equality and diversity and the development of the next generation of research leaders. The hub strategy provides an overview of research and innovation priorities, which will be addressed through multiple routes but linked through the hub, with activities designed to stimulate alignment across the research community and industry sectors to maximise engagement with prioritised research challenges through and beyond the hub time-scale. These include: 1. Networking and engagement activities to bring the research community together with industry and other stakeholders to ensure research efforts within the community are aligned, complementary and remain inspired by or relevant to industry challenges. This will include support and development of the ECR community to ensure sustainability and promote EDI within the sector as a whole. Actions will also be taken to identify potential cross over research synergies and opportunities for transfer of research between sectors and disciplines, both within and external to ORE. Furthermore, a structured communication plan built around progress of the community towards the sector research challenges will promote exploitation and commercialisation. 2. A set of core research work packages addressing priority topics selected and structured to maximize progress towards the sector objectives and building on the cross cutting expertise of the co-director team. 3. Targeted use of flexible fund as seed-corn activity leading to projects aligned with, and in partnership with, the hub.

The Centre for Care is a collaboration between the universities of Sheffield, Birmingham, Kent and Oxford, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Office for National Statistics, Carers UK, the National Children's Bureau and the Social Care Institute for Excellence. Working with care sector partners and leading international teams, it addresses the urgent need for new, accessible evidence on care. Arrangements for care, and people who need or provide care, are under unprecedented pressure. Quality, cost, unmet need and the situation of carers and care workers are central concerns. Care interacts with other systems in the NHS, jobs market and in policy on migration, welfare and housing. The cultures, values and public policies that determine eligibility for support and funding rules are also crucial, and 'shocks' like Covid-19 have profound and multiple effects. Together, these factors have led to fragmented care provision and unfair outcomes, and the need for reform is now widely accepted. The Centre for Care provides new evidence and thinking for policymakers, care sector organisations and for people who need or provide care. Its objectives are to: - work with people who need care, carers, care workers and others to produce studies that improve understanding of care and promote wellbeing; - publish robust findings on care systems, on paid and unpaid care, and on diversity, inequalities and sustainability in care; - exploit existing data and develop new studies, producing findings that policymakers and other researchers can use; - work with PhD students and emerging scholars, establishing a new generation of care specialists; - stimulate and inform public discussion of care and translate research into practice; and - collaborate with other care research teams, within and beyond the UK. In studying care, we focus on support, services and protections to promote the wellbeing of vulnerable or disabled people of all ages, and the networks, communities and systems that affect them. Our work will generate new knowledge on three major topics: 'Care trajectories and constraints: requiring, receiving and giving care' explores experiences of care at different life stages and as people transition between different parts of the care system. It also studies how giving or receiving care is affected when families are geographically dispersed. 'Inequalities in care: consequences, planning and place' uses latest statistical and data linkage techniques to learn how socio-economic, health and other inequalities shape experience of care, and the consequences of these for groups and individuals in different places and over time. 'Care workforce change: organisation, delivery and development' focuses on care worker recruitment and conditions; regulation and organisation of care work, including the introduction of new technologies; and efforts to improve job and service quality in care. Cross-cutting these studies, the Centre will also examine 'Care as a complex, adaptive ecosystem', 'Digital care' and Care data infrastructure', supporting the integration of all our research. This helps us develop new thinking on care inequalities, how care ecosystems operate and change, and the drivers and implications of digitalisation and other developments. It also enables us to exploit the UK's finest statistical datasets to produce compelling new insights on care and caring. Our multidisciplinary research team builds on a strong portfolio of care studies and is supported by researchers in nine other countries, all equally passionate about doing impactful research that can drive positive change in experience of care and caring. Our work is undertaken in partnership with care sector organisations and groups advocating on behalf of people who need care, carers and care workers. The Centre for Care is vibrant, innovative, and determined to make a positive difference through impactful, accessible research for all to use.

The AquaSpace project has the goal of providing increased space for aquaculture to allow increased production. Following the call, we will achieve this by identifying the key constraints experienced by aquaculture development in a wide range of contexts and aquaculture types, taking into account all relevant factors and advised by a Reference User Group. We will then map these constraints against a wide variety of tools/methods that have already been developed in national and EU projects for spatial planning purposes, including some that have been designed specifically for aquaculture. In the freshwater sector only, we will also consider ecosystem services provided by aquaculture that are relevant to integrated catchment planning and management. At 16 case study sites having a variety of scales, aquaculture at different trophic levels with different environmental interactions and most importantly with a range of key space-related development constraints as defined by local stakeholders, we will assess appropriate tools using a common process so as to facilitate synthesis and comparison. This case study approach will generate a large amount of information and is allocated about a third of the project’s resources. The project will develop the outcomes leading to a set of evaluated tools for facilitating the aquaculture planning process by overcoming present constraints. This information will be presented on an interactive web-based platform with tailored entry points for specific user types (e.g. planners, farmers, public) to enable them to navigate to the tools most appropriate to their application. The knowledge and information gained during this process will be developed into an on-line module at Masters Level which will also be developed into a short CPD course aimed at aquaculture planning professionals. The public will be engaged by an innovative school video competition and a vehicle to ensure project legacy will be established.

Optical microscopy is the most widely used imaging tool in laboratories all around the world. Indeed, According to BCC market research, the global optical microscopy market will be worth US$6.3 billion in 2020. Several Nobel prizes have been awarded for contributions made to the development of optical microscopy, including most recently in 2014. There is, however, a major limitation facing optical microscopy: it is difficult, if not impossible, to image tissue hidden beneath layers of overlying tissue. This occurs for the same reason that it is difficult to see clearly through a window covered in rain drops - tissue is highly scattering, like rain drops, and critically degrades image quality. This is important as it prevents in-tact tissue from being imaged in its natural environment, requiring tissue to instead be sliced into thin sections. A variety of approaches have been used in an attempt to overcome this problem. All such approaches are generally similar in that they insert hardware into the microscope in an attempt to compensate for the degradation due to the sample. This is similar to humans using spectacles to overcome imperfections of their eye. The main difference is that opticians are able to precisely determine the imperfections that each eye has, and thus design spectacles which perfectly compensate for them. No such method has been developed for measuring sample induced imperfections, or aberrations, present in microscope images. This project proposes to do just that: measure the imperfections caused by the sample itself. This will be achieved by computing the optical structure of the sample (i.e., how light travels in the sample) via a two stage process. Firstly, the sample will be imaged by a microscope capable of performing rapid three-dimensional imaging called an optical coherence microscope (OCM). OCM works very much like ultrasound imaging, except light is used instead of sound waves. The second step involves developing a sophisticated computational procedure for calculating the sample's optical structure from the OCM image. This will be performed using a recently mathematical model, developed recently by the project team, which allows OCM images to be predicted from a given sample structure. Clearly, our task is to solve the opposite problem: calculate the sample's structure given a measured OCM image. Formal techniques have been established for solving the problem in the opposite fashion which will be adapted specifically for this project. Once the sample's optical structure has been solved, in a follow-on project, existing methods will be employed for restoring optical fluorescence microscope images which have been degraded by the sample itself. This will enable fluorescence microscopy to be performed at depths within tissue which are currently inaccessible. This will be highly advantageous to many biological researchers in the UK and the world.

This proposal is for a Doctoral Training Centre to provide a new generation of engineering leaders in Offshore & Marine Renewable Energy Structures. This is a unique opportunity for two internationally leading Universities to join together to provide an industrially-focussed centre of excellence in this pivotal subject area. The majority of informed and balanced views suggest approximately 180 TWh/year of offshore wind, ~300km of wave farms (19 TWh/year), 1,000 tidal stream turbines (6 TWh/year) and 3 small tidal range schemes (3 TWh/year) are desirable/achievable using David MacKay's UK DECC 2050 Pathways calculator. These together would represent 30% of predicted actual UK electricity demand. This would be a truly enormous renewable energy contribution to the UK electricity supply, given the predicted increase of electricity demand in the transport sector. The inclusion of onshore wind brings this figure closer to 38% of UK electricity by 2050. RenewablesUK predicts Britain has the opportunity to lead the world in developing the emerging marine energy industry with the sector having the potential to employ 10,000 people and generate revenues of nearly £4bn per year by 2020. The large scale development of offshore renewable energy (Wind, Wave and Tidal) represents one of the biggest opportunities for sustainable economic growth in the UK for a generation. The emerging offshore wind sector is however unlike the Oil & Gas industry in that structures are unmanned, fabricated in much larger volumes and the commercial reality is that the sector has to proactively take measures to further reduce CAPEX and OPEX. Support structures need to be structurally optimised and to avail of contemporary and emerging methodologies in structural integrity design and assessment. Current offshore design standards and practices are based on Offshore Oil & Gas experience which relates to unrepresentative target structural reliability, machine and structural loading characteristics and scaling issues particularly with respect to large diameter piled structural systems. To date Universities and the Industry have done a tremendous job to help device developers test and trial different concepts however the challenge now moves to the next stage to ensure these technologies can be manufactured in volume and deployed at the right cost including installation and maintenance over the full design life. This is a proposal to marry together Marine and Offshore Structures expertise with emerging large steel fabrication and welding/joining technologies to ensure graduates from the programme will have the prerequisite knowledge and experience of integrated structural systems to support the developing Offshore and Marine Renewable Energy sector. The Renewable Energy Marine Structures (REMS) Doctoral Centre CDT will embrace the full spectrum of Structural Analysis in the Marine Environment, Materials and Engineering Structural Integrity, Geotechnical Engineering, Foundation Design, Site Investigation, Soil-Structure Interaction, Inspection, Monitoring and NDT through to Environmental Impact and Quantitative Risk and Reliability Analysis so that the UK can lead the world-wide development of a new generation of marine structures and support systems for renewable energy. The Cranfield-Oxford partnership brings together an unrivalled team of internationally leading expertise in the design, manufacture, operation and maintenance of offshore structural systems and together with the industrial partnerships forged as part of this bid promises a truly world-leading centre in Marine Structures for the 21st Century.