Driving on ice can be slippery and leads to poor road safety. In order to improve grip of tire on ice, new materials have been developed for arctic conditions, and an increasing interest to the interaction between ice and rubber has emerged. Several mechanisms govern the tribological behavior of ice-rubber, such as melting and premelting of ice, adhesion of ice-rubber interface, rubber viscoelasticity. In addition, these mechanisms are known to depend on both temperature (T) and sliding velocity (V). These dynamic mechanisms and their coupling result in the complicated friction behavior of ice-rubber interfaces. This project aims at understanding the interplay between the governing factors and their coupling, depending on the conditions as well as the rubber properties in order to elucidate the friction mechanisms of ice-rubber interfaces, and establish a guideline to design innovative rubber materials. Combination of nano and macro approaches including simulation will be employed.

Both the UK and Japan define their identity by their relationship to the sea and both have struggled with the effects of rising sea levels and climate change. This new research network will bring together British and Japanese scholars to develop new social science approaches to the political ecology of coastal societies. Our network will examine two topics. First, the social and political context surrounding the harvesting of seaweed, with special attention to traditional rights and methods of building a "blue economy". Second, we will also investigate the legacies of community-based flood management and mitigation systems in both UK and Japan with an eye to identifying best practice. Both issues are connected and of central concern to authorities in each area. Our network will build around two network seminars and two "scoping events" where British and Japanese researchers will together converse with stakeholders, managers, and visit local communities to investigate the possibility of designing a major research project around one or the topic.

The difficulty of developing adequate foreign language (FL) proficiency has led education researchers to investigate how FLs can be learned in the most effective and efficient way. Drawing on perspectives from neuroscience, we propose a novel, interdisciplinary hypothesis that individual differences in brain and cognitive functions related to hearing and memory can explain why certain FL learners attain different degrees of success under different instructional programs (form- vs. meaning-oriented) in linguistically different contexts (British learners of Japanese vs. Japanese learners of English). The findings of the research will shed light on whether it is possible to identify neurocognitive profiles specific to different groups of FL learners, highlight their advantages and shortcomings, and suggest optimal, profile-matched instructional methods. With the aid of the Connections Gant, we will initiate a novel collaboration between the UK and Japan across two somewhat independently developed fields (i.e., education, neuroscience) at both faculty and student levels. It also represents the very first partnership between world-renowned institutes in education (UCL - ranked 2nd in the UK) and neuroscience (Birkbeck and Tohoku - ranked 8th and 3rd in the UK and Japan, respectively) (Times Higher Education, 2018). The two host institutes, Birkbeck and Tohoku, have shown their willingness to support the current initiative by providing access to research facilities (office, meeting rooms). To facilitate the execution of the proposed activities, the members also plan to seek internal funding (Birkbeck Incentive Funds; Joint Research Program with Tohoku University). The team includes both scholars at different stages in their careers who completed their formal academic training at different time points (Saito, 2011; Tierney, 2010; Révész, 2006; Jeong, 2007; Sugiura, 2000; Suzuki, 2015). Thus, the project not only promotes intercultural/interdisciplinary interaction, but also serves as an opportunity for PhD students and scholars early in their careers to increase the breadth and depth of their experience by working with senior scholars. After the initial video-conferencing sessions to meet and exchange ideas, we will host 5-day research workshops at Birkbeck (March 2019) and Tohoku University (August 2019). In these meetings, the team will work together on an interdisciplinary overview on the following three topics: (a) auditory neural encoding and phonological learning (Saito, Tierney, Révész, Jeong); (b) declarative memory and lexical learning (Saito, Tierney, Sugiura, Suzuki); and (c) procedural memory and grammar learning (Révész, Jeong, Sugiura, Suzuki). Research findings on these topics will also be summarised according to each target language (Japanese vs. English). The members' PhD students will participate in literature search and manuscript writing as a co-author. To disseminate the research, we will host unique symposia in London (September 2019) and Tokyo (October 2019). In each event, members and their PhD student collaborators will present their conceptual papers alongside two expert keynote speakers from education and neuroscience, who will provide valuable feedback on team's research. To invoke interests from various types of audience, local PhD students and FL teachers will be invited to present their insights on successful FL learning and engage in discussion with team members. All presentations will be published in an open-access, edited volume produced by an international publisher. A non-technical report on the cognitive mechanisms underlying successful FL learning will be shared via the team's new website and on social media in both Japanese and English. During the final period of the collaboration (April 2020), the team will work on grant applications (e.g., JSPS, ESRC) to fund a series of empirical studies and test the hypotheses that the team will have developed.

Transparent organic electronic and optoelectronic devices are nowadays emerging technologies for future applications, for example in smart windows and in photovoltaic cells. The attributes of organic materials include large and ultrafast nonlinear optical responses and large colour tuneability. However, the electrical conductivity of organic materials is usually poor and this limits their utility. Here we propose to pursue a new type of organic material for such applications, a material that has a high electrical conductivity and thus has the potential to revolutionise the field: the material is graphene. This is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, with spectacular strength, flexibility, transparency, and electrical conductivity. The proposed project is directed specifically at tuning the electronic properties of graphene in order to allow the potential of this material to be exploited in transparent electronic and optoelectronic devices. The outputs of the project, the development of graphene-based transparent devices, will be fundamental to the commercial and the economic development of transparent electronics. So far, chemical functionalization of graphene with different molecular species revealed that each molecular specie can be used to accumulate electrons or holes in graphene ( that is n- or p-type doping of graphene). This suggests the possibility that different doping of adjacent graphene areas can be used to engineer electron/hole interfaces also known as p-n junctions, which are the core of large part of nowadays electronic devices. Other chemical species such as hydrogen and fluorine atoms attached to graphene can modify its band structure by opening a band gap in the otherwise zero-gap semimetallic material, providing the opportunity to use graphene as a truly organic semiconductor. The potential afforded by the chemical functionalization of graphene materials is still in its infancy, and it holds great promise for future integrated optoelectronics. The tremendous advantages of integrating devices on the same chip in electronics naturally suggest that the same be done with electronic and optoelectronic devices. However, integration of optoelectronic devices has proven to be a difficult challenge because of inherent incompatibilities. For example, a light-emitting diode based on a p-n structure has a structure quite different from the structure of any transistor. The exploitation of graphene will allow this incompatibility to be transcended. Intelligent schemes of functionalization of graphene hold the promise to accomplish the patterning of transparent standard resistors, capacitors and transistor structures integrated with light-emitting and detecting devices which constitutes a fundamental step towards applications such as smart windows. This pioneering research is at the core of this proposal.

CRUST takes advantage of the UK's leadership in uncertainty evaluation of earthquake source and ground motion (Goda [PI] and University of Bristol/Cabot Research Institute) and on-shore tsunami impact research (Rossetto [Co-I] and University College of London/EPICentre [Earthquake and People Interaction Centre]) to develop an innovative cross-hazard risk assessment methodology for cascading disasters that promotes dynamic decision-making processes for catastrophe risk management. It cuts across multiple academic fields, i.e. geophysics, engineering seismology, earthquake engineering, and coastal engineering. The timeliness and critical needs for cascading multi-hazards impact assessments have been exemplified by recent catastrophes. CRUST fills the current gap between quasi-static, fragmented approaches for multi-hazards and envisaged, dynamic, coherent frameworks for cascading hazards. CRUST combines a wide range of state-of-the-art hazard and risk models into a comprehensive methodology by taking into account uncertainty associated with predictions of hazards and risks. The work will provide multi-hazards risk assessment guidelines and tools for policy-makers and engineering/reinsurance industries. The proposal capitalises on a breakthrough technology for generating long-waves achieved by Rossetto. CRUST is composed of four work packages (WPs): WP1-'Ground shaking risk modelling due to mega-thrust subduction earthquakes'; WP2-'Tsunami wave and fragility modelling due to mega-thrust subduction earthquakes'; WP3-'Integrated multi-hazards modelling for earthquake shaking and tsunami'; and WP4-'Case studies for the Hikurangi and Cascadia subduction zones'. In WP1-WP3, the research adopts the 2011 Tohoku earthquake as a case study site, since this event offers extensive datasets for strong motion data, tsunami inundation, and building damage survey results, together with other geographical and demographical information (e.g. high-resolution bathymetry data and digital elevation model). The aims of WP1 are: to generate strong motion time-histories based on uncertain earthquake slips, reflecting multiple asperities (large slip patches) over a fault plane (WP1-1); to characterise spatiotemporal occurrence of aftershocks using global catalogues of subduction earthquakes (WP1-2); and to conduct probabilistic seismic performance assessment of structures subjected to mainshock-aftershock sequences (WP1-3). WP2 comprises tsunami wave profile and inundation simulation using uncertain earthquake slips (WP2-1); characterisation of tsunami loads to structures in coastal areas through large-scale physical experiments using an innovative long wave generation system at HR Wallingford (WP2-2); and development of analytical tsunami fragility models in comparison with field observations and experiments (WP2-3). The WP2 will be conducted in collaboration with academic collaborators from Kyoto University and Tohoku University (Japan). WP3 integrates the model components developed from WP1 and WP2 into a comprehensive framework for multi-hazards risk assessment for the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (WP3-1). Then, practical engineering tools for the multi-hazards method will be developed in WP3-2. Finally, in WP4, the developed multi-hazards methodology will be applied to the Hikurangi and Cascadia subduction zones. The assessments are done in a predictive mode, and these case studies will be conducted in close collaboration with academic partners, GNS Science (New Zealand) for the Hikurangi zone, and researchers at Western University and University of British Columbia (Canada) for the Cascadia zone.