This is a UCL-wide bid to invest in a range of equipment items to refresh and upgrade our experimental facilities which will help to maintain a cutting-edge in internationally leading research. Each of the bundles included in this proposal contributes to one or more strategic themes, in which UCL, as well as national and international funders, has invested significantly in recent years: Health technologies, Advanced functional materials, Sustainable built environment and Novel information and communication technologies. UCL has considerable strengths in these areas, and we have experienced significant growth in terms of staff and student numbers, and breadth and impact of research activity. This additional investment will therefore provide an ideal platform to ensure the sustained growth of the highest quality research, as well as supporting the early career researchers. Each bundle identifies a set of items that underpin a range of research activities, often reaching across department and discipline boundaries, which are of strategic importance for UCL and EPSRC. The specific items identified within the bundles have been selected in close collaboration with senior management and individuals and groups working in the area, to ensure that they are aligned with their current needs and have the greatest potential to support maximum impact of their research activities. Each bundle has been allocated a Lead Investigator who will be responsible for regular reporting to the Vice-Provost for Research on progress against objectives. The four EPSRC challenge themes addressed by this proposal are: Health technologies [bundles 1, 2, 3, 6]; Advanced functional materials [bundles 1, 3, 4, 5, 6]; Sustainable built environments [bundle 7]; and Novel information and communication technologies [bundles 5, 8].

The proliferation of wireless networks over the past decade has made security a major concern for these networks and the applications that have to use them. Wireless networks have fundamental characteristics that make them significantly different from traditional wired networks, particularly with regard to security and reliability. Moreover there is an increasing trend for access to services residing on fixed (e.g. enterprise) networks via wireless access. Therefore the design of secure and reliable wireless networks presents a major challenge to the designers of next generation networks with general public wireless access. It is also expected that many future networks will have to live under the threat of attacks as a matter of course. Current research attempts to secure networks against all types of attack, at all times and generally irrespective of the cost to the performance of the network. This research proposal aims to investigate a new type of integrated, flexible, and intelligent security architecture for providing tolerance to intrusion attacks against next generation networks with wireless access. Thus our goal is not to prevent intrusions but to enable network architectures to withstand them. Central to the work will be the design of a distributed Intrusion tolerance system that is based on a cross layer detection and mitigation approach. As such, intrusion detection and mitigation will be integrated within the layered architecture of the network so that the network has an intelligent view of the overall level of threat(s) posed at any time throughout the network. This approach brings a number of significant advantages over existing intrusion detection systems (IDS) particularly when applied to wireless access networks that have to withstand some level of attacks over prolonged periods.

Label-free detection of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) is considered to be one of the holy grails of biosensing. CTCs are malignant cells shed into the bloodstream from a tumour, which have the potential to establish metastases. The separation and subsequent characterization of these cells is of vital importance for cancer diagnosis and development of personalized cancer therapies. Biochemical CTC separation methods have proven to be highly inefficient and, therefore, preventive screening by sole blood analysis is currently not reliable. Microwave-to-terahertz dielectric measurements were successfully used for the identification of cancer cells; their capability for tumour tissue imaging is clinically established as a viable alternative to X-rays and MRI. The frequency range from 10 GHz up to about 1 THz is extremely promising for the detection of single tumour cells. Due to the diminishing cell membrane polarization effects, the cell membrane becomes transparent, but cell scattering is still negligible, in contrast to that found in the visible and near/medium-infrared range. Due to the high electromagnetic absorption of water up to about 1 THz, electromagnetic resonators with high quality factors and highly concentrated electric field within a small integrated microfluidic reservoir (previously demonstrated by the team), which essentially contains one cell at a time, represent an ideal system for fast and accurate dielectric measurements. This is because the single cell lies within their natural liquid environment. In order to tackle the problem of extremely low abundance of CTCs in blood samples, we intend to combine microfluidic separation techniques with integrated microwave-to-terahertz resonators on one chip or as a multichip combination, aiming towards a lab-on-chip approach for clinical applications. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, within this three-year project, we suggest a multidisciplinary approach, based on the expertise of the associated members of Imperial's Centre for Terahertz Science and Engineering (made up of academics and researchers from the Depts. of Materials, Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Physics), along with selected groups from dedicated areas of Life Sciences (which includes cancer cell biology and cell biosensing), plus the expertise of oncologists from Imperial's Faculty of Medicine. A variety of tumour cell suspension of defined concentration based on whole blood, serum or water being derived from a murine model will be our gold standard approach for the generation of a database of dielectric properties of different types of tumour cells, for the optimization of different sensor chip approaches, and for the development of cell detection methods. As a key milestone, towards the end of the project, we will demonstrate CTC detection in human blood samples. As the main engineering challenge of this project, three different electromagnetic resonator approaches will be investigated, based on our previous work on silicon MEMS technology for nanolitre liquid measurements: dielectric resonators, photonic crystals and spoof plasmon-based metamaterials. Advanced micro- and nano-machining techniques like deep reactive ion etching, e-beam lithography and focussed ion-beam etching will be employed for the manufacturing of fully-integrated (sub-) THz resonator-microfluidic systems. On the way towards the grand challenge of CTC detection, we intend to investigate two potential applications, which may generate clinical impact on a shorter timescale: Label-free detection of leukaemia cells within a murine model and bladder cancer cell detection in human urine samples. In both cases, the expected cell abundance is much higher than in the case of CTC, but the methods of dielectric cell recognition are identical to CTC detection. Follow-up projects including clinical studies plus stronger involvement of industry are likely to be launched during the time-span of this project.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.