The twentieth century saw an explosion in semiconductor electronics from the first transistor, which was used in hearing aids, to the ultrafast computers of today. A similar surge is anticipated for Plastic Electronics based on a new type of semiconducting material which is soft and flexible rather than hard and brittle. Plastic Electronics is considered a disruptive technology, not displacing conventional electronics, but creating new markets because it enables the printing of electronic materials at low temperatures so that plastic, fabric, paper and other flexible materials can be used as substrates. Printing minimises the waste of materials and low cost roll-to-roll manufacturing can be used because the substrates are flexible. New applications include intelligent or interactive packaging, RFID tags, e-readers, flexible power sources and lighting panels. The organic field effect transistor (OFET) is the fundamental building block of plastic electronics and is used to amplify and switch electronic signals. The organic semiconducting channel connects the source and drain electrodes and is separated from the gate electrode by an insulating dielectric. A positive/negative gate voltage induces negative/positive charges at the insulator/semiconductor interface and so controls the conductivity of the semiconductor and consequently the current flowing between the source and drain. The future success of the industry depends on the availability of high performance solution processable materials and low voltage device operation. The semiconductors must have high electron and hole mobility (velocity/electric field) achieved by the hopping of carriers between closely spaced molecular sites. A new class of lamellar polymers, mostly developed in the UK, provides the required state-of the art performance because of their macromolecular self-organisation. However a major problem is that the materials are only well-ordered in microscopic domains; trapping in grain boundaries and poor interconnectivity between domains substantially reduce performance and reliability. The low voltage operation of OFETs requires that the gate insulators have a high dielectric constant. We propose novel insulating dielectrics for OFETs to simultaneously align the plastic semiconductors and ensure low voltage operation. They will be solution processable at low temperatures for compatibility with printing and other large area manufacturing techniques. We will synthesise and characterise the new materials and test their performance using state of the art semiconductors. We will engage with industrial end-users to ensure that our technology is exploited so contributing to the high-tech economy in an area where the UK is already pre-eminent. We anticipate that our novel insulators will provide monodomain order over large areas to the overlying semiconductor and so will enhance OFET performance and stability. Hence we aim to hasten the commercialisation of Plastic Electronics.

The United Kingdom is a coastal nation with the majority of the population living within a few miles of an estuary or the sea. The nature of the coastline depends on the local conditions of geology and water flow. Rocky coastlines are found where the energy of the sea is high, while mud and sand are found where the energy is lower and these sediments can be deposited. These low energy muddy and sandy (depositional) habitats, are very important for the ecology and economy of the UK. They provide food for many species of birds and fish, but also protect the coastline from the erosive forces of the sea. In addition, they act as a "filter", where pollutants from the rivers are captured and eventually degraded. Because of the importance of these systems, their natural behaviour and stability is of increasing concern as sea levels rise and storm events increase in frequency with climate change. The movement of sediment around the coast of Britain has vast economic and ecological consequences, but surprisingly we have very little scientific information that helps us to predict how natural mudflats and beaches will respond to the changing forces of the tides, wind and waves. When water flows over the sea bottom, the energy of the flow shapes the sediment into wavy features called bedforms (such as ripples). These bedforms help control the erosion and transport of sand, mud, nutrients and pollutants. Information allowing us to predict the shape, size and movement of bedforms is essential for environmental management, hydraulic engineering, benthic habitat biology, computer modelling of particle transport, sedimentary geology, and many other scientific disciplines. However, there is an almost complete lack of knowledge concerning bedforms consisting of mixtures of sand and mud. Sandy sediments are known to be "non-cohesive", because the sand particles do not stick together, whereas muds are made up of smaller particles that do stick together and so are called "cohesive" sediments. This project, COHBED, will take advantage of the latest developments in measurement technologies to produce information about the growth, movement and stability of bedforms that consist of natural mixtures of sands and muds, a natural condition that is very common but has rarely been studied before. In a new departure, this work includes a multidisciplinary team to combine the physics, mathematics, sedimentology, and biology of these systems, since we recognise that the organisms (from bacteria to sea grasses) that inhabit natural systems also change the erosional characteristics and bedform behaviour. This is why COHBED will include laboratory experiments and field surveys. A series of experiments in laboratory flow channels will investigate key factors that control the behaviour and properties of bedforms, such as: - System energy: effects of flow velocity, bed friction and flow depth - Bed properties: particle size, proportion of mud and sand, and biological effects - Time: the speed of bedform growth and rate of change as flow energy changes - Particle erosion: changes in the bedforms as smaller particles are eroded away The results of the laboratory studies will be compared with the behaviour of natural systems. Field surveys will be conducted to validate the predictions derived from the laboratory studies, using new techniques that for the first time allow essential simultaneous measurements of flow, sediment and bedform properties. The COHBED project will maintain the UK at the forefront of this research area and will help us to manage our coasts in the face of climate change.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

This CDP will engage with current debates about the role of cultural institutions in collecting, preserving and promoting indigenous languages, and the ethical issues that such activities raise. The core supervisory team is the British Library Curator for North American Printed Collections (Fuentes) and a U.K. expert in indigenous history (Porter), supported by a secondary team at the forefront of indigenous language studies (Professor Dale Turner (Anishinaabe), Department of Native Studies, Dartmouth College; Mishiikenh (Vernon Altiman, Mohawk), Queen's University, Ontario; 3) Professor Marianne Mithun, University of California, Santa Barbara. The student will be encouraged in their first year to use Student Development and institutional funding to complete one or more short but intensive language competence courses run by co-supervisor Mishiikenh in Ontario. They will use their acquired knowledge of Anishinaabe and will work with indigenous communities to generate the first survey, identification & tagging of indigenous language holdings in a series of BL collections and they will identify and significantly improve catalogue records in relation to indigenous languages. The student will begin by engaging specifically with BL Boarding School publications and the variety of material therein (primers, reference texts and indigenous creative output), before going on to explore dictionaries and religious texts in translation, as well as 20th century Native newspapers, activist campaign materials and literature by indigenous authors and poets. To help them comprehend this work in indigenous context, they will be encouraged to explore methodologies such as 'up-streaming', asymmetries of power within other post or neo-colonial contexts and linguistic code switching as defined by Penelope Gardner-Chloros and others. The student will seek to learn from the expertise of the curatorial and learning teams who worked on the 'Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land' exhibition and will also participate in a Library indigenous working group.

This project brings together a team of researchers at the University of Hull and three external stakeholder groups - Hull City Council; Groundwork and Probe - to explore how Citizen Inquiry methodologies and digital technologies can improve the quality of research that has public value. An important part of our work is to ensure our research is informed and used by the people who live in the communities around us. Citizen Science is a way of designing research that involves the general public or 'citizens' as contributors and collaborators in the project. There are various methods that we can use to carry out these inquiries but there are also many barriers and challenges that typically hinder academic researchers in universities from engaging the general public with Citizen Science. One of these is small participation rates and participation which is biased towards white, middle-aged and higher-income people (Defra, 2015) This is an issue that the project will challenge by exploring how researchers and the public can co-design research designed that meets the needs of a more diverse range of the population, particularly hard to reach and under-represented communities - the communities that we most want to work with. One approach is called Citizen Inquiry which is more participatory in nature and can involve the public is designing the research, collecting and analyzing data and sharing the findings. Digital technologies, such as mobile phones, often play a significant part in this process and this project will explore their effectiveness in engaging groups that are seen as hard to reach and traditionally reluctant to engage in citizen science, such as young people. The primary aim of the project is to explore how to convince academic researchers that Citizen Science is worthwhile and can add value to their research. We contend that Citizen Inquiry with its greater participatory approach is more likely to achieve this, through, for example, helping researchers to design more effective research questions that focus on issues of greater value to the public. To explore and verify this assumption the project will work with a specific cohort of researchers at the University of Hull who are currently exploring the issue of plastics waste as part of a larger project on plastics funded by the EPSRC. These researchers are part of a team working in what is referred to as the Plastics Collaboratory at the University of Hull. The project will investigate the barriers that traditionally inhibit these researchers from engaging more with the public in the research process itself and those that inhibit the three stakeholder groups themselves from working more closely with the research community. In the first phase of the project (January - February 2020) this will involve interviews and focus groups with a cross-section of participants from these different communities, leading to a project report and set of recommendations. In the second phase of the project (March-April, 2020), the research community and the three stakeholder groups will be brought together in a collaborative half-day workshop to share their collective wisdom on the issue and to explore how they might use Citizen Inquiry methodologies in the future. This workshop will include practical, hands-on-sessions to explore how mobile technologies and particular apps can be used to undertake Citizen Inquiry projects, laying down a foundation for further activities and engagement beyond the lifetime of the project itself which, if funded, will run from January to April, 2020. The project will conclude in April 2020 with an open conference bringing together researchers and interested stakeholder groups to share the findings from the research and to explore further opportunities to design collaborative research projects and seek additional funding.