Reducing carbon emissions and securing energy supplies are crucial international goals to which energy demand reduction must make a major contribution. On a national level, demand reduction, deployment of new and renewable energy technologies, and decarbonisation of the energy supply are essential if the UK is to meet its legally binding carbon reduction targets. As a result, this area is an important theme within the EPSRC's strategic plan, but one that suffers from historical underinvestment and a serious shortage of appropriately skilled researchers. Major energy demand reductions are required within the working lifetime of Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) graduates, i.e. by 2050. Students will thus have to be capable of identifying and undertaking research that will have an impact within their 35 year post-doctoral career. The challenges will be exacerbated as our population ages, as climate change advances and as fuel prices rise: successful demand reduction requires both detailed technical knowledge and multi-disciplinary skills. The DTC will therefore span the interfaces between traditional disciplines to develop a training programme that teaches the context and process-bound problems of technology deployment, along with the communication and leadership skills needed to initiate real change within the tight time scale required. It will be jointly operated by University College London (UCL) and Loughborough University (LU); two world-class centres of energy research. Through the cross-faculty Energy Institute at UCL and Sustainability Research School at LU, over 80 academics have been identified who are able and willing to supervise DTC students. These experts span the full range of necessary disciplines from science and engineering to ergonomics and design, psychology and sociology through to economics and politics. The reputation of the universities will enable them to attract the very best students to this research area.The DTC will begin with a 1 year joint MRes programme followed by a 3 year PhD programme including a placement abroad and the opportunity for each DTC student to employ an undergraduate intern to assist them. Students will be trained in communication methods and alternative forms of public engagement. They will thus understand the energy challenges faced by the UK, appreciate the international energy landscape, develop people-management and communication skills, and so acquire the competence to make a tangible impact. An annual colloquium will be the focal point of the DTC year acting as a show-case and major mechanism for connection to the wider stakeholder community.The DTC will be led by internationally eminent academics (Prof Robert Lowe, Director, and Prof Kevin J Lomas, Deputy Director), together they have over 50 years of experience in this sector. They will be supported by a management structure headed by an Advisory Board chaired by Pascal Terrien, Director of the European Centre and Laboratories for Energy Efficiency Research and responsible for the Demand Reduction programme of the UK Energy Technology Institute. This will help secure the international, industrial and UK research linkages of the DTC.Students will receive a stipend that is competitive with other DTCs in the energy arena and, for work in certain areas, further enhancement from industrial sponsors. They will have a personal annual research allowance, an excellent research environment and access to resources. Both Universities are committed to energy research at the highest level, and each has invested over 3.2M in academic appointments, infrastructure development and other support, specifically to the energy demand reduction area. Each university will match the EPSRC funded studentships one-for-one, with funding from other sources. This DTC will therefore train at least 100 students over its 8 year life.

Today's communication networks need to be supported by an ultra-broadband optical backbone in order to respond to the enormous demand for data exchange. Without the use of photonic components, the "magic" of being 24/7connected on a global scale just by using our portable devices would be impossible. Recently, a new branch of science, called plasmonics, has gained great momentum in the scientific community, since it brings the promise to be complementary to photonics. For instance, in the realm of plasmonics, devices can function on a nanometric scale (1 nanometer [nm] = a billionth of a meter), with consequent advantages in terms of versatility, scalability, and reduced power consumption. The proposed project "Tunable plasmonics for Ultrafast Switching at Telecom Wavelengths" is focused on novel materials for plasmonic applications (namely titanium nitride -TiN; and aluminum doped zinc oxide - AZO). Besides solving fundamental issues typical of plasmonic devices such as poor transparency and low damage threshold, these two materials unable the possibility to engineer the light-matter interaction at will. This can be achieved either by changing the fabrication procedure or in a more dynamic fashion by means of an external excitation such as a laser beam or an applied voltage. The core active material at the center of this project is a new kind of AZO developed inside the collaborative effort between Heriot-Watt University in UK, and the Birck Nanotechnology Center in USA. This "special" AZO is grown by unconventional methods and it exhibits ultrafast optical response (i.e. after the material properties are altered by an optical pulse, it restores its original behavior on a time scale shorter than 1 ps = 1/1000000000000 sec). One fundamental goal of this project is gaining a deep knowledge of the physical mechanism behind the ultra-fast behavior of AZO (still not fully understood) and use this knowledge to further optimize the material for application in ultra-fast photonics. In addition to this, in order to properly evaluate the potentials of both AZO and TiN in the real world, this project includes the fabrication and testing of an optical modulator prototype (the modulator being the most fundamental building block for encoding information). This device will be interfaced with the external world with input/output TiN-based plasmonic waveguides and will exploit AZO as active core material for performing the ultra-fast signal encoding. Numerical simulations foresee outstanding performances in terms of compactness, reduced power consumption, and ultra-fast operational speed.

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.

The publishing industry determines whose voices get heard. Publishers can be gatekeepers as well as agents of change, capable of challenging or reaffirming dominant narratives and inequalities and driving cultural change across borders. This project transforms public access to twentieth-century publishers' archives, asking new questions about the transatlantic relationship between US/UK and expatriate publishers, and putting pressure on existing assumptions about voice and representation in Anglophone literary publishing. The period we focus on (1900-50) was a time of exponential growth in readership, book-buying, and the number of publishing houses starting up, as the industry modernised rapidly in response to international changes in copyright, changes in printing technology, and global channels of distribution. At the same time, innovative publishers were making crucial space for new types of writing and new voices. Key modernist works and publishing histories that we'll showcase in this new, expanded database include Nancy Cunard's edited Negro anthology (1934), Sylvia Beach's publication of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Alfred Knopf's publishing of Willa Cather alongside European and Russian translations for American audiences, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf's fostering of anti-colonial and left-wing voices. The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (or MAPP) is an established international digital humanities project (http://www.modernistarchives.com/), built by a team of US, UK and Canadian archivists and scholars. It is the first international open access project to digitise a publisher's archive and to contextualise and present little-known aspects of the publishing process (submission letters, reader's reviews, sales and accounts data) in relation to books and the people and businesses involved. This new phase adds a transatlantic dimension to the prototype we have built, which has focussed on the Hogarth Press. The expanded resource will put US publishing house Alfred A. Knopf (founded by Alfred and Blanche Knopf in 1915), into dialogue with expat publishers and booksellers Sylvia Beach and Nancy Cunard, literary agents William and Jenny Bradley (founded 1909, representing American, English and French authors, including James Baldwin and Richard Wright), and the UK publishing house of Chatto & Windus (founded 1855). In size, organisation, and outputs, Knopf is an American counterpart to the Woolfs' press, while Nancy Cunard's Hours Press is a shorter-lived small press (1928-31). Chatto & Windus represents the kind of modernist mid-sized press that the Hogarth Press became. Bringing these transatlantic collections together will make it possible to map transatlantic publishing networks and the circulation of books, ideas and peoples across borders, in a way that has not been possible for scholars working individually in paper-based archives before. Transatlantic knowledge production and collaborative and community experiences are central to this research. Working across several workstreams, we'll build on and expand our previous practice by creating new data with existing partners (University of Reading Special Collections, Washington State University Pullman, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin) and work with other cultural institutions (the New York Public Library, and Sussex University Library Special Collections) to engage with a wider community of audiences. We'll work with new groups of community volunteers, facilitate transnational training, and develop a best practice toolkit and series of digital and in-person exhibitions on Transatlantic Modernist Publishing with our cultural institutions. Collaboration is built into the heart of MAPP as a feminist digital humanities project. This project takes this further by working with a larger group of British and American partners to reconfigure the relationships between publishers, authors and readers across borders.

The UK pharmaceutical industry produces 16% of the world's well-known medicines, employs more than 66,000 people (200,000 more indirectly) and contributes over £8.8 billion to the UK GVA. The current covid-19 crisis has highlighted the need for the UK and the USA to have a strong, smart pharmaceutical manufacturing base. The FDA in the USA has identified continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing as a highly promising solution to these challenges by enabling lower capital cost, smaller footprint and highly efficient facilities, which can be distributed geographically, improve national security by reducing dependency on foreign suppliers and can produce multiple products on demand with minimum risk to quality. However, the UK Government Made Smarter Review highlights that we still have a way to go to achieve a Right First Time smart manufacturing system as an enabler for the digitalization of continuous manufacturing in pharmaceutical industry. Addressing these challenges are the domain of process systems engineers. By developing right-first-time (RFT) smart manufacturing systems incorporating Industry 4.0 concepts, we intend to address these key challenges in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Our hypothesis is that the development of a systematic framework for smart continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing can deliver key benefits to the industry including: - Reduced time to market of new products; - Reduced waste and increased resilience; and - Reduced cost of manufacture. To develop this framework, we have brought together a world leading team of process systems and pharmaceutical engineers from four universities in the UK and USA. An important and unique element of this proposal is the ability to validate state of the art models, control and optimization procedures on three cutting edge continuous manufacturing experimental platforms: (1) Consigma 25 wet granulation line at University of Sheffield (UK); (2) Dry granulation line at Purdue University (USA); and (3) Continuous direct compression line, also at Purdue. The outcome of this project will be a framework and computational tools for optimal design of pharmaceutical processes with a real-time process management system and a flexible real-time release testing framework, all verified at pilot scale.