Member Article

£200m for university-private sector research pairings

The Chancellor has announced an additional £200m of funding for university research programmes.

The funding will be made through UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UK RPIF), which initially launched with government investment of £100m at Budget 2012. The fund was heavily oversubscribed, and it is hoped this latest raft will allow further projects to benefit.

Universities must match the funding by at least double from private companies or charities, taking the total investment, including universities’ own contributions, to at least £1bn. The fund is managed by HEFCE, and applications must build on existing strong research capability, while being judged on value for money.

In the first round of bidding, a number of high value projects were successful. For example, the Fund facilitated a £138m partnership, consisting of the University of Oxford and a consortium including Synergy Health, Cancer Research UK, Roche Diagnostics, GE Healthcare and the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, to establish a world centre for targeted cancer research. Elsewhere, a £60m partnership between the University of Birmingham and Rolls-Royce was enabled to set up a research centre for high temperature metallurgy and associated processes for components including turbine blades.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .