Physics Department News
£1.3m Grant Awards - August 2011
Awards top £1,3m in August 2011, with major awards for Jeremy Sloan, Claire Foullon, Mike Allen plus substantial contributions from: Sandra Chapman, Mark Newton, and Gary Barker :
| Mike Allen £71,694 EPSRC | Subproject for Institution # 26409 Hard-soft matter interfaces: from understanding to engineering- EPSRC Programme grant. |
| Sandra Chapman £80,701 EC | TURBOPLASMAS: Turbulent phenomena in space plasmas: Boosting observations, data analysis and numerical simulations |
| Claire Foullon £432,816 STFC | Flow-driven Instabilities of the Sun-Earth System |
| Jeremy Sloan (Richard Beanland)£500,518 EPSRC | Supercritical Fluid Electrodeposition (Programme Grant) |
| Diane Holland £500 (AWE Plc) | Corporate Sponsorship |
| Mark Newton £39,994 Gemological Institute of America | Adaption of a monozoom microscope to produce an experimental rig for selected-area colorimetry |
| Gary Barker Ben Morgan, Yorck Ramachers£34,815 EC | LAGUNA-LBNO—Design of a pan-European Infrastructure for Large Apparatus studying Grand Unification, Neutrino Astrophysics and Long Baseline Neutrino Oscillations |
| Malcolm Cooper £71,694 Diamond Light Source Ltd | Secondment agreement for Diamond Light Source Limited - Gemma Newby |
| David Leadley £650 Paintbox Banbury Ltd | Industrial placement agreement - Volker Keinhorst (arranged through MPAGS 2 scheme, cross-ref MPAGS 2 collaboration agreement 26938) |
| Richard Beanland £800 Vetted Limited | Short form agreement for project SEM analysis of coated car engine piston |
The finances for 2010/11 have now been released. it was a good year for physics. The headline results are:
| £1m operating surplus | We had a plan for £0.5m surplus, but exceeded the the plan substantially |
| £5m gross surplus | We have contributed £5m to the university of which £4m is our share of University running costs. |
RESEARCH AWARDS for 2010/11
Our research awards reached £7.5m for 2010/11 financial year. That is a respectable amount, comfortably above the last two years. It meets our target of exceeding £7m, but lest people feel complacent the target for the new financial year is £8m.
It is all the more remarkable because it excludes MPAGS (not yet signed) and iMR DTC (£1.9m which is technically classed as teaching) nor does it include major equipment only grants like AM1 etc.
This averages £150k per academic per year of new awards, and that is an average over all staff, including theory and office based academics. If we maintain that level, then each staff member would accumulate a portfolio of c£450k. The main target is based on the research income that we get each year from our portfolio of grants, including deferred capital grants, those figures should be available in about 4 weeks time.
Over 40% of the total academic staff salary bill is funded direct from grants through a combination of fellowships and PI time.
July Awards
The new awards in July form an impressive and diverse list.
- Top by far is the Nanosilicon Programme grant at £1.85m headed by David Leadley
- Marzena Szymanska is awarded £400k from EPSRC for Novel Superfluid Phenomena in Semiconductor Microcavities. Which adds to an increasingly impressive portfolio in the theory group.
- Jon Duffy brings in a welcome £150k from EPSRC for Fermiology and spin densities from x-ray scattering
- Mark Newton £110k also from EPSRC for CHIST-ERA: Quantum Information with NV Centres.
- Sandra Chapman has tapped into EU funds to the tune of £80k for Turboplasmas
- STFC have funded an outreach programme to purchase and run a mobile planetarium led by Peter Wheatley but involving staff throughout the department. £10k This adds another string to an impressive and professional outreach programme.
- And Julie Staunton has industrial funding for a studentship modelling the electrocalorific effect. £27k
Volker Keinhorst takes up MPAGS Industrial Placement
Volker Keinhorst, a PhD student in the microscopy group, will become the first Warwick postgraduate to take up an industrial placement within the Midlands Physics Alliance Graduate School (MPAGS) scheme when he starts work in Banbury with Paintbox UK Ltd at the end of July. The aim of the placement will be to help Paintbox develop their automobile painting process including micro analysis via FIB SEM studies of paint/substrate interfaces.
This placement was made possible through the industrial contacts of the Science City Research Alliance. More information about the MPAGS Industrial Placements is available and any students interested in taking part in this scheme should contact David Leadley.