Announcing the results of the Oxford Martin School's 2012-2015 funding round:
Exploiting the power of modern genetics; developing vaccines without needles; computing inspired by biology; and safeguarding future human security. These are the research questions to be tackled by new teams joining the Oxford Martin School through a £6.4 million competition held for academics across the University of Oxford.
Six new research programmes will get underway in October, following a highly competitive and innovative funding process. With over 330 individual applications from across the University, academics were clearly eager to push the frontiers of interdisciplinary research. Ultimately the successful teams addressed the School’s key criteria: promoting academic excellence; addressing issues of a global scale; ensuring a real-world impact beyond academia, and developing innovative interdisciplinary research.
The six new projects will involve over 70 academics from 17 different departments across the University of Oxford. The projects are:
Viral infections – exploiting the unprecedented power of modern genetics to understand the clearance of viral infections such as HIV and Hepatitis C.
Led by: Professor Angela McLean and Professor Rodney Phillips
Resource stewardship – radically rethinking global resource stewardship to consider the tensions within an increasingly crowded world, accountable to future generations.
Led by: Professor Myles Allen; Professor Jim Hall; Professor Steve Rayner; and Professor Kathy Willis
Quantum technology – learning directly from biological systems to develop quantum computing which will revolutionize current information processing capacity with impacts for climate predictions and drug discovery.
Led by: Professor Vlatko Vedral and Professor Dieter Jaksch
Vaccines – transforming vaccines against globally important diseases such as influenza, and developing innovative needle-free delivery technologies.
Led by: Professor Adrian Hill; Professor Andrew Pollard; and Professor Christoph Tang
Human rights for future generations – designing a new framework for human rights to deal with the unprecedented and unpredictable factors affecting the welfare of future generations.
Led by: Professor Sandra Fredman; Professor Simon Caney; and Mr Dapo Akande
Complexity, risk and resilience – improving the resilience of critical global systems – food webs, the internet, the global financial system – in the face of growing risk and uncertainty.
Led by: Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas
The new research projects will run for three years from Autumn 2012. The research will contribute to the Oxford Martin School’s already ambitious portfolio of over 30 research programmes that address topics ranging from conflict and climate change to food security and global health. Since its founding in 2005, the Oxford Martin School has grown into a global centre for interdisciplinary scholarship and thinking about the future. The School’s key aim is to develop new approaches to some of society’s most intractable questions.
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