University research funding: Awards to six new research projects

The University Committee for Research & Innovation (UCRI) provides funding each year for the strategic development of promising and ambitious research ideas and emerging initiatives in the University. In a recent competitive process, the Committee awarded £180,000 to six new projects.

The funding supports projects of up to two years’ duration that align with the strategic priorities of the University or their respective Research Themes, and that: 

• demonstrate ambition to achieve growth in research income, scale, methodologies, partnerships, reputation or audiences

• enable high-risk research – for example providing proof of concept to inform external grant applications, or

• support innovation and the translation of research into products and processes, for example, by supporting pilot projects.

Professor Dominik Zaum, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research & Innovation, said:

"This funding supports the development of innovative research which has the potential to raise the reputation and profile of our work. The high number of responses to the call for proposals and the quality of submissions reflects the vibrancy and ambition of our research plans.

"Congratulations to those researchers who have won awards in this round; the standard of applications was outstanding and represented an impressive breadth of research ideas from applicants at all stages of their careers."

Those receiving funding include:

James Cooper (Chemical Sciences): Polymer membranes with reversible permeability for next generation filtration technologies (£31,097)

Permeable polymer membranes are essential for a wide range of filtration technologies, for example the dialysis of blood or industrial-scale water purification. Unfortunately, most filtration devices that contain polymer membranes have limited lifespans and are thrown away once used, leading to significant amounts of waste material. Scientists are working to develop membranes with changeable permeability that could remove specific ions or molecules from a target solution, release them in another location, and then be recycled to be used again. In this project, we will incorporate stimuli-responsive supramolecular assemblies into polymer membranes to obtain controllable filtration properties. Polymer membranes with high levels of selectivity or control over filtration will then be used to fabricate prototype devices for use in filtration applications (e.g. sensors for biomedical implants or filters for removal of environmental pollutants).

Rob Hosfield (Archaeology): Neanderthals and early modern humans in the Mendip Hills, Somerset (£14,840)

This archaeological project will conduct new fieldwork at a Palaeolithic ('Old Stone Age') site in the Mendip Hills. As one of very few British sites dating to the time of both the Neanderthals and early modern humans (‘hominins’), the site has the potential to reveal how these species survived in, and adapted to, a single landscape during the fluctuating climates of the last ice age. The project aims to improve our understanding of the age of the site and the palaeo-environmental contexts of the hominin occupations. The project is a collaboration between Reading, Exeter, Brighton and Royal Holloway.

Michael Levitin (Mathematics): Old and new conjectures in spectral geometry (£34,192)

Spectral geometry studies, in rigorous mathematical terms, the relations between the shapes of solid bodies (domains) or curved surfaces (manifolds) and the sounds they make (the frequency spectrum). These natural frequencies, especially the high ones, are difficult to compute numerically, hence the need for advanced analytic tools to study the relations between the geometry and the spectra. The project aims to attack some of the most long-standing and challenging conjectures in spectral geometry, which quantitatively link the frequencies to the geometries, as well as some new problems.

Donal O’Sullivan (Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems): Further applications enabled by continuous and spatially explicit soil moisture mapping in agricultural and environmental sciences (£49,900)

This project uses a novel combination of technologies – actively heated optic-fibre cables below ground and radar imaging above ground – to map soil moisture at field scale with unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution and will explore how the more accurate root-zone soil moisture models obtained can spawn innovation in both precision agriculture and flood management applications. The proof-of-concept study, which will be implemented at the Crop Research Unit at Sonning Farm, will involve continuous measurement throughout the 2022 growing season of the 3-dimensional dynamic soil moisture profile under hundreds of individual plots of wheat varieties selected for their contrasting water use dynamics.

Daisy Powell and Holly Joseph (Education): Does bilingualism mitigate the effects of social disadvantage on early literacy? (£17,391) 

The so-called disadvantage gap – the gap in educational attainment between poorer students and their peers – starts early in life and persists through the school years, culminating in reduced life chances. However, children with English as an additional language (EAL) show a smaller gap than their English-only speaking peers and as yet we do not know the reasons for this. This project examines the social, environmental and economic factors which may compound or protect against the punishing effects of poverty in EAL and English-only children in the area of Whitley, Reading.

Simone Varotto (ICMA Centre): Calm mind, smart choices: The impact of mindfulness on financial decisions (RETF £32,875, ICMA Centre £3,000)

This investigation aims to shed light on how mindfulness meditation could potentially help to improve the financial decision-making of retail investors. Possible avenues for this include stress reduction, more rational (rather than emotional) processing of information, and a better assessment of long-term versus short-term rewards. The results of this research may have the potential to influence financial education in schools and colleges where mindfulness meditation could be taught to help individuals counter common behavioural biases that are known to lead to self-defeating outcomes when it comes to money matters.