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The difficulty of certifying the safety (often termed Verification and Validation — V&V) of increasingly complex and more autonomous Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) systems is now widely accepted to be a serious threat to the success of future space missions. In response to this threat, the European Space Agency has funded Dr Prathyush P Menon and his team to develop a suite of mathematical tools for the V&V of advanced GNC systems. These tools have now been widely adopted throughout the European Space industry, and have been successfully applied by major companies such as Astrium, Thales-Alenia and GMV to systems ranging from flexible and autonomous satellites, to launch vehicles and hypersonic re-entry vehicles.
Research at the University of Nottingham has augmented the aspirations and entrepreneurial capabilities of academic researchers through participation in the Biotechnology Young Entrepreneurs Scheme (YES) business plan competition.
The content and pedagogy of the competition are built upon research pioneered by the University of Nottingham Institute for Enterprise and Innovation (UNIEI), delivered together with research councils and industry. Since 2008, more than 2,000 researchers have participated in the scheme and an independent evaluation demonstrated that it has enhanced their entrepreneurial skills, augmented their career aspirations and increased their engagement in the process of commercialising academic research.
The mouse is the most important laboratory animal used worldwide in biomedical research and for regulatory testing of products. Research at the University of Liverpool by Prof Hurst has led to a change in the methods universally recommended for routine handling of mice to minimize a well- recognized problem that handling can create high anxiety, stress and a risk of animals biting the handler. This has impacts for animal welfare, for practitioners, and for reliability in a broad range of research and testing using mice (e.g. in the pharmaceuticals industry) where responses can be confounded by uncontrolled anxiety responses. Mouse handling guidelines have been changed and are being implemented in animal research facilities.
In the years 1914-19, over 1,000 war plays, pageants and revues were submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office for licensing. Dr Andrew Maunder led a project that recovered these since-forgotten plays, introducing modern audiences to a largely unknown dimension of cultural life on the WWI Home Front through performances staged between 2011 and 2013. These allowed audiences to think well beyond the `war poets' and to reappraise their understanding of the war and its culture. School-age and adult audiences have come to understand that, if theatre is cut out of the picture, it is impossible to gain a full and accurate sense of WWI culture and its legacy.
There has been a growing interest in the concept of social enterprise - that is organisations that are trading but with a social purpose. The research at Middlesex University has Influenced policies of state support to social enterprises demonstrated through references to research in policy documents and acknowledgement by key policy makers working in a range of UK national departments and Scottish Government. Research findings have influenced how government measures the size of the social enterprise sector and the supply of social investment funds, feeding into strategy documents of the Cabinet Office and supporting the development of Big Society Capital. Research has also stimulated the growth of individual social enterprises, with one reporting an increased turnover of 20% over 2 years.
Clench's research on Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionisation - Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MALDI-MSI) technologies has impacted directly on pharmaceutical industry practice regarding studies of drug distribution studies in biological tissues, providing increased information, more rapidly. Companies have benefitted from long-term relationships with Clench's Bioanalysis Research Group and seek its expertise for consultancy purposes. Former members of Clench's group hold key positions in industry, implementing and further developing these technologies. Francese has had significant success in applying MALDI-MSI to analysis of latent fingermarks for forensic applications benefiting Home Office scientists and crime scene investigation units. Research advances in MALDI-MSI by Clench and Francese are patented and exploited via licensing.
Radiation hardness is key for sensors used in many nuclear medicine, space and defence applications, and for nuclear reactor monitoring and fuel handling. It is vital to academic research in the high particle fluence environments found in particle and nuclear physics. At Liverpool, the development of novel radiation-hard silicon sensor technologies was driven by sensor requirements at the LHC. This research has led to the adoption of n-implant in p-type planar silicon (n-in-p) sensors in the wider research community and by commercial suppliers of sensing devices including Micron Semiconductor and e2v (UK), Hamamatsu Photonics (Japan), CNM (Spain) and FBK (Italy).
Research at the University of Leeds underpinned the development and manufacture of RF filter technology by Radio Design Ltd, including the 3G `Universal RF Combiner Unit' with sales of >£18M (40,000 units) since 2008, which led to the company's Queen's Award for Enterprise (Innovation) in 2011. This technology was subsequently improved specifically for the 2012 London Olympics for shared use by all five cellular operators, and has now been further developed, again using Leeds research, for 4G systems (with >£4.2M sales in 2013). Leeds research has contributed directly to ~75% of Radio Design's products, and its expansion from 11 employees in 2008 to 150 employees today. Leeds-designed RF filters have also been widely utilized by other manufacturers, with estimated annual international sales of tens of millions of pounds since 2008.
In parallel, Leeds research on the physical modelling and design of pHEMT switches has been used since 2008 by RFMD (UK) Ltd (previously Filtronic Compound Semiconductors), who supply all major mobile phone manufacturers — over 2 billion pHEMT switches are used worldwide, with RFMD's estimated sales exceeding £250M since 2008.
Gait recognition research has produced impacts on public policy, on national security processes, on forensic service practice, on culture and society. The notion that people can be recognised by the way they walk was invented as a totally new means to identify people and has gained increasing popularity, reflected by its inclusion in an episode of BBC premier series Spooks. This followed considerable scientific development after its invention at Southampton in 1994, culminating in impacts that include its integration in a commercial system piloted by the National Physics Laboratory, novel forensic use in a criminal conviction, its take up by researchers at the Serious Organised Crime Agency and its focus by The Forensic Science Society. Southampton has retained its position at the forefront of gait biometrics research, collaborating nationally and internationally and driving prolific media engagement that has furthered this new technology and increased its global impact