Small items of research equipment at the University of St Andrews. Supporting a new generation of Physical Sciences Research.

A range of small equipment will be used to support and enhance activities of early career researchers and EPSRC funded fellows and PhD students:

Groups in synthetic optical materials (SOM) and nanophotonics are developing materials and devices for all fields that benefit from tailored control of light matter interaction at the nanoscale, eg ultrathin flexible metamaterials (metaflex) embedding graphene layers with dynamically controllable optical response for imaging and cloaking to energy and bio-related applications and narrow linewidth lasers based on semiconductor optical amplifiers and narrow nanostructured mirrors, as optical interconnect for energy efficient data transfer and manipulation.

Researchers in catalysis are developing more atom efficient syntheses and syntheses under benign conditions to provide a sustainable future for the UK. Furthermore, the rapid depletion of fossil fuels as a resource for energy and chemicals production necessitates a future change to increase the use of biomass. The most abundant renewable resource in this context is lignocellulosic biomass, which is much more plentiful than the alternative feedstocks such as sugars, starch, oils and fats.

A diverse range of high quality facilities and research programs aimed at characterising for example novel materials, devices, different states of matter, biological materials, will be enhanced by the provision of eg improved variable temperature devices, modern computer interfaces and atmospheric control. These facilities support all of the physical sciences in St Andrews.

Chemical Biology and Health will develop programs combining molecular biology, surface science and engineering in order to make new designer biocatalysts and expeditious access to designer natural product analogues for health and as tools for chemical biology by combining synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry. Furthermore, single-molecule microscopy techniques will be applied to elucidate molecular conformation, assess chemical reactions, achieve single molecule sensing, monitor relevant kinetics, reveal sample heterogeneity and detect transient species with an unprecedented level of detail.

Mathematical computational activity will be enhanced by provision of new parallel computing facilities. In addition the new equipment will enhance the ability of multi-disciplinary groups in the schools of Psychology and Computer Science to develop and test new novel input and output devices, and c) explore how best to create, design and explain content with these input and output modalities.

Impact Summary
Our major focus areas in this equipment call are in the areas of new materials and fabrication; catalysis and synthesis; characterisation; chemical biology and health; and computation and perception.

Commercial Entities
The increased equipment resource base will allow our researchers, in particular our early-career researchers, to develop high-quality partnerships with industry partners which they not have been able to do without the equipment funding due to under-utilized our out-of-date pieces of equipment. The research outputs from these collaborations allow the development of new products and processes for market, including software for cloud computing and digital tourism, and processes to facilitate better neurological disorder diagnosis (see Healthcare below).

Similarly, provision of research expertise and equipment access through various programmes to Scottish and UK SMEs allows them to maintain their market position, stabilize or increases their employee numbers, and weather the current economic climate.

Healthcare
It is calculated that around 42% of the UK population have a relative or a friend who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. In addition to this, caring for each person with dementia costs around £27k per year (Source: "Dementia 2010, Alzheimer's Research Trust"). It is clear that any improvement in our understanding of aggregation-related diseases and any small progress towards the development of inhibitors or imaging sensors will have not only a remarkable economic but also societal impact. A method to discriminate between amyloid polymorphs will have impact in pharmaceutical companies by enabling them to focus on tailoring their research to particular aggregation types, work currently being carried out by early-career researcher Dr. Carlos Penedo.

Government and Policy Makers
USTAN physical scientists have in the past provided expert testimony to national parliamentary panels (Holyrood and Westminster, for example on geothermal energy), and lead international (NIH, NASA) as well as national research council projects, and expect our capacity to deliver such impacts to continue through support of an enhanced equipment base.
Computer scientists are heavily engaged in translational research in fields as diverse as digital tourism and cloud computing, which are key priority areas for the UK and Scottish governments in their visions to increase tourism income and efficient low-carbon distributed networks.

Research Students and PDRAs: Training Highly Skilled Researchers
The University has a strongly research driven approach to teaching and the new facilities will be used in outreach activities with direct benefit to the quality of national and international students, and in particular EPSRC-funded PhD students.

The skills gained include training in cutting edge measurement technology, advanced data analysis tools and the ability to solve complex problems independently. Developing the computation resource base will ensure that students and PDRAs acquire familiarity with modern computational techniques, which can then be employed across a wide range of application areas.