By 
The winning Scottish Crucible 2017 collaborative research projects were announced earlier in September, as part of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s annual awards reception.
The Scottish Crucible awards enable the alumni from each year’s cohort to initiate ambitious, collaborative and innovative projects, which are anticipated to lead to long term research relationships across Scotland.
The projects are both multidisciplinary and cross-institutional, building on the “Labs” the researchers participated in earlier this year, where they gained knowledge and understanding of creativity, innovation, collaboration, knowledge exchange and how to engage with the media and policy makers.
A panel of Fellows of the RSE met in August, chaired by Prof Peter Holmes to review the proposals submitted by the 2017 cohort. Four projects were funded, with the announcement made at the RSE Awards Reception on 11 September. Many of the 2017 cohort were able to attend the reception, unaware of who would be receiving funding!
Across the four projects, there are nine institutions represented, including the Universities of Glasgow, St Andrews, Stirling, Strathclyde, West of Scotland, the James Hutton Institute, Scotland’s Rural College, and Heriot-Watt University.
The four projects are:
- Don’t make a wave: understanding the dynamics of a debate. Led by Dr Alice Toniolo, University of St Andrews.
- Controllable lighting for efficient growth, species selection and pathogen elimination in plants and algae: Optical Weed and Feed. Led by Dr David Childs, University of Glasgow.
- A novel approach to quantifying the structural complexity of Scotland’s maerl beds. Led by Dr Heidi Burdett, Heriot-Watt University
- Shape-memory alloys to control biofouling in aquaculture. Led by Dr Giuseppe Paladini, University of Stirling.
Dr Heidi Burdett, a marine scientist and Research Fellow in the Lyell Centre at Heriot-Watt University, is involved with two projects, leading the project on Scotland’s maerl beds with a mathematician and bio-analytical chemist. On winning the project award, Dr Burdett said “Winning the funding has allowed me to immediately pursue new research directions that I did not even know were possible before Scottish Crucible, with new collaborators that I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise.”
