Daresbury site awarded £183m for pioneering scientific projects
More than £183m of new funding has been pledged for science projects at the Sci-Tech Daresbury site.
This morning (March 27), UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced £473m investment in infrastructure to five new UK projects that will advance the UK’s science and innovation capability, and to equip UK science and innovation for the future.
More than £183m has been allocated to two new projects at Daresbury Laboratory.
The announcement reveals that £124.4m has been earmarked for Relativistic Ultrafast Electron Diffraction and Imaging (RUEDI).
Located at STFC’s (Science and Technology Facilities Council) Daresbury Laboratory, RUEDI will be the most powerful high energy electron microscope for ultrafast imaging and the world’s fastest electron diffraction facility.
It is a collaboration between the University of Liverpool, the STFC and the Rosalind Franklin Institute.
The University of Liverpool will lead the £125m facility at Daresbury to drive forward scientific discoveries and technological advances in areas such as sustainable energy, advanced materials, quantum technologies, and personalised medicine.
Prof Nigel Browning, Chair of Electron Microscopy in the School of Engineering at the University of Liverpool, will lead RUEDI. He said: “This announcement is excellent news for the University of Liverpool, for the North West region and for the UK scientific community.
“RUEDI is the first facility to allow the evolution of structural changes in materials to be observed and determined through time-resolved experiments, rather than by static structure.
“This ground breaking capability will help researchers develop the new technologies and solutions needed to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.”
In addition, £58.8m has been assigned to the Electron Ion Collider (EIC), a UK-US collaboration to develop new detector and accelerator infrastructure to address fundamental questions on the nature of matter.
Once built, the EIC will be installed at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a major new particle accelerator facility at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York in the United States.
The technology will be built at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory in Daresbury and STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, alongside a consortium of universities including Birmingham, Brunel, Glasgow, Lancaster, Liverpool, Oxford, York as well as the Cockcroft Institute.
Prof Mark Thomson, Executive Chair for STFC, and Infrastructure Champion for UKRI, said: “Through these investments UKRI continues to equip the research and innovation community with the tools it needs to explore and develop the science and technologies needed for the coming decades.
“From improving our understanding of the structure of matter itself to digitising the country’s collections of natural specimens, these projects will strengthen the UK community’s quest for discovery and innovative applications.”
He added: “The long term nature of this investment also helps to maintain the UK’s key position on the world stage of research and innovation for the future.
“On a personal level, I am particularly pleased that today’s announcement will strengthen the UK’s collaboration with the US Department of Energy, in the development and delivery of a major new scientific facility.”
