The return on investment (ROI) generated by the GW4 Alliance has reached an all-time high.
For every £1 it spends on investing in collaborative research, GW4 now generates £25 in external research and infrastructure awards – a significant increase on its previous record of £20 in 2022.
To date, the GW4 Alliance has invested around £3.4million in over 100 collaborative research communities, across Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter universities, covering a range of topics, including those related to GW4’s new key strategic priorities: cyber and digital transformation; health and wellbeing; creative communities, and sustainable Net Zero.
This investment, involving over 750 GW4 academics, more than 400 non-academic partnerships, and collaborations with 130 institutions across 42 different countries, has resulted in a substantial grant income of £87million.
GW4 Alliance Director, Dr Joanna Jenkinson MBE, said: “GW4 aims to build research communities of scale and capability to deliver a step-change in world-class research and innovation that could not be achieved by one of the institutions alone. I am thrilled that our support is enabling GW4’s communities to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges, whilst also helping them to secure significant external funding in the process.”
The increase in ROI can be attributed to the success of the research communities funded by GW4’s Building Communities Generator Award Funding call, which offers awards of up to £20K to support new and existing research communities to develop their research, establish collaborative networks and build new partnerships.
Collaborative research communities supported by this scheme are tackling major societal, global and industrial challenges; from sustainable Net Zero and climate change, to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), health and wellbeing and digital transformation. The scheme also particularly supports and encourages Early Career Researcher (ECR) communities, with the aim of investing in talented people and developing a highly-skilled future workforce.
Net Zero Sustainability
Investment in these research communities has generated major external grant funding. For example, recently, the work of the collaborative GW4 research community Circular Economy of Timber Buildings - GW4 , who were awarded just under £19k by GW4 in 2022, successfully secured a £4.6million grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to co-design energy efficient and low carbon housing fit for the future, as part of UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Green Transition Ecosystem.
The project, led jointly by the University of Bath and Cardiff University, and involving academics from Bristol and Exeter, will work with communities in Bristol and Swansea to co-design energy efficient and low carbon housing fit for the future.
Professor Jo Patterson, Director of Research at the Welsh School of Architecture and co-lead for the project, said: “This project evolved from a GW4 research community, and would not have been possible without the support of the GW4 Alliance. I am excited to be part of a team that will expand on that research, working with colleagues across the alliance and alongside new regional partners to transform existing housing by working with, and for, communities.”
Cyber & Digital Transformation
GW4 Isambard has been particularly successful, bringing in over £22.7m from UKRI for three iterations of high-performance supercomputer facilities. The project evolved from the GW4 Software-Intensive Research community, which received £3M of EPSRC capital funding, in 2017, to develop Isambard – the world’s first ARM-based supercomputer to go into production use, and the largest ARM-based system outside of the U.S. Research conducted on GW4 Isambard has advanced climate modelling and health care innovation, and was vital in the fight against COVID-19, contributing to the design of the vaccines by modelling the virus and how vaccines might work against it.
The success of this project subsequently led to £4.1million in funding for Isambard 2, in 2020, and an additional £15.6million investment for the creation of Isambard 3, one of the world’s top supercomputers. Most recently, GW4 Isambard has led to the establishment of Isambard-AI, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, due to be launched at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in 2024. The project, led by the University of Bristol, received a landmark £225million* government investment to become part of a new national Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR) for the country and supercharge the nation’s AI capabilities.
Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, Principal Investigator for the GW4 Isambard project and a Professor of high-performance computing at the University of Bristol, said: “GW4 Isambard has been a huge project, and it's needed the expertise of colleagues from right across to the consortium. We couldn't have done this without collaborating across GW4.”
The VSimulators project, which started life as a GW4 research community, also received a £4.8 million infrastructure project grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to become a world-class, national research facility with platforms located at both the GW4 member institutions of Bath and Exeter. The purpose of the VSimulators is to provide a state-of-the-art research facility for studying the physiological and psychological effects of environmental factors in the built environment. These facilities use virtual reality and motion platforms to create immersive simulations that mimic real-world conditions. They can be used to investigate how people interact with and are affected by buildings and the built environment.
Health & Wellbeing
Across Health and Wellbeing, Professor Sarah Richardson, a researcher at the University of Exeter, and PI of the GW4 research and innovation community “Stratify and Treat – a new horizon for type 1 diabetes after 100 years”, has received a prestigious £1.5 million Senior Research Fellowship from the Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge.
Professor Richardson is one of only three researchers in the UK to hold the award and this significant funding will support the groundbreaking research into type 1 diabetes she is leading.
“The GW4 community funding helped us create a network of researchers, healthcare professionals, data scientists, and clinicians working on Type 1 diabetes in the South West.” Professor Richardson said. “This contributed to further collaborative publications, joint research funding, and the formation of the T1D Engagement Group (T1D EgG) in the hope that some great ideas will hatch! This group meets monthly to discuss recent developments and hot topics in the field. It has now joined forces with the UK T1D Research Consortium to connect Type 1 diabetes researchers across the UK.”
Creative Communities
Likewise, principal investigators from two GW4 research communities; Dr Julia Paulson, Associate Professor in Education from the University of Bristol, and Dr Lizzi Milligan, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, were awarded a total of of £3.4 million from UKRI’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Collective Programme, to lead distinct projects.
Dr Paulson’s project was awarded a grant of £2 million to lead the Education, Justice and Memory Network (EdJAM), while Dr Milligan received £1.4 million to lead the project ‘Education as and for Environmental, Epistemic and Transitional justice to enable Sustainable Development’ (JustEd).
Both academics were involved in the GW4 Transformative History Education: Learning from Creative Practices in Cambodia, Columbia and Iraq Community, which catalysed this work.
The power of small seed funding
By bringing together researchers with complementary expertise from across its four institutions, GW4 offers the access to specialist expertise and infrastructure to facilitate these types of innovative research projects at scale, which are solving real-world problems.
GW4 adds value by creating opportunities for researchers to address some of the biggest challenges and priorities facing society today. We do this, in part, by helping our universities to identify and develop new internal and external collaborations, building strategic partnerships to provide co-created solutions and increase our impact. By providing small seed funding opportunities, through initiatives like the Building Communities Generator Fund, we have facilitated significant gains, demonstrating the value of providing our researchers with opportunities to innovate and generate novel research results, which can then become the catalysts for much larger projects.
For full information, visit our list of research communities, or explore our Strategic Vision 2023-2028 for further details on the work of the Alliance.
*Though building on the success of GW4 Isambard, the new Isambard-AI supercomputer is a University of Bristol-led project and, therefore, the £225million government investment is not included in GW4’s overall return on investment figure.
GW4 aims to build research communities of scale and capability to deliver a step change in world-class research and innovation that could not be achieved by one of the institutions alone. I am thrilled that our support is enabling GW4’s communities to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges, whilst also helping them to secure significant external funding in the process.”
