All communities are listed below in alphabetical order, and can be searched using key words or fund type.
Our “Featured Communities” are from the most recent round of Generator funding.
Our Communities
Our communities
The GW4 Building Communities Programme aims to build research and innovation communities of scale and capability, delivering a step change in world-class research that could not be achieved by one of the institutions alone. The Programme has two funding schemes:
- The annual Generator Fund which awards GW4 communities up to £20K for 6 month projects (launched in 2020). This replaced the Initiator (up to £20K for 5 months) and Accelerator (up to £75K for 8 months) funding schemes, which ran from 2014 – 2019.
- The Development Awards which support new, and advance existing, collaborations across GW4 by funding single activities or resources with up to £5K. This is a rolling scheme, with no closing date.
More details of both schemes, and how to apply, can be found at the links above.
Building Communities funding supports both the creation of new GW4 communities and the development of the strongest ideas emerging from our existing communities, and is open to any academic area. To date, the GW4 Alliance has invested over £3.2M in 105 collaborative research communities, which have generated £63.4M in research income. This means that for every £1 GW4 spends on collaborative research communities, GW4 captures an impressive £20 in external research awards.
Research integrity
The GW4 Alliance has adopted the Russell Group Research Integrity Statement of cooperation in cross-institutional research misconduct allegations, which aims to support the efforts of researcher communities to foster research integrity (also known as good practice in research or the responsible conduct of research).
Explore our communities
Featured Communities
168 results found
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GW4 Muculoskeletal Research Consortium
Initiator
Overview
Key objectives of the consortium include identifying areas of commonality and complementarity, exploring potential shared research infrastructure and facilities, recognising strengths and gaps in our combined research portfolio and exploring potential programmes of research.
Community lead
University of Bath: Richie Gill
University of Bristol: Ashley Blom (PI), Jon Tarlton
Cardiff University: Bruce Caterson
University of Exeter: Andrew Toms
Awarded
May 2015
Harnessing Technology to Develop New Models of Alzheimers Disease
Accelerator
Overview
As a team we have identified some early changes that occur to control how genes are regulated in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. We will investigate how these gene changes might lead to Alzheimer’s disease.
Community lead
University of Bath: Vasanta Subramanian
University of Bristol: James Hodge, Caroline Relton
Cardiff University: Nick Allen
University of Exeter: Katie Lunnon (PI), Jonathan Mill, Jonathan Brown
Awarded
May 2015
Large Scale Brain Networks in Neurological & Psychiatric Disorders
Accelerator
Overview
This project will be cross-disciplinary, combining theory, clinical data and experiments. A broad aim of our network is to stimulate research collaborations that integrate experimental and clinical approaches with mathematical and computational modelling of brain networks.
Community lead
University of Bath: Roland Jones
University of Bristol: Richard Apps, Nina Kazanina
Cardiff University: Vincenzo Crunelli
University of Exeter: Marc Goodfellow (PI), Jon Brown
Awarded
May 2015
Political, Social, Institutional & Cultural Dimensions of Risk & Security
Initiator
Overview
We aimed to bring together GW4 researchers to examine the analytical, political, social, institutional and cultural dimensions of risk in contemporary security discourse and practice.
Community lead
University of Bath: David Galbreath
University of Bristol: Tim Edmunds
Cardiff University: Christian Bueger
University of Exeter: Doug Stokes (PI), Sir Paul Newton
Awarded
November 2014
Functional Materials Far From Equilibrium
Initiator
Overview
This collaboration brings together all GW4 universities to nucleate a new community that will address an important bottleneck in the development of novel technological devices: the nonequilibrium evolution of material microstructure and its impact on macroscopic material behaviour.
Community lead
University of Bath: Johannes Zimmer (PI), Chris Bowen
University of Bristol: Isaac Chenchiah
Cardiff University: Nicolas Dirr
University of Exeter: David Wright
Awarded
October 2014
Large Scale Brain Networks in Health and Disease
Initiator
Overview
We aim to establish an active research community across GW4 to stimulate research collaborations that integrate experimental and clinical approaches with mathematical and computational modelling of brain networks.
Community lead
University of Bath: Roland Jones
University of Bristol: Matt Jones
Cardiff University: Vincenzo Crunelli
University of Exeter: Marc Goodfellow (PI)
Awarded
October 2014
GW4 Medieval Studies
Accelerator
Overview
This project has established a GW4 Medieval Studies community that is vibrant, productive and creative with a shared vision. Its aim is to lead in the field. There are various on-going shared initiatives to develop the research culture in Medieval Studies.
Community lead
University of Bristol: Carolyn Muessig (PI), Ian Wei, Beth Williamson, Helen Fulton (replacement PI)
Cardiff University: Bronach Kane
University of Exeter: James Clark
Awarded
October 2014
GW4 Imaging Network
Initiator
Overview
This community aimed to create a GW4 network of inter-disciplinary expertise to promote, inspire and support quantitative image analysis across the disciplines, in each institution, and to promote GW4 scientific imaging at the international level.
Community lead
University of Bath: Silvia Munoz-Descalzo, Jim Caunt
University of Bristol: Mark Jepson
Cardiff University: Jim Murray, Peter Watson, Joaquin de Navascues Melero
University of Exeter: Michael Deeks (PI), Jacqueline Christmas, George Littlejohn, Jeremy Metz
Awarded
October 2014
GW4 Environmental Humanities
Initiator
Overview
A new community of researchers in the Human Sciences focused on raising the profile and collaborative potential of interdisciplinary work on environmental problems in Wales, the South West and internationally.
Community lead
University of Bath: Axel Goodbody
University of Bristol: Peter Coates
Cardiff University: Ria Dunkley
University of Exeter: Nicola Whyte (PI)
Awarded
October 2014
Unlocking the Science for an Autonomous Structural Health Monitoring System
Accelerator
Overview
The primary vision of this collaboration was to become a world leading research consortium that advanced the state of the art in wireless Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) in composite structures by bringing together the unique combination of expertise within GW4.
Community lead
University of Bath: Alicia Kim
University of Bristol: Stephen Hallett
Cardiff University: Carol Featherston (PI)
University of Exeter: Meiling Zhu
Awarded
October 2014