Research grant given to Warwick departments

The University of Warwick was one of 55 UK institutions to receive a research grant of more than £5 million over the holidays as a Christmas present by the European Research Council (ERC).

Set up by the European Union (EU) in 2007, the ERC is the first pan-European organization to fund frontier research.

Within Warwick, these funds have been won by the Department of Sociology, the Faculty of Science, and the Mathematics Institute. They will be used over the next few years to fund new research projects.

In Sociology, Dr. Alice Mah will launch an interdisciplinary project focusing on scientific expertise about the effects of toxic pollution and the way in which this expertise is used to justify a lack of corporate social responsibility by the petrochemical industry.

The university’s Faculty of Science will allocate £3.9m to the Chemistry Department which will fund three projects each focusing on: effective catalysts for alkane transformation, the mimicking of nature’s cold defense system, and lastly the production of better drugs to fight superbugs.

Meanwhile, in the Mathematics Institute, the funds will go to Dr. Agelos Georgakopoulos who will lead the Random Graph Geometry and Convergence (RGGC) project- an intra-disciplinary research programme in pure mathematics with graph theory at the epicentre and connections to other fields.