UC Irvine and UC San Diego have partnered with four universities in Southern England to pursue innovative research opportunities in biology, engineering and medicine. Funded by a $2.6 million grant from the government of the United Kingdom, the collaborative research projects are to focus on developing technologies that will eventually lead to commercially viable products.
The U.S.-U.K. collaboration came about after UCI received a $75,000 UC Discovery Grant aimed at seeking new ways for enhancing involvement of the state's industries in "pre-technology" research. The partnership with the U.K. universities will be a step toward meeting this goal by accelerating the development of usable technologies that can entice industry involvement and ultimately benefit California residents.
"This collaboration is a terrific way to pair up scientists from Southern California whose strengths and interests match up with those from the universities of Southern England," said David G. Schetter, assistant vice chancellor of UCI's Office of Technology Alliances. "These matches should lead to accelerated product development and support the growing technology corridor in Orange County by fueling the innovation pipeline."
UCI and UCSD scientists will meet their British counterparts for the first time this week. The overseas scientists come from the U.K. universities of Bath, Bristol, Southampton and Surrey, which are part of a collaboration known as the SETsquared Partnership. SETsquared helps technology-based ventures in the U.K. become commercially viable, and represents more than 6,500 researchers and eight percent of the U.K.'s academic research funding.
The U.K. scientists will visit UCI May 3 and meet their counterparts from the School of Biological Sciences, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, The Henry Samueli School of Engineering and the School of Medicine. Researchers will then begin two years of working together on specific projects and apply for grant funds.
More information on the collaboration can be found at globalconnect.org/setsquared.
About the University of California, Irvine: The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students and about 1,400 faculty members. The second-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3.3 billion. For more UCI news, visit www.today.uci.edu.
Television: UCI has a broadcast studio available for live or taped interviews. For more information, visit http://today.uci.edu/broadcast.
News Radio: UCI maintains on campus an ISDN line for conducting interviews with its faculty and experts. The use of this line is available free-of-charge to radio news programs/stations who wish to interview UCI faculty and experts. Use of the ISDN line is limited by availability and approval by the university.