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West Midlands
Neuroendocrine Immune Networks in Ageing (NINA)
Birmingham
Health
Current demographic trends indicate that by the year 2020 almost 1 in 5 of the European population will be aged over 65. However, although life expectancy is increasing in the developed world, the period of good health enjoyed by its people is not keeping pace. The ageing population is thus a major health and economic issue for Europe. Although ageing is a complex process, we know much about its actions at the cellular and tissue level. In contrast, our understanding of how the various age-related changes interact to result in frailty and disease is incomplete. There is therefore a pressing need to carry out multidisciplinary research to identify factors contributing to age-related frailty and to develop interventions to promote healthy ageing. While Europe has many excellent research teams working on age-related diseases, such as neurodegeneration, there is little attempt to pool resources and identify underlying common age-related processes that predispose to pathology and represent rational targets for intervention. In addition, there is a lack of scientists trained in multidisciplinary ageing research and the challenge of an ageing population will not be met unless we increase research capacity in this area. NINA is a multi-site ITN that will make a significant impact upon research capacity by training 12 early stage researchers and 2 experienced researchers, integrating research and training at 10 world class European institutes. Fellows will benefit from the expertise of academic partners and training will be enhanced by the intersectoral experience provided by two industrial partners and a non-governmental organisation. NINA will tackle crucial health research challenges by directing the multidisciplinary programme at the identification of key factors driving the ageing process. NINA will focus on the age-related changes influencing the interactions of the brain, immune and endocrine systems to understand how these changes impact upon health.
http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/92673_en.html
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/mds/projects/ii/nina/index.aspx
COMET
Plug-and-produce COmponents and METhods for adaptive control of industrial robots enabling cost effective, high precision manufacturing in factories of the future
Birmingham
Manufacture
Yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s challenging and dynamic economic environment forces European high-end manufacturing industry to focus on high flexibility, high quality, reliability and low life-cycle costs and to respond quickly to changes in this environment. The high-end manufacturing industry requests production systems that can quickly switch between diverse machining operations with short changeover, programming and set-up times without compromising quality, reliability or life-cycle costs. From a conceptual point of view, industrial robot technology could provide an excellent base for machining being both flexible (due to their lay-out) and cost efficient (robots cost 2-5 times less then machine tools). However, industrial robots lack absolute positioning accuracy (1), are unable to react in real time to changing process conditions (2) and lack reliable programming and simulation tools to ensure first time right machining once production commences (3). These three critical limitations prevent industrial robots from being integrated in high-end machining processes. The COMET consortium will provide a revolutionary Plug-and-Produce solution enabling the use of industrial robots for high end machining processes, appreciating the needs from the manufacturing industry for cost effective, flexible and reliable manufacturing solutions. The proposed solution will be on the average 30% more cost effective than dedicated machine tools whilst delivering absolute positional accuracy of at least 50 µm. Due to the sense of urgency in Europe’s manufacturing industry the COMET consortium defined an ambitious work plan of only 30 months to develop and demonstrate the innovations planned and meet the objectives set. These ambitious goals and the planned dissemination and training activities encourage a quick uptake by the manufacturing industry. Over a 5 years period, the estimated impact is 45M€ to 50M€ justifying the investment from the EC and the COMET partnership.
http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/95706_en.html
Midland Metropolitan Hospital
Birmingham
Health
The European Investment Bank, Europe’s long-term lending institution, has agreed to provide GBP 108m to support construction of the new Midland Metropolitan Hospital in Birmingham. Once open in three years’ time the brand new hospital will provide state of the art acute healthcare for 530,000 people living in Sandwell and West Birmingham and include one of the largest accident and emergency departments in Europe.
The new hospital scheme, costing GBP 350m, includes 670 beds and 15 operating theatres, as well as a new public park, reached financial close following an agreement between the Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust and developers Carillion. The new accident and emergency department will replace emergency care facilities at City Hospital and Sandwell and is expected to treat more than 140,000 patients a year.
Robotic Manipulation for Nuclear Sort and Segregation (RoMaNS)
Birmingham
Research and innovation
The RoMaNS project is helping to develop a new generation of robots to handle spent nuclear waste. Nuclear waste must be “sorted and segregated”, so that low-level waste can be placed in low-level storage containers, avoiding wastage and loss. Many older nuclear sites contain large numbers of legacy storage containers which must now be cut open, investigated, and sorted. This can only be done remotely using robots, because of the high levels of radioactive material.
Current state-of-the-art practice in the industry, consists of simple tele-operation (e.g. by joystick or teach-pendant). Such an approach is not viable in the long-term, because it is prohibitively slow for processing the vast quantity of material required. The project will develop novel hardware and software solutions for advanced bi-lateral tele-operation and advance autonomy methods for highly adaptive manipulation actions.
http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194336_en.html
FAME
Flexible and Mobile Economic Processing Technologies
Stoke-on-Trent
Manufacture
FAME aims to reduce the reliance of European Industry and consumers on raw materials that currently have to be imported from outside the EU. The project will work toward a more efficient exploitation of European domestic mineral resources by optimising the extraction and processing of ores that include raw materials.
The consortium has 16 partners from 7 European countries and includes industry, academia and governmental institutions. The project primarily involves strategically important reference deposits operated or/and accessible to the project partners and, additionally, associated partners within the EU and Greenland.
http://www.wardell-armstrong.com/fame-pegmatite-samples-finland
EMPOWER
Combating all forms of violence against women and children in rural areas
Staffordshire
Social
The EMPOWER Project is an innovative and exciting partnership supported and funded by the European Union through the DAPHNE III Programme which aims to combat all forms of violence against women and children. EMPOWER is an inspirational joining together of organisations from 3 different European regions – Staffordshire in the UK, Presov in Slovakia and Extremadura in Spain, all working to combat domestic and sexual violence in rural communities. At its centre is the goal of contributing to reducing and preventing violence against women. It involves researching and exchanging knowledge and practice, developing new initiatives, and sharing the results of this work in ways that can make a real difference to agencies working on the front line, and most importantly, to victims and survivors.
http://www.staffordshirewomensaid.org/news/EmpowerProject.php
