Investment in research infrastructure estate
Over the last decade, we have invested £170 million in research capital infrastructure, largely due to our outstanding success in securing HEFCE, JIF and SRIF funding.
This investment exploits the strategic value of co-locating researchers from different disciplines in state-of-the-art facilities for real sustained knowledge exchange.
Examples include:
The Humanities Research Institute
This £1.6 million award-winning facility to support interdisciplinary research in the arts and humanities, which opened in 2006, is home to cutting-edge research projects using innovative digital technologies.
Humanities Research Institute (HRI) website
Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Science (ICOSS)
A £5.7 million centre, which opened in 2005, is the first large scale dedicated facility for social science research in the UK.
It accommodates more than a hundred researchers in multidisciplinary teams working on evidence-based research to inform social policy on Health and Social Care, Urban and Regional Planning, Social Exclusion and Spatial Inequality, Computational Data Analysis and Criminology.
Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Science (ICOSS) website
The Henry Wellcome Laboratories
The £26 million refurbishment of facilities at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital site of the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences has created the Henry Wellcome Laboratories and has brought together most of the basic and clinical researchers in Sheffield onto one site.
North Campus
A £20 million investment has created what we believe to be the UK´s largest dedicated multidisciplinary science and engineering research facility. This campus includes the Kroto Research Institute and the Nanoscience and Technology Centre. It accommodates 110 researchers from 20 disciplines in an environment where engineers, medics, physicists and environmental scholars with similar interests work side by side.
The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) with Boeing
A £10million world-leading centre for advanced manufacturing activities, the AMRC incorporates the Centre for Advanced Materials Technologies (CAMTeC), the Factory of the Future (with Rolls Royce as the principal partner), the Centre of Excellence in Customised Assembly (CECA), and the Innovation Metal Processes Centre (IMPC).
In the AMRC with Boeing, academia, industry and government bodies work together to rapidly migrate research discoveries into industry, devising groundbreaking responses to economic and environmental challenges. The Factory of the Future will have a zero carbon footprint and will develop next generation methods of combining analysis, design and manufacturing for aerospace.
The Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) with Boeing website
The Controlled Environment Rooms
This £4 million state-of-the-art facility provides technology of the analysis of plant growth under a wide spectrum of climatic conditions. It allows us to recreate extreme environments of light and temperature from the Arctic to the tropics, and even to create climates from the past and the future, for example, with altered concentrations of the greenhouse gas CO2. The facility allows us to investigate the influence of climate on biodiversity and natural ecosystems, to understand how the environment has shaped evolution and to predict the impact of climate change on the main sources of energy and food for the planet.