EPSRC Advanced Materials - Priority Scoping Workshops

Overview

We are in the process of taking a fresh look at our EPSRC Advanced Materials priority areas - and we need your help and input.

Our priority areas help to guide materials focused workstreams across EPSRC. They provide a framework through which EPSRC can address cross-cutting and community challenges, and enable us to address for example, specific aspects of skills, or to catalyse and accelerate societal and economic impacts.

Using the outputs of a community survey run earlier in the year, we will now be running four short workshops to gain more understanding of certain areas. Engaging with these is an opportunity for you to help shape the Advanced Materials landscape through EPSRC, informing our delivery activity and priorities across the materials landscape. For each workshop topic, we are looking for a range of individuals , including those from academia, industry, and end-users, to help us explore this area further and provide insight into the challenges, needs and potential of the topic.

In our Advanced Materials (AM) strategy refresh online workshops, we will be raising questions on following topics and at the following times/dates):

• Critical Minerals and Materials: 27 June 2024, 10:00 - 12:00 [APPLICATIONS CLOSED]

Critical mineral and materials have been strongly highlighted as an important area for consideration through the community survey we conducted earlier in the year. This focuses on three key areas: (a) novel materials that replace or reduce critical minerals use in existing systems, (b) approaches to recycling existing materials containing critical minerals, (c) working with impurities in materials design and fabrication.

• Characterisation and Metrology: 9 July 2024, 13:00-15:00

Materials characterisation and metrology can have far reaching impacts for science and industry alike, including real impacts on materials development and acceleration of design to use timescales. The survey has highlighted this as an area of interest for the materials community. We are looking to understand more on the (a) new horizons of characterisation and metrology, (b) key limitations of current methods for characterisation and metrology of novel materials approaches or types, (c) key opportunities or barriers around the development of new characterisation and metrology approaches.

• Manufacturing Materials: 10 July 2024, 10:00-12:00

Materials manufacturing development is a key area to enable novel materials to scale up from the lab and gain industrial pull through. The recent community survey highlighted that manufacturing remains a challenge in some areas of materials science and innovation. We are looking to explore further the most pressing materials manufacturing challenges, barriers and opportunities. The survey particularly highlighted the following areas: (a) novel manufacturing needs for novel material types (metamaterials, 2D materials, doping, nano-scaled), (b) automated high throughput tools and advances, (3) materials self-assembly, (d) the physics of scale up and cross-length-scale modelling.

• Materials for Health: 11 July 2024, 10:00-12:00

Materials to support and develop positive health outcomes is an area that has been flagged by the survey as a space for possible impact. We would like to develop our understanding of the possible impact spaces in this further. We are interested to hear more discussions across a breath of applications to support better health outcomes across the population, which could include (a) materials for the detection and tackling of disease and infection both inside and outside of medical setting, (b) materials to increase the circularity or environmental sustainability of the health sector, (c) materials that reduce inequalities for healthcare outcomes, this might include materials affordability/cost. Please note that medical devices are not in scope for this workshop.

Let us know if you would like to join one of the above sessions

Why your views matter

We want to identify the next set of Research and Societal challenges that have the potential to transform materials research, and it's potential for impact, over the next 10 years. 

The Advanced Materials theme has strategic oversight of materials science, engineering and innovation across the EPSRC remit - from fundamental physics through to mission-driven translational work. This broad remit means that we need diverse inputs from across academic communities and disciplines, across career stages, innovation levels, and from industrialists and end users.

Your input helps us to work with communities, policy makers and others to develop well evidenced and considered strategies and priorities as we move forward. Working together towards a healthy and innovative UK materials community that delivers knowledge-based, societal and economic impact.