National Centre Strategy

As a National Centre we have a role to work with and on behalf of the wider community and to engage with the wider community in this area, to act on their behalf e.g. to influence policy, facilitate and support workshops, meetings on topics within scope, support feasibility studies, develop national expertise and facility register.

The Centre holds an important position in the collaborative Research and Innovation Landscape in the UK and has an abundance of engagements including those with EPSRC Grand Challenge networks, iCON PI’s, CPI (HVM catapult), KTNs and collaborative TSB R&D projects. As a National Centre there has been a high degree of developing strategy and influencing policy in the area of continuous manufacturing. To date the Centre is enthusiastically engaged with TSB, SCI, IChemE, KTNs, CIA, RSC, MMIP and is a member of APSIRE. We have received press coverage from announcements from Rt Hon David Willets and Rt Hon Vince Cable visited our facilities to officially open Phase I of our RPIF award. More recently we have been visited by the Swiss Ambassador Dominik Furgler, to discuss potential UK – Swiss opportunities. Also in January the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA), Prof Robin Grime, visited CMAC. The UK Chief Scientific Adviser is responsible for providing advice to the Foreign Secretary, Ministers and officials on science, technology and innovation. His role is to ensure that our work on key issues undergoes proper scientific challenge, and to strengthen the scientific and engineering capacity within the Foreign Office. The CSA works closely with the cross-government community of Chief Scientific Advisers and the wider UK and international academic science community.

The National Centre Strategy is to foster and support an inclusive, collaborative approach to accelerate progress across the Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) involving academia, industry and other research organisations. To support this we are involved in a range of outreach activities to raise the profile of the Centre and work with colleagues across the UK from different sectors. The Centre is linking with the external academic research community (1), and will continue to evolve and grow the research programme over time to meet the needs of the scope (2). We have established a DTC to meet the needs for skilled researchers in this area with 45 new PhD graduates establishing new capabilities and capacity in the UK (3). Also through the CMAC industrial membership organisation and the HVM Catapult, the EPSRC Centre is contributing to complementary applied and closer to market research in this area.