Multidisciplinary themes
Digital Technology
The digital economy concerns methods and technologies associated with the communication and manipulation of information, including the secure management of databases and communications across mobile wireless networks. The theme crosses many disciplines and covers the processing of medical records, remote sensing from space, the modelling and simulation of changes in the climate and the landscape, creating an integrated transport system and enhancing entertainment experiences.
Energy and Sustainability
Energy and water remain two of the most important resources that we need to sustain in order to ensure our long-term survival on this planet. Enabling the world’s rapidly growing, resource-intensive population to thrive in the coming decades will require that we look to new technologies associated with the treatment, desalination, recycling, storage and transportation of water. In one example, our engineers are now working with aid-agencies to develop low cost purification units for providing clean drinking water in the Developing World.
Environment
New, green technologies for improving the environment are being developed within the University. These technologies range from the development of low-carbon industrial processing, through natural product chemistry to understanding seasonal changes in carbon cycling in the Amazon basin, and the effect that this has on the global climate. This cross-disciplinary theme is not just concerned with the development of new science and technology, but also involves understanding the social and political processes by which people interact with the environment.
Health and Wellbeing
The diagnosis of disease lies at the centre of improvements in our medical infrastructure. Examples range from low-cost, disposable biosensors for infectious diseases such as malaria in the Developing World, to the detection of the early signs of heart disease in more affluent populations. Other heath-care opportunities, enabled by new technologies drawn from across the sciences and engineering, include rehabilitation engineering (with new automated systems helping patients with spinal injury to walk) and the use of new biomaterials to improve medical implants, promote wound healing in the skin and enable organ regeneration.
Infrastructure and Transport
Glasgow has a rich history in transport and infrastructure, with a world-renowned engineering heritage that changed the world. This heritage includes inventions to improve the steam engine through manufacturing locomotives and building ships. Nowadays, our expertise lies at the current state of the art, for example working with the space agencies to develop new technologies for communication and travel. The development of infrastructure is also closely associated with the energy agenda, creating new algorithms and techniques to link a distributed green energy network into the national grid.
Materials
This theme cuts across many science and engineering topics, including the development of new materials for solar fuels, biocompatible materials for implants and new plastics to replace conventional electronic components. The field is not, however, simply about making new materials with extraordinary functional properties. It is equally important to understand how advanced structural materials break and corrode, using modelling and simulation tools to predict catastrophic failure in aeroplanes, bones and concrete.
Nanotechnology
We are at the forefront of the use of nanotechnology in a wide spectrum of industries including electronics, healthcare, security, photonics and renewable energies. Our scientists and engineers are involved both in carrying out fundamental research and in creating a new generation of start-up companies. Researchers and industrial multinationals alike now travel across the world to use our state of the art facility and draw upon our world-renowned expertise.
Systems and Synthetic Biology
Modern biology and medicine pose complex questions on how cells, organs and tissues interact with each other. Systems biology seeks to use mathematical techniques developed from within engineering and computer science to explore the nature of the signals that control life, regeneration, disease and death. Similarly, synthetic biology draws heavily on both engineering and the physical sciences, seeking to develop rules that enable new biochemical pathways to be produced within cell-like structures. The subject has recently received considerable media attention associated with the development of artificial cells, where several pathways are linked together to create new forms of "life".