EPSRC Programme Grants
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences, investing more than £850 million a year in a broad range of subjects – from mathematics to materials science, and from information technology to structural engineering.
EPSRC Programme Grants are a flexible mechanism to provide funding to world-leading research groups to address significant major research challenges. They are intended to support a suite of related research activities focussing on one strategic research theme. To date (October 2011), there have been three Programme Grants in Mathematics:
- Professor Richard Thomas, Imperial College London, 'Applied derived categories'', £1.3 million, January 2010 - December 2015.
- Professor Geoffrey Grimmett, University of Cambridge, 'New frontiers in random geometry', £1.4 million, September 2011 - August 2017.
- Professor Dominic Joyce, Oxford University, 'Motivic invariants and categorification', £1.8 million, October 2011 - September 2017.
Ours is, we believe, the largest grant ever made in Pure Mathematics in the UK. The principal investigator is Professor Dominic Joyce, and the co-investigators Tom Bridgeland, Kobi Kremnizer, Kevin McGerty, and Balázs Szendröi. The proposal is a collaboration between Professors Joyce and Bridgeland and Dr Szendröi in Algebraic Geometry, and Dr Kremnizer and Dr McGerty in Geometric Representation Theory. The proposal creates a new research group spanning Geometry and Representation Theory, with an emphasis on projects involving both disciplines. Over the six years, amongst other things the EPSRC grant will fund six 2 year PDRAs, three 3.5 year PhD studentships, a visitors programme, and a workshop. Our research programme is summarized here.