In September, the UK Government finalised an agreement to rejoin Horizon Europe, the European Union’s key funding programme for research and innovation. After a period of post-Brexit uncertainty it has provided a welcome boost for researchers looking to draw on the collaborative possibilities and funding streams.
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, Professor Adam Tickell, said, "The announcement regarding Horizon Europe is great news for science and innovation, and a huge relief for the research community. Research in the UK is amongst the best in the world and collaborations with partners across the continent enhance the quality of work for all concerned. We never stopped believing in European funded research and our track record for Horizon Europe is one of the best in the UK.”
In light of the announcement, we caught up with Professor Iseult Lynch, Professor of Environmental Nanosciences at the University of Birmingham to discuss her experiences of Horizon Europe funding and how it facilitates interdisciplinary research.
“I’m delighted that the Horizon funding will be available again – particularly for early career researchers and those trying to get their foot in the door,” she says. “In my field there is just so much more opportunity and funding for projects broadly at the intersection of environmental sustainability and pollution. The real thrust of activity and energy in this area is coming from the EU.”
While the EU’s budget for Horizon Europe is vast (€95.5 billion), it is the approach that the programme allows for that most attracts Professor Lynch.
“There’s a different approach compared to the majority of other funders. It’s quite common in my subject to be very specific in your original bid – detailing how many samples you’ll take at exactly what timepoints or locations. With the Horizon projects it’s more goal-oriented. We outline where we want to get to, acknowledging that there might be ten different paths we could take along the way, and are given the flexibility to find the optimal solution.”
She goes on to explain that the acceptance of a more uncertain, exploratory approach lends itself to interdisciplinary research – which itself has a tendency to push new boundaries and test new collaborations.
Read more examples of our interdisciplinary research...
“Scientific research needs to exist in the discomfort zone, as it were. You need to marry that inquisitive side with a depth of knowledge, whether that’s about specific disciplines or methodologies. When you find that balance you’ve got the foundation for a really strong interdisciplinary project.”
“There’s a certain moment in research that I describe as ‘getting the tingles’,” continues Professor Lynch. “It happens when you find a way of doing something differently, or you bring two things together that hadn’t previously been considered. In nanoscience some of the leaps forward we’ve seen of late combine that in-depth subject knowledge (ecotoxicology) with computer programming, using machine learning to discover things that we simply couldn’t before. Then other advances are made in completely different relationships – leaning more towards social sciences, for example. When you can connect the dots and see things coming together, that’s where the magic happens.”
Since the start of Horizon Europe in 2021, the University of Birmingham has submitted over 500 applications and have won 87 awards* to the value of over €45m (£37.5m).
The University sits fifth in the UK in terms of overall project participation, behind Oxford, Imperial, UCL and Cambridge – with an overall success rate with EU-funded projects at 17% (with Pillar 2 collaborative projects the success rate is close to 30%.)
In Pillar 2, Birmingham leads the the UK in the Cluster for Digital, Industry and Space, is sixth-placed in the Climate, Energy and Mobility Cluster, and seventh within the Health Cluster.
*(correct as of November 2023)
Horizon Europe and the University of Birmingham
Horizon Europe in Action: WorldFAIR
One of Professor Lynch’s core research projects is a workstream within WorldFAIR – a Horizon Europe project that explores how to make data ‘FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable)’ within research disciplines and to find commonalities in data practice across diverse subjects.
The project is looking to produce recommendations and guidelines for data assessment in different subject areas based on the FAIR principles, and an interoperability framework to link across different areas.
At the heart of the WorldFAIR project are 11 case studies, covering a wide range of sciences, communities and challenges. Professor Lynch heads up WP4, ‘Nanomaterials’.
Professor Iseult Lynch
Professor of Environmental Nanosciences
“Though we’re nestled between Chemistry and Geochemistry on the case study map (or petal diagram as we refer to it), what we’re doing extends beyond that and touches on each of the other projects – even working towards finding common areas of interest with data considerations in cultural heritage such as museum collections.
The scope of the WorldFAIR project gives it phenomenal breadth, but not at the expense of disciplinary rigour, and that’s down to the scale of the funding and size of the project team and their underpinning disciplinary networks.”
Within the Nanomaterials workstream, Professor Lynch is heading up efforts to map existing initiatives to increase the FAIRness of both nanomaterials and mixture toxicity datasets, then to build on this to develop and pilot interoperability standards and guidelines for increasing FAIRness in the interlinked scientific disciplines (chemical toxicity, nanomaterials toxicity and characterisation, risk assessment, advanced materials, environmental science).
The aim is to enable the further adoption of the FAIR principles by the international nanomaterials community and to encourage greater alignment with neighbouring disciplines and communities.
Professor Lynch explains how the project team is made up of different experts, with very different characteristics. “What we’re doing in our case study requires a blend of expertise but also a mix of personalities. Of course it needs those with that deep disciplinary knowledge, but we also rely on those who are just as happy working outside their domain comfort zones. They’re the ones who can open up entirely new ways of working.”
One of the challenges of a project of such scale, though, is being able to keep track of the various pathways that emerge along the way.
“We’ve identified so many strands we might want to pull at. We’re lucky to have a certain amount of flexibility built-into Horizon projects which helps us to not miss opportunities for exploring interesting findings. But that’s also where project coordination and management skills come to the fore, in interdisciplinary projects. You need to be adept at listening, facilitating conversation, identifying crosslinks and being that glue to keep it all together.”
Professor Lynch points to one example of how the construction of the WorldFAIR project, and an intent to explore such opportunities, led to a particularly interesting discussion.
“Each of the project team went away and independently wrote about how we deal with a sample or entity that we want to describe and document. Across our different disciplines we all talk about more or less the same thing but we each call it something different; a sample, an entity, a feature of interest, a specimen. It’s such a simple consideration but that different language can make it a bit impenetrable to someone not embedded within that discipline. So, by finding what the common ground is we can step out of our rigid thinking and come up with more useful descriptors that support a more FAIR way of doing things (such as sharing data).”
The WorldFAIR case study on Nanomaterials is set to deliver its complete human- and machine-readable nanomaterials data provenance trails that can be easily implemented by the entire community. A key output will be the extension of the International Chemical Identifier (InChI) standard representation to cover also nanomaterials, via the NanoInChI.
Balancing scale with agility
Away from WorldFAIR, Professor Lynch believes the Horizon Europe programme has changed, and continues to change, the landscape for interdisciplinary research.
“I think in the last decade we’ve seen the focus shift from projects that were three to four million Euros on very specific topics, to clusters of activities, and now towards these much larger projects than span hundreds of millions of Euros and many hundred partners. It’s quite a titanic operation. While fantastic that there’s such funding for collaborative research, it does bring the added challenge of how to maintain agility.”
Agility is key in any research field, but it is a particularly changeable time for those at the heart of environmental science with a raft of policy changes (e.g., the EU Green Deal, the Circular Economy Action Plan, the Zero Pollution Action Plan) adding new layers to an already complex subject.
“Things are changing quite quickly,” explains Professor Lynch, “but that’s a result of there being greater urgency to properly understand, and invest in, new ways of protecting our environment. One of the things I like about the Horizon projects is that you can make those amendments when policy changes, or technological shifts, happen. There’s no sense of carrying on regardless. If new guidelines or new insight becomes available, for example, we have the flexibility to change tack.”
The Covid-19 pandemic was test of that agility. Projects build around face-to-face interactions had to adapt and become virtual, lab-based researchers had to explore alternative desk and data-based activities when the facilities themselves were locked down.
“I think what that reminded us of is that there is always a capability to be agile when there is a significant enough driver. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate how the Horizon Programme funds projects, because they support us having a certain portion of the budget to be allocated to the unknown. There has to be an element of trust in that, but it can be key to allowing researchers to embrace a new technology or meet a change in requirements from the research community itself. You simply can’t know at the outset of a project what the five-year path is going to look like and funders that understand that will yield the benefits by not stifling the exploratory nature of the work.”
Reflecting on her earlier comment, Professor Lynch concludes, “That’s the benefit of being goal-oriented. With these projects the key is knowing where we want to go. We don’t always know how we’ll get there, but that’s where the most exciting research happens.”
If you’re a researcher looking to know more about EU funding opportunities, contact the team on EUsupport@contacts.bham.ac.uk.