First Winton Pump-prime Grants Awarded

The Winton Pump-prime scheme at the Cavendish Laboratory has been launched to encourage exploration of new innovate ideas with relevance to the broad field of Sustainability. This scheme is designed to promote speculative, high-risk activities that have the potential for major impact, which otherwise would be difficult to resource.  Following the launch of the scheme in November 2011, the first four grants have been awarded in a range of diverse areas.

The researchers and projects to receive funding are:

• Dr Pietro Cicuta (Biological and Soft Systems) and Prof Alison Smith (Department of Plant Science) – “Optimisation of algae growth for biofuels”
• Dr Michael Köhl (Atomic, Mesoscopic and Optical Physics) - "Cooling by sorting"
• Dr Michelle Moram (Semiconductor Physics and Materials Science and Metallurgy) and Prof Dave Ritchie (Semiconductor Physics) – “(Sc,Al,Ga)N materials for energy harvesting”
• Dr Brian Walker (Optoelectronics), Mark Wilson (Optoelectronics), Andrew Musser (Optoelectronics), Nicholas Paul (Chemistry and Optoelectronics) – “Singlet Fission: Towards a universal mechanism and high efficiency photovoltaics”