Grant winners - 11 September 2014

Royal Society

Wolfson Research Merit Awards

Awards are worth £10,000-£30,000 a year, which is a salary enhancement

• Award winner: Carlos Nuñez
• Institution: Swansea University

Duality in string theory, dualities in quantum field theories and applications

• Award winner: Alistair Pike
• Institution: University of Southampton

Robust chronologies and isotopic windows on human behaviour

• Award winner: Hayley Fowler
• Institution: Newcastle University

Understanding climate change impacts on hydrological extremes

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Standard Research

• Award winner: William Holderbaum
• Institution: University of Reading
• Value: £708,302

Development of a functional electrical stimulation system for bone health maintenance in spinal cord injury patients

• Award winner: Edward Archer
• Institution: University of Ulster
• Value: £82,793

An investigation into engineered thermoplastic polymer composite filament for through thickness reinforcement of laminated carbon fibre composites

• Award winner: Joanne Mason
• Institution: University of Exeter
• Value: £100,237

Transport properties of incompressible field-guided MHD turbulence

Leverhulme Trust

Research Project Grants
Sciences

• Award winner: Kristian Franze
• Institution: University of Cambridge
• Value: £166,156

Forces in neuronal development and growth

• Award winner: Stephen Lynch
• Institution: Cardiff University
• Value: £230,776

Quantum optics of mid-gap chalcogen donors in singlecrystal silicon

• Award winner: Hugh Rabagliati
• Institution: University of Edinburgh
• Value: £158,522

Expectation-driven language learning

• Award winner: Elizabeth Sockett
• Institution: University of Nottingham
• Value: £143,770

The molecular control of bacterial biting and gliding in Bdellovibrio

In detail

Research Project Grants
Humanities

Award winner: Stuart Taberner
Institution: University of Leeds
Value: £260,140

Traumatic pasts, cosmopolitanism and nation-building in contemporary German and South African literature

This project will analyse literary fiction in post-unification Germany and post-apartheid South Africa as a critique of the way these countries relate their traumatic pasts to the globalisation of Holocaust memory (“cosmopolitan memory”) in order to promote nation-building. The study will explore coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany and apartheid in South Africa and also investigate the way literature in both countries is reflecting on and shaping these processes. “At the heart of this three-year project is a comparison of the ways literary fiction emerging from Germany and South Africa is currently probing the tensions that can emerge between nation-building and this commitment to honour past victims by rejecting prejudice in the present,” wrote Stuart Taberner in the Leverhulme Trust’s newsletter. “What this project seeks to do is to examine how writers from a variety of backgrounds in each country are confronting ‘the nation’ with its unfulfilled promises and its incomplete reckoning with the past.”