Grant winners – 21 January 2016

Leverhulme Trust

Research Project Grants
Sciences

• Award winner: Nicola Allison
• Institution: University of St Andrews
• Value: £169,406

The control of coral biomineralisation

• Award winner: Reinhold Medina
• Institution: Queen’s University Belfast
• Value: £260,505

Exploring a novel role for interferon signalling in cellular senescence

• Award winner: John Mulley
• Institution: Bangor University
• Value: £182,005

Mapping the gerbil genome

Royal Society

Wolfson Research Merit Awards

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

• Award winner: William Sloan
• Institution: University of Glasgow

Ecologically engineering the next generation of environmental biotechnologies

• Award winner: Chris Pickard
• Institution: University of Cambridge

Automated computational materials discovery: building on random search

• Award winner: Andrew McAinsh
• Institution: University of Warwick

Mechanics of chromosome segregation in human cells

Economic and Social Research Council

Research Grants

• Award winner: Tim Jackson
• Institution: University of Surrey
• Value: £4,755,360

Sustainable prosperity: Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity

• Award winner: Martyn Griffin
• Institution: University of Leeds
• Value: £210,462

A democracy to come? Investigating change in alternative organisations

• Award winner: Tessa Dekker
• Institution: University College London
• Value: £222,497

Using economic theory to understand children’s risky visuomotor decisions

• Award winner: Tine Buffel
• Institution: University of Manchester
• Value: £224,158

Urban ageing and social exclusion

In detail

Award winner: Sam Friedman
Institution: London School of Economics
Value: £186,900

Breaking the ‘class’ ceiling? Social mobility into Britain’s elite occupations

This study will explore rates of social mobility into and within Britain’s elite occupations. Improving social mobility, a key policy for the main political parties, has historically centred on a commitment to increase the number of people from lower occupational class backgrounds who move into higher class groups during their working lives. A limitation of this focus is that it misses potentially important differences in rates of mobility between occupations, especially elite or esteemed professions. In the past, such detailed analysis has not been possible because datasets have simply not had sample sizes that were large enough to meaningfully examine mobility into individual occupations. However, new questions about parents’ occupations in the Labour Force Survey, the UK’s largest employment survey, will provide new data that the team can use to explore how rates of upward mobility vary between Britain’s 29 most elite occupations. The study will also investigate the relationships between rates of mobility and other forms of disadvantage, such as gender and ethnicity, in these occupations.