The EPSRC has awarded grants worth £20m to Bath, Imperial, London School of Economics, Edinburgh, Exeter, Heriot-Watt, Lancaster, Manchester and Strathclyde universities.
As a result of the EPSRC 2008 Science and Innovation Awards, researchers at Manchester and Lancaster universities have received a £5m grant to research applications of graphene in areas of material science, chemistry and engineering.
For their part, Exeter and Bath university researchers have jointly received grants totalling around £5m to look at the applications of graphene in the areas of nano-electronics, photonics and bio-sciences.
The other two EPSRC grants have been shared between scientists at Imperial College London and the London School of Economics who will research into synthetic biology, and a group of engineers at a consortium of Scottish universities - Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde - who will look at high-performance computing, including complex software algorithms and numerical analysis.
The EPSRC is funding the four programmes with supporting finance from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC).
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