In every sense, we live in a material world and the drive to develop smarter, lighter, more versatile and resilient materials shows no sign of decelerating. Whether designed to withstand brutal operating environments, save energy or bring life-saving medical advances within reach, there’s a constant thirst for the next generation of game-changers – and the UCL Institute for Materials Discovery (IMD) is delivering the innovation, imagination and inspiration needed to succeed. Under its Director, Professor Kwang-Leong Choy, and with a growing network of collaborators – including other SES members plus partners worldwide – the IMD is already an established institute...

Each month we post a new edition to the SES 'Spotlight On...' series, showcasing equipment at our institutions, providing information and case studies for interested researchers/industries, and promoting better use of already available equipment. The Cross Faculty NMR Centre (CFNMR Centre) was opened in 2006 to provide ultra-high field NMR instruments to researchers across the faculties of natural sciences and medicine. Now it hosts one Bruker 800 MHz NMR spectrometer, equipped with 1H/13C/15N/2H cryoprobe and a cooling sampleJet, one Bruker 600 MHz NMR spectrometer with cryoprobe, and another Bruker 600 MHz NMR dedicated for biosolids studies. NMR is used to characterise the structure...

Cyber security, open source intelligence, web science, bioinformatics and crime science…all modern and relevant terms in the UK research landscape, and all with one thing in common: Data. Why are researchers interested in accessing publicly available data? What are they doing with anonymised, confidential data? How can open data provide us with intelligence? How can data from one field of research be used in another? This Unique finale to The Data Dialogue, At War with Data, provided Early Career Researchers from a range of disciplines with the tools and knowledge to approach the subject of research data from a wider point of view....