UK Reveals Plans for Becoming “Graphene Hub”

Can a $71 million research institute establish the UK as a graphene hub?

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UK Reveals Plans for Becoming “Graphene Hub”

The University of Manchester in the UK has been at the forefront of graphene research ever since Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov fabricated the single atom-thick sheets of carbon back in 2004 and were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for it.

Since then researchers across the globe have been exploring the possibilities of this wonder material, especially in the field of electronics despite it not possessing an inherent band gap. The research has not only been geographically spread out but also in terms of both commercial and government research institutions being involved in it. In short, it seems like just about any lab doing work in nanomaterials has at least one researcher working on graphene.

But the UK government was intent on not relinquishing their lead in graphene, or so it seems. So they promised £50 million ($79 million) in additional funding specifically targeted at graphene research and yesterday they announced the details of how that money is to be used.

The press release emphasizes how “The graphene hub will build on this by taking this research through to commercial success." So I was wondering if there would be any discussion of how they intended to build up an electronics industry that it never really had in the first place to exploit the material.

But the whole “commercialization” idea is left pretty vague. Instead, we get what we typically get whenever governments decide to support nanotechnology research: a building.

Nanotechnology really must be one of the biggest boons for the construction industry over the last 10 years. It certainly is putting a smile on the face of cement contractors in and around Manchester with a £45 million ($71 million) to be spent on building a new graphene institute.

The “commercial”aspect? Well, both researchers and businesses will have access to the facility.

I have heard it argued that the UK’s nanotechnology initiative might have benefited from focusing its funds and resources on a few large research institutes rather than spreading them out among a much larger number of labs. That may be true and this announcement seems to be following that line of logic.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but think that funding the construction of one large institute is an overly simplified way of maintaining your perceived leadership in graphene research and later commercialization.

While it would certainly have been more complicated to plan out how you would take all the research that already exists in the field and see how government funds could help bring the fruits of that research to market, it might have had a greater impact on the commercial aspect of keeping the UK as a leader in the field of graphene.

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