The advance of "Rising Powers" - including Brazil, China, Russia, and India - promises to be one of the major forces in global economic, political and social development in the 21st Century. Shifts in the distribution of technological and innovative capabilities underpin these changes. During the 20th Century, the United States along with Western Europe, Japan, and other established economies, led in the application of science and technology in fostering economic growth. In the present century, the Rising Powers are seeking to move beyond low-wage or resource-based strategies for development by expanding their science and technology capabilities. Critically, progress on this front requires not only building up R&D capacities and commercial applications, but also developing appropriate governance systems and institutional and corporate structures, building financial, human capital, management and related complementary assets, facilitating technological entrepreneurship, fostering demand and accessing international markets, and ensuring environmental, societal and political sustainability. If these countries are successful, it is likely that there will be major implications for the established developed countries. These include new opportunities through expanded markets, growth of talent pools and inventiveness, and prospects for scientific collaboration in addressing global environmental and societal challenges. The implications also include potential threats in terms of loss of technological leadership, increased international trade competition, shifts in the balance of military capabilities, and competition for scarce resources. Yet, if the Rising Powers (or at least some of them) fail in their efforts to develop and broadly apply advanced scientific and technological capabilities to further their economic and social development, growth expectations will be unmet or will proceed wastefully and societal tensions might rise, contributing to internal and international political instabilities. This project aims to address scholarly, management and policy issues related to the causes, sustainability and competitiveness of advanced technological development in driving the growth of Rising Powers, and in so doing also explore associated issues of governance and equity. Our technological focus will be on the emerging domain of nanotechnology. Our Rising Power country focus will be on China and Russia, with significant consideration of not only internal developments but also the interactions and implications of the growth of nanotechnology in these two countries for the UK and other developed and developing economies. The project will be undertaken by an interdisciplinary team, involving units of the University of Manchester in partnership with colleagues from China and Russia, with attention to capacity development, building a new research network, fostering training, and engaging users.

The United Kingdom is home to 2,500 museums, of which 1,800 are accredited and formally registered, whilst there are 2,389 registered archives in the UK, of which 122 are national, 654 locals, and 324 university-based, with overall total of 4,889 heritage public institutions, largely on both public funding and income generated from visitors and tourists. China, by comparison, has an incredible growth in number of museums from 300 in 1978 to 3,589 museums in 2020, of which 3,054 are state-owned museums, of which 1,514 are public, whilst 535 are private. Museums in China have been classified as First Class, Second Class and Third Class, but only 851 museums have been accredited, yet they are very popular for educational activities and approximately 334,610 activities were organised during 2019. Boosting over 8,000 annual exhibitions, over 20 million items collections, most Museums are entry fee-free and boost 1 billion visits a year. Whilst Creative industries and digital heritage technology has been growing in the UK for a few decades, it is still growing, yet at fast pace in China. Since late 2004, the concept of the creative industries arrived in China. It was warmly welcomed in Shanghai and then subsequently adopted with some degree of caution in Beijing. In the years since, officials, scholars, practitioners, entrepreneurs and developers have exploited the idea of creative industries, and a range of associated terms, to construct an alternative vision of an emerging China. The Project will study how major R&D funding programmes in both countries are driving radical change with a dramatic rise in creating new digital cultural content, datasets, virtual tours, and experiences for user engagement in the museum and cultural heritage sectors. Through sectors surveys and case studies of key projects, partnerships and successful collaborations, the project will generate a series of new datasets, analysis of effective strategies, emerging knowledge, and skillsets to inform future UK-China partnerships in the digital and virtual heritage domains. The research team of the Centre for Architecture, Urbanism and Global Heritage (CAUGH) at Nottingham Trent University, will undertake this project in collaboration with key Chinese partners with nationally-leading research team and knowledge in this field, including: Tong-Ji University's School of Architecture and Urban Planning; The School of Design & Arts at Beijing Institute of Technology; the Old Summer Palace Authority through the jointly established the CEntre of Virtual Intelligence for Cultural Heritage [CEViC]; and The Communications University of China through the recently developed China-UK University Museum Alliance. It will provide an important contribution to inform policy, investment and support programmes that help both governments address key Sustainable Development Goals in both countries, looking at Creative economy, Sustainable cities and infrastructures and, Sustainable preservation of cultural heritage.

The LEAP Digital Health Hub is a partnership of the South West's leading Universities, more than 20 supporting companies nationally, many NHS Trusts & Health Boards, 4 social care organisations, the region's Local Authorities, the West of England Academic Health Science Network (AHSN), the award-winning business incubator SETsquared and Health Data Research UK (HDRUK). The 50+ partners that shaped this bid ranged from the research director for a provider of residential care homes, to a chief clinical information officer working in an intensive care unit; from the founder of a femtech startup to the head of the healthcare analytics team for a multinational consulting firm. In workshops through June and July 2022 they told us that Digital Health is as much about design and user experience as health data analysis; it is motivated by patient benefit but must also consider viable business models for industry. All Hub partners will have access to dedicated physical office space in central Bristol alongside the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Digital Health and Care. There, they will train, network and research together across disciplines and sectors. They will engage with partners across the UK- and beyond. Recognising that UK breakthroughs in Digital Health may be equally (or more) impactful abroad, the Hub's new "Global Digital Health Network" links the Hub to Digital Health expertise from the US, China, India, Nigeria and Australia (sections B1.2, B5). The Hub's unique Skills and Knowledge Programme is designed to address the professional training needs of industry, health and social care providers and academia within the two Themes of Transforming Health & Care Beyond the Hospital and Optimising Disease Prediction, Diagnosis & Intervention. This is proposed to be the world's largest Digital Health taught programme. The Hub's Fellowship programme will comprise 5 different schemes to develop future leaders, within not only academia, industry and the health/care sector, but also within the community - as patients or informal carers. The Hub's Research programme focusses on pre-competitive research within the Hub's two thematic areas of Transforming Health and Care Beyond the Hospital and Optimising Disease Prediction, Diagnosis and Intervention. The Hub will add value by surfacing health priorities from its partner health and social care organisations, working with the West of England AHSN and also with Hub members such as Chief Nursing Information Officers, with charities, social care providers, patient and community groups.

Aerosols are a collection of solid particles of liquid droplets dispersed in air and include smoke, fog, sea spray and pollution particles from vehicles. Particle sizes can range from the nanometre (a millionth of a millimetre) to the millimetre scale. Aerosols influence health, visibility, and climate and are finding increased technological application in the delivery of drugs to the lungs, the engineering of nanostructures through spray drying, and the delivery of fuels for combustion. This research will examine some of the fundamental challenges faced in understanding aerosols.A key to understanding the impact of aerosols on human health is to understand how they are transformed as they are inhaled and exhaled. In the humid environment found within the respiratory tract, water vapour can condense on inhaled particles leading to growth in size. This can influence their depth of penetration into the lungs, with smaller particles penetrating deeper. The targeted delivery of drugs to the lungs may be enhanced by altering their response to a humid environment. Further, the transmission of airborne viruses, such as the influenza virus, may be influenced by the humidity changes on exhalation and inhalation. Similarly, in atmospheric science it is crucial to understand how aerosol particles are influenced by humidity in order to predict the size of cloud droplets. Understanding the change in particle size with humidity is also critical for understanding the ability of particles to scatter and absorb sunlight and their impact on climate. Thus, key themes of this project will be to understand how particles change in size with humidity and their efficiency in scattering and absorbing light.It is also essential to know the chemical composition of particles to interpret their impact on health and the environment, particularly in polluted urban environments, and to understand how particles are chemically changed over time. Water is ubiquitous in our environment and largely regulates the composition of aerosol. However, many chemicals are not soluble in water. This is particularly true for many pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are considered to be carcinogenic and mutagenic, and for many of the agrochemicals that are used in crop production. Such chemicals may be very soluble and become concentrated in organic liquids. A key theme of this project will be to understand the properties of aerosol droplets that contain both water soluble and insoluble chemicals, and to understand how chemicals can dissolve into the organic phase within an aerosol. Indeed, many of the organic components may undergo chemical reactions in our environment and a further theme will be to explore the chemistry that can occur in aerosol and how it influences aerosol properties. From the delivery of drugs to the lungs, to the evaporation of fuel droplets in combustion, the spray drying of particles, and the growth of particles in the atmosphere, understanding the rate at which particles can change size and composition is also crucial. For example, the processes occurring during the evaporation of a volatile solvent in the use of metered does inhalers critically determine the delivery of active pharmaceuticals to the lungs. The solid structures formed when liquid droplets rapidly evaporate are controlled by how quickly the solvent evaporates in spray drying. Studies of these very rapid processes are a further theme.Finally, there is considerable interest in the analysis and chemical reactions of very small sample volumes, and this has led to the development of lab-on-a-chip technology. Commonly, solutions flow through very small fabricated channels to allow measurements on micro-litre samples. A final theme of this project will be to control reactions in aerosol droplets containing only picolitres of sample, a billionth of cubic centimetre, using laser beams to move particles around and control chemistry.