HEC Materials Chemistry Consortium


Application Procedure (last updated: 5th January 2022)

Membership

To become a full member of the Materials Chemistry Consortium (MCC), please contact Scott Woodley (Principle Investigator and Project Manager) and CC klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk. Applicants will: (a) have an academic appointment where he/she is eligible to apply as a PI for standard EPSRC funding; (b) provide a summary (two sides of A4 max) of HEC based research that they would like to conduct (now and in the future) and how this complements the remit of the Materials Chemistry Consortium; and (c) have an opportunity to give a presentation of their work to other members at the next convenient meeting (a good opportunity to establish new collaborations!). Full members can also request user accounts for their group. Typically, I refer to "full members" as "group leaders", whereas the term "MCC members" will also include their researchers who have access to our HEC resources (e.g., have an account on ARCHER). Please note that requests for HEC time will need to be justified later, following the guidelines given below. Note also, when there is an oversubscription of time resources, constraints on requests may be imposed on new members; a cap which will itself be relaxed over time. Finally, please note that membership applications are typically considered just before one of our one-day meetings (see below). Thus, if you have not had a reply 1 week before the next advertied meeting, then please send Scott Woodley an email to check all is well.



Requests for HEC Resources (ARCHER2 and YOUNG)

One-day meetings are typically held at UCL just before a new six month allocation period on ARCHER. During MCC meetings we decide how to redistribute our allocation of national HEC resources (CPU time) for the next six month period for Tier-1 and Tier-2 HEC facilities, namely ARCHER and YOUNG, to full MCC members (group leaders), once submitted proposals have been assessed by the executive committee. Note that all members at our meeting have had an opportunity to defend and ask questions about the proposed work. Dates of our next meeting, along with deadline for submission of proposals, will be advertised on our main noticeboard (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/klmc/mcc) and are typically held just into Summer break and within winter break (as lecture theatres are more available then).

Applications for national HEC time from each full member should be sent to "klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk" as attachments of ONE email, either from the full member or from a member chosen from his/her group (who should also CC the application to the full member of the group). Please also refer to latest info/instructions given on the MCC noticeboard.
The application should consist of:
(a) one group summary form and
(b) a separate proposal for each project requiring HEC time, but concatenated so that only one document results from each theme.
Please DO NOT change the formatting style used in (a) and (b). More details/help on how to complete both of these documents are given below. Note that upon accepting HEC resources distributed via the MCC, you agree to the MCC management holding data required in order to conduct the work of the MCC, support our 3-day conferences (which are held once every two years), and help the MCC in its obligations to report back to EPSRC, promote good practice and diseminate outputs of the MCC (which includes including the correct acknowledgments where appropriate). Help with reporting back to EPSRC includes the production of an annual report and the completion of ResearchFish; typically this requires each group to: (a) keep our Google forms up-to-date with regards to your publications, and the qualifications obtained and destinations of your group members; and (b) complete their own short annual report detailing information in a convenient form that can be either cut and pasted into our full annual report and/or cut and pasted onto a webpage but diseminating work to the public. The template for this short annual report, which is required for each theme you have had resources and which will be required by 1st November, can be found here. Full instructions can be found within this document.

The "group summary" aids my endeavours to provide lunch for those attending our meeting and, moreover, helps me keep track on some of the data that EPSRC may require (software) and who in your group should get acccess to your allocation.

Incomplete group summaries, missing data in Google forms or missing reports will invalidate submitted proposals.

Group summary form: There are essentially two sections to this form.
The first lists information about your proposals that I will cut and paste into the Summary Sheet. Under "Authors" include all but the name of the group leader (full member) and use bold font for those who need access to the time (group leaders will automatically have access to all their budget codes). In each theme, order proposals by size of request, largest first, and give the subtotals.
The second section is about members of your group. Note that each member of the group should be listed in full (next time updating this part of the form will be much easier/quicker). If someone has recently left, then hopefully you have good news to upload into our destinations which might also include details of qualifications gained.
In the group summary template document, I have completed the various sections for my group (where I have also created a few new colleagues and assumed papers 9-11 are not yet listed in order to demonstrate what I am after). Please keep the same formating as you update/remove my answers! Also, please do not convert this document into a pdf!

Google forms: The details of all publications that contain an appropriate acknowledgment and reference to our EPSRC grant number should be provided. Where a publication involves more than one group, please only list the publication within the group which supplied the largest fraction of HEC time. Please enter the details directly into our Google Forms. As well as details of publications resulting from your use of HEC resources obtined via the MCC, we also need to be able to report how access to HEC resources have helped members with their careers. For example: for members that leave your group please supply employment details of where they moved on to (job title and name of company or university); if they were a member of staff (PDRA) please also provide which months/years they worked in your group; if they have graduated then please provide the name of the student, title of their degree, which university and the year it was awarded. Specific examples pre-2014 can be found here, which is kept on our "password protected" part of the MCC website. Please note that any member of your group can submit the data, after which you will receive an email that will contain a link that you can use later if you need to update this data (I would keep the links to destinations/qualifications for each of your members and, if details correct, delete links to publications).
Updates on details of invited / prestigious presentations at conferences, where MCC supported work was disseminated will be captured in the short annual report.

Proposals: please update the red text and then change this text to black and remove instructions given in a blue font. If submitting more than one proposal within a theme (a current list of which is given below), please concatenate the proposals in that theme into one document so that the proposal requesting the most time resources starts on the first page, followed, on a new page, by the next most time resource request, etc. Remember to rename the proposal documents, before sending, using the convention:

{theme code}-{group code}.pdf

where hopefully you can also convert the Word document into a pdf. The theme codes are also listed below and the group code is typically the first three letters of the Group Leader (i.e. the full member).

Time will be allocated to the budget code:

e05-{theme code}-{group code} on ARCHER and MCC_{theme code}_{group code} on YOUNG

Note that I upload a summary and all proposals within the restricted part of our website before the meeting (and previous documents provide examples of what is expected!). At least two days before the MCC committee meeting, please check the summary I upload onto the website to ensure that your projects are listed correctly (only the Group Leader and names listed in bold will be given access to allocated time).

Remember, for each proposal one of the named applicants must be present at our meeting - particularly the project leader (full member) if making large requests, but we understand this is not always possible - to answer any questions put forward by other members. For large time requests, we may ask for one of the named applicants to give a short summary of the proposed work or a short presentation. We also run 3 day conferences every other year, and expect members to report their work at these events (or if invited to present their work during the morning of one of our one day meetings).


Please also note, any unused time that was previously allocated at our last meeting will be lost to us at the end of the allocation period, so we will actively redistribute from budgets that are currently underspent if the MCC is also currently underspending - EPSRC expects our usage to be fairly constant throughout the allocation periods.



Current themes for the ARCHER and YOUNG service

Biomaterials and Soft Matter
Energy Generation, Storage and Transport
Environment and Smart Materials
Fundamentals of Bulk Materials
Fundamentals of Surfaces and Interfaces
Fundamentals of Low Dimensional Materials
Materials Discovery
Reactivity and Catalysis

complete list 		Theme code

biosoft
power
enviro
bulk
surfin
nano
discov
react

-


Old themes for the ARCHER and THOMAS service

Biomaterials
Catalytic Science
Energy Generation and Efficiency
Energy Storage
Environment
Nano and Defect Structures
Organic and Soft Matter
Surfaces and Interfaces

complete list
 Theme code

biomat
react
gener
store
enviro
nandef
softm
surfin


Old themes employed on the HECToR service

Biomaterials
Environmental materials research
Materials for energy technology
Nano and defect chemistry
Quantum Devices - Modelling of Quantum Optical Devices
Reactivity
Surface and interfacial science

complete list 		Theme code

biomat
enviro
power
nandef
qmdev
react
surfin