UCL-ZJU Strategic Partner Funds 2021/22 recipients

1 April 2022

The second joint seed funding call from the two institutions will launch seven new projects led by UCL and Zhejiang University (ZJU) academics

Following a first joint call for collaborative projects last year, UCL and ZJU have awarded seven new projects up to £10,000 each under the 2021/22 round of the UCL-ZJU Strategic Partner Funds.

The projects, each jointly led by a UCL and ZJU academic, will explore a wide range of subjects including AI in collaborative learning, reinterpreting the Liangzhu culture and intelligent drug delivery.

One of the funding recipients, Dr Jie Huang (UCL Engineering Sciences), said: "We’re delighted to be awarded a UCL-ZJU Strategic Partner Fund. This is a great initiative to strengthen the international research collaborations between two leading universities. Our project brings the research groups of Materials Engineering and Pharmacy together to develop advanced smart nanomaterials for an “intelligent” drug delivery. This seed fund will help to build a strong team pioneering in personalised therapy for 21^st century healthcare, and lead collaborative research in Nanomedicine and Advanced Materials Processing in this post-pandemic world."

UCL and ZJU have been working in close partnership for several years. Last year, UCL President & Provost Dr Michael Spence was among a host of global university leaders to sign a joint statement reaffirming collective commitment to the UN’s 2030 Agenda at a virtual forum hosted by ZJU.

See the full list of UCL-ZJU Strategic Partner Funds 2021/22 recipients below:

Lead UCL applicant	Faculty	Project
Dr Mutlu Cukurova	IOE	Improving education quality and equity under the COVID-19 pandemic: The design and implementation of multimodal data-driven artifcial intelligence in collaborative learning.
Dr Jie Huang	Engineering Sciences	Personalised therapy: stimuli responsive medical materials for intelligent drug delivery.
Dr Bing Li	MAPS	A collaborative framework for the development of nanomaterial-based point-of-care biosensors for biomarker screening and disease diagnosis.
Dr Rodolfo Lorenzo	Engineering Sciences	Innovative structural bamboo system for the construction industry.
Prof Ferruccio Renzoni	MAPS	New frontiers of imaging with atomic magnetometers.
Prof Michael Rowlands	Social & Historical Sciences	Devolution - Reinterpreting the Liangzhu culture within a comparative perspective of the concept of civilisation.
Dr Feng Ryan Wang	Engineering Sciences	Hydrocarbon Waste Upgrading to Blue H2

More information

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