CAJ #10 - Who funds graphene research?

One of the biggest investors in graphene research is the European Union. Last year the European Commission invested €1bn to researchers to find a way to exploit graphene.

The funding will be distributed over a period of 10 years. It will go directly to the Graphene Flagship, led by Professor Jari Kinaret, from Sweden's Chalmers University in Gothenburg. The Graphene Flagship will co-ordinate 126 academic and industrial research groups across 17 countries. Their initial budget is €54m. The funding graphene received is part of Europe's Future and Emerging Technologies competition. Another project that received money from it is the Human Brain Project which focuses on developing a highly detailed model of the brain.

The research teams will be researching graphene and its properties in order to find a way to use it most efficiently and maybe even combine it with silicone. They hope that graphene will be applicable in the industry because it is an excellent electricity conductor, stronger than steel, harder than diamond, has ideal optical properties and is as thin as currently possible. The research areas that will be covered in the first 30 months include ICT communications, physical transport and applications of graphene in energy, technology and sensors. The Flagship will also try not to conduct research on topics where research has already been conducted. In one of the press reports that were released from the Flagship they said that their precise focus will be on graphene production.

The research group includes, among others, representatives from Nokia and Airbus which will provide management support and four Nobel laureates, namely Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, the two researchers who discovered graphene, as well as German physicist Klaus von Klitzing and French physicist Albert Fert.

Research is also being conducted at the University of Cambridge that has its own Graphene Centre. They want to go from theory to practice and enable graphene to be used in the industry as soon as possible. The Cambridge Graphene Centre alone attracted £13m in financial support from Nokia, Dyson, Plastic Logic, Philips and BaE systems, with an additional £11m from the European Research Council.

Visit the website of Graphene Flagship to find out how their research is going:

http://graphene-flagship.eu/

XOXO A.