Grant winners - 18 September 2014

Royal Society

Wolfson Research Merit Awards

Awards are worth £10,000-£30,000 a year, which is a salary enhancement

• Award winner: Graham Cormode
• Institution: University of Warwick

Small summaries for big data

• Award winner: Pierre Friedlingstein
• Institution: University of Exeter

Earth System biogeochemical feedbacks, climate targets and emissions mitigation

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council

Research Grants

• Award winner: John Woolliams
• Institution: University of Edinburgh
• Value: £262,715

GplusE: Genomic selection and environment modelling for next-generation wheat breeding

• Award winner: John Bothwell
• Institution: Durham University
• Value: £841,968

Transnational approaches to resolving biological bottlenecks in macroalgal biofuel production (SuBBSea)

• Award winner: Tracy Palmer
• Institution: University of Dundee
• Value: £406,287

Coordinating different protein translocation machineries during assembly of a membrane protein

Leverhulme Trust

International Networks
Humanities

• Award winner: James Belich
• Institution: University of Oxford
• Value: £124,789

Global nodes, global orders: macro- and micro-histories of globalisation

• Award winner: Mark Frost
• Institution: University of Essex
• Value: £102,877

War memoryscapes in Asia partnership: routes to post-conflict reconciliation

Social sciences

• Award winner: Paolo Di Martino
• Institution: University of Birmingham
• Value: £22,239

Re-doing business: insolvency and bankruptcy legislation, models of business, and firms’ governance in historical and comparative perspective (1900-2010)

• Award winner: Suman Gupta
• Institution: The Open University
• Value: £121,959

Framing financial crisis and protest: northwest and southeast Europe

Economic and Social Research Council

Transformative Research

• Award winner: Kath Browne
• Institution: University of Brighton
• Value: £193,087

Making liveable lives: rethinking social exclusion

• Award winner: Dawn Watkins
• Institution: University of Leicester
• Value: £197,944

Where do I stand? Assessing children’s understanding of law as an empowering force in their lives

In detail

Economic and Social Research Council

Award winner: Farida Vis
Institution: University of Sheffield
Value: £206,880

Picturing the social: transforming our understanding of images in social media and big data research

This project is the world’s first cross-platform academic research project into social media images, exploring the impact images of this kind have on society. A key aim of the project is to use the insight from academia and industry to build a free research tool that will allow researchers to capture this visual data to highlight and study different aspects. “Images tend to be trickier to study than words,” said Farida Vis. “With the rise in techniques that focus on large volumes of text, specifically with the growing interest in so-called big data, images tend to get forgotten.” Findings from the project will be disseminated via the new Visual Social Media Lab.