Interdisciplinary Research Pump Priming Awards
Pump Priming Awards
The Pump Priming scheme was created to encourage collaboration and provide support for activities that will lead to an increase in successful interdisciplinary research across the University. Funds are awarded to proposals that aim to support and pump-prime new interdisciplinary research programmes which seek to release synergies between existing clusters of excellence.
For the 2025-26 call 85 applications were received and eleven awards were made.
| PI | School | Title | Primary Theme |
| Katarzyna Cieslik | Environment, Education and Development | Platformization of rural Africa: dependency, dispossession and data in the ‘sharing economy’ | Digital Futures |
| Gareth Clay | Environment, Education and Development | Pan Africa Mining Study (PAMS) | Sustainable Futures |
| Clara Dawson | Arts, Languages and Cultures | Dead or Alive: Birds in our World | Creative Manchester |
| David Foster | Engineering | Challenging the impossible: Questioning the reconstruction of ancient Egyptian faces through interdisciplinary collective approaches from digital, medical and arts methods | Creative Manchester |
| Sokratia Georgaka | Health Sciences | Bridging the Gap: AI-Powered Spatial Tumour Profiling of Glioblastoma from Routine H&E Images | Digital Futures |
| Simon Harper | Engineering | Hypo-cheat Randomised Control Trial Enabler | Digital Futures |
| Dharman Jeyasingham | Health Sciences | Co-producing inclusive housing and care solutions with older lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people | Creative Manchester |
| Jaise Kuriakose | Engineering | Community-led Energy Renewables | Sustainable Futures |
| Victoria Palin | Medical Sciences | Closing the health gap: using technology to improve data transfer to tackle inequalities in CVD-related diagnoses and outcomes | Healthier Futures |
| Gareth Price | Medical Sciences | Addressing Cancer Inequalities Through Integrated Clinical and Environmental Data Analysis | Healthier Futures |
| Andrew Welfle | Engineering | Route 66: Visions for Rapid Decarbonisation of Transport – Exploring Integrated Approaches for Road, Aviation and Maritime | Sustainable Futures |
Pump Priming Awards 2024/25
For the 2024-25 call 57 applications were received and ten awards were made.
| PI | School | Title | Primary Theme |
| Riza Batista Navarro | Engineering | MediaQuery: Harnessing AI to Enable the Systematic Search and Analysis of Large Subtitled Audio-visual Datasets for Sociocultural Research | Digital Futures |
| Anke Bernau | Arts, Languages and Cultures | Moss Worlds | Creative Manchester |
| Laura Black | Environment, Education and Development | Exploring and enacting ‘very local’ cultures of mathematics: Establishing methodologies for arts-engaged and youth-led community practice | Creative Manchester |
| Sophie Everest | Arts, Languages and Cultures | Collective Creativity and Entrepreneurship in the Post War Black British Music Archive | Creative Manchester |
| Emma Gowen | Health Sciences | Marginalisation multiplied: Improving autistic health inequalities with collaborative interdisciplinary research and knowledge transfer through Autism@Manchester | Healthier Futures |
| Evangelos Kontopantelis | Health Sciences | Ethnic inequalities in multimorbidity burden and their relationship to clinical outcomes in people with diabetes in Greater Manchester | Healthier Futures |
| Ciara McGrath | Social Sciences | Visions of, and steps towards, an Environmentally Sustainable Space Future | Sustainable Futures |
| Carly McLachlan | Engineering | Truly Affordable Housing Finance for Net Zero | Sustainable Futures |
| Ben Parkes | Engineering | Tackling the energetic cost of computing at the University of Manchester | Sustainable Futures |
| Mihaela Popa-Wyatt | Social Sciences | How Dialogue Fractures: the Social Dynamics of Misinformation in the Digital Age | Digital Futures |
Pump Priming Awards 2023/24
For the 2023-24 competition 63 applications were received to the pump-priming calls and 19 awards were made.
| PI | School | Title | Primary Theme |
| Laura Anselmi | Health Sciences | Addressing ethnic and socio-economic inequalities in use of hospital care | Health Inequalities |
| Colin Bannard | Arts, Languages and Cultures | Mitigating the risk of child language delay at school entry: a feasibility study of service delivery and evaluation | International Strategic Partnerships |
| Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo | AMBS | Does additive manufacturing affect the business model and boundaries of SMEs? | Digital Futures |
| Jane Brooks | Health Sciences | Enabling asylum-seeking older women to challenge health and societal inequalities in the UK: An oral histories and futures approach | Health Inequalities |
| Neil Dixon | Natural Sciences | Pathways for sustainable biomanufacturing futures | Sustainable Futures |
| Charis Enns | Environment, Education and Development | Building an interdisciplinary action research programme on land use, land management and zoonotic disease burden | Health Inequalities |
| Alejandro Gallego Schmid | Engineering | CO-OPERATE: SoCiO-envirOnmental assessment of rePurposing abandoned coal minE foR geothermAl districT hEating | Sustainable Futures |
| Nicola Gartland | Health Sciences | Children’s inequalities across Greater Manchester: engagement with stakeholders to co-design a project investigating the interactive effects of air pollution and deprivation on children’s cognitive function | Sustainable Futures |
| Juhi Gupta | Health Sciences | ‘Multi-Omics for health technologies’ network and exemplar project development | Digital Futures |
| Claudia Henninger | Natural Sciences | PREMIER (Progressive and emerging interdisciplinary (bio) materials research) – the journey of a jersey | Sustainable Futures |
| Stephen Hicks | Health Sciences | Air Space: Creating a community-integrated network of interdisciplinary research on socio-atmospherics | Creative Manchester |
| Richard Kirkham | Engineering | The Building Safety Network | Open |
| Gareth Kitchen | Medical Sciences | “I see you” – AR integrating direct patient observations with XAI to support critical care decisions at the ICU | Health Inequalities |
| Cerys Manning | Medical Sciences | Building on Stockholm-Manchester links to understand single cell gene regulation in retinal development | International Strategic Partnerships |
| Rosa Parisi | Health Sciences | Incidence of pancreatic cancer by social deprivation and ethnic group: a population-based study in Greater Manchester | Health Inequalities |
| Simon Parry | Arts, Languages and Cultures | Centre for Creative Health Studies | Creative Manchester |
| Joe Swift | Biological Sciences | Development of a synthetic bioink to replace Matrigel for human mammary gland studies | Open |
| Martie Van Tongeren | Health Sciences | Returning to work with Long Covid in high-risk populations | Health Inequalities |
| Eliana Vasquez Osorio | Medical Sciences | LINKER:Longitudinal Imaging Linking Outcomes and Interventions | Digital Futures |