Starting in April 2023, the Centre of Excellence for Resilient Infrastructure Analysis fosters research in the area of resilience in the natural and built environment as part of the overarching UKRI programme ‘Building a Secure and Resilient World’ (BSRW)’, a 5-year programme which seeks to tap the UK’s research and innovation system to tackle large-scale, complex challenges for the UK.
The Centre is initially funded by a £4M grant from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), awarded in Spring 2023 to the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Scientific Computing to establish a national Centre of Excellence for Resilient Infrastructure Analysis, and moves DAFNI into its new phase.
Within the Centre, the many strands of research needed to create more resilient cities and societies are being brought together.
The aim of this new Centre is to foster multi-disciplinary research and DAFNI, as the support high performance platform, will bring together research areas including engineering, data sciences, environmental science, health sciences and social sciences.
Outputs from the Centre are essential to provide researchers with the capacity to advise policy makers, , local councils and private companies with the analysis and scenario-planning vital to ensure the UK is prepared for the sudden impacts of extreme floods, water and food shortages, energy failures and other challenges.
Using the DAFNI computational platform, researchers in the Centre of Excellence will be able to collaborate online, scale research, integrate computational models, model workflows and deposit and share models and data with the infrastructure research community in the UK and further afield.
Call for Research Projects
DAFNI is launching a call for research projects to support the Centre of Excellence, with applications accepted from 12th April 2023.
Researchers and academics active in infrastructure research as well as those working in multidisciplinary areas from across the UK are invited to apply for funding from the £1.4M available. We welcome single and multi-institution bids.
The funding is split into three key areas:
- Supporting key models in the area of resilience
- Developing a resilience framework
- Exploring resilience scenarios
Applications will be accepted from UK Research Performing Organisations eligible to accept UKRI grants. The applications will be made through the JeS submission system.
If you are interested in getting involved or applying for this new funding opportunity, you can find out more:
At the DAFNI Building a Secure and Resilient World funding programme Town Hall webinar meeting webpage, or
Attend our ‘UKCRIC Discover DAFNI’ event on 27th March 2023 from 10.30am to 4.00pm: High-performance computing for national infrastructure in-person event at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, Nr Didcot, Oxon, OX11 0QX. Register for this event at: UKCRIC Eventbrite page.
To keep in contact with this new grant programme, please subscribe to our DAFNI mailing list: https://www.dafni.ac.uk/#subscribe.