Research

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Vanessa's coming home

The start of the new season always creates football fever in the School of Mathematical Sciences (SMS), but this time round the transfer of Dr Vanessa 'Nobby' Styles to Sussex is causing a particular stir.

As a DPhil student in SMS, Vanessa was a keen player in the weekly soccer match between staff and postgraduates. Her success in winning a Leverhulme 2000 Special Research Fellowship means that she will shortly be lacing up her boots once more.

Only 20 Leverhulme fellowships are awarded nationally, across all subject areas, and this year's success is the first for SMS. The University's Research Development Fund is matching the financial contribution from the Leverhulme Foundation.

Off the pitch, Vanessa will work with Professor Charlie Elliott in the Applied Mathematics group, which is part of SMS's Centre for Mathematical Analysis and its Applications.

Research grants and contracts

Electron beams
Professor Terry Clark and colleagues in EIT have been awarded £490,000 by the EPSRC to set up an electron beam lithographic facility, which will foster interdisciplinary links between research groups, including those in biological and cognitive sciences.

Learning goes on after graduation
Better continuing professional development for new graduates is the aim of a major new research project to be conducted by USIE's Professor Michael Eraut and Stephen Steadman, together with Professors Carolyn Miller and Frederick Maillardet from the University of Brighton.

The joint project will investigate three groups of graduates (accountants, engineers and nurses) through their first three years of full-time employment, examining the factors affecting their learning and approaches to facilitating it.

For employers and for teachers of professional and vocational education, the research will provide better evidence on the transition from higher education to work, how and what knowledge is used that has been acquired in higher education, what is learned in the workplace, and its implications for relevant programmes in higher education.

The project is one of nine (worth a total of £7.5m) announced in September by the Economic and Research Council (ESRC), whose Teaching and Learning Research Programme aims to raise the attainment of learners in all UK education and training settings, from pre-school to lifelong learning.

Centre for Byzantine Cultural History
A Centre for Byzantine Cultural History is to be established at the University of Belfast with funding of £900,000 over five years from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). Sussex is one of the partners in the project and art historian Dr Liz James will be taking part in research under the partnership.

Deflated soccer balls

Since the first pure samples of C₆₀ and C₇₀ were isolated at Sussex in the early 1990s, closed-cage carbon molecules (fullerenes) have been the centre of chemists' attention worldwide.

In the latest issue of Angewandte Chemie, one of the prime chemistry journals in the world, Roger Taylor (CPES) and his collaborators at Moscow University describe the X-ray structure of an unusual fluorinated fullerene, C₆₀F₁₈.

Uniquely for a fullerene, this is spherical on one side only and has one face that is completely flat, making it look like a soccer ball with the air let out. (The binding of the fluorine causes a number of the double bonds to be broken, resulting in a belt of C atoms coupled to their neighbours only by single bonds.)

The first truly 'aromatic' closed-cage carbon molecule, C₆₀F₁₈ has unique properties. Roger said: "The unusual electronic properties of the fluorinated fullerene cage make this compound a particularly interesting candidate for future applications in photovoltaics and photonics."

See www.wiley-vch.de/vch/journals/2002/index.html.