The Global Partnership Award aims to promote the strategic priorities of the University of Southampton and to raise the University's international profile. This seed funding offers support to develop joint international research or education-related activities with an international dimension that are at an early stage of development. Proposals that are interdisciplinary are most welcome. The Global Partnership Award replaces the earlier WUN Research Mobility Programme and the Santander Latin America Fund.
More information on the scheme is available here .
Incoming faculty and student visitors from other Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) institutions
The University of Southampton is pleased to host incoming Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) visiting research students and faculty members under the Research Mobility Programme.
If you are a student or a researcher at a WUN member institution and are interested in visiting Southampton, you may be able apply to WUN at your home institution for research mobility support. In addition, you would need to:
Find a University of Southampton host and obtain a letter of invitation.
View the current projects below
Creative Futures Exchange: International perspectives on change in the creative industries.
Partners: University of Ghana.
Key Words: Internationalisation; diversity; sustainability; employability; knowledge exchange; creative industries.
The "Creative Futures Exchange" project brings together educators and students from the School of Information and Communication (University of Ghana) and Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). It focuses on internationalisation of creative industries curricula through Collaborative Online International Learning. Students will participate in a series of thematic online workshops and digital collaborations examining: Civic roles and relationships; Sustainable business models and practices; Equality, diversity and inclusion; and Platforms and Technologies. Project outcomes include: (1) curriculum development reports and resources (2) online documentation of workshops and collaborations (3) public showcase. The activities and outcomes will benefit participating and future cohorts of students, the project team educators and their colleagues, and local creative organisations and practitioners.
Textiles Heritage – Craft Futures.
Partners: University of Bergen, Norway.
Key words: Textiles Craft Practice Heritage Identity Futures.
Textile crafts and histories are of global significance – upholding individual and community identities, greatly influencing industry and economic consumption, and, importantly, relating to pressing issues around social and environmental sustainability. Cross and inter-disciplinary concepts of heritage and identity, this project will enable the formation of a dedicated scholarly network which will establish an archive of international importance, enabling more extensive research undertakings and global collaborations with practice-based and industrial capacity, whilst revitalising the valorisation and use of textile crafts in the 21st century. This is of specific interest in Nordic countries currently and will foster wider investigation through these relationships
Collaboration on ecological surveys and capacity building to preserve tropical forests in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Partners: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) and University of Southampton School of Education.
Key Words: Tropical forests, conservation, capacity-building, ecosystem integrit.
Tropical forest biodiversity is declining globally, endangering the wellbeing of rural communities that inhabit the tropics. Solutions to this complex environmental challenge requires a multidisciplinary approach. This project aims to improve methods of evaluating the integrity of forests in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. A multidisciplinary theory and practical course will be designed and delivered for students of Mexican universities in collaboration with UNAM. The students will run ecological surveys to assess the ecosystem health of forests in the Yucatan Peninsula, towards contributing to the long-term wellbeing of the communities of this region.
Quantifying the effect of upstream deforestation on downstream ecosystems: using coral skeletal luminescence to reconstruct land-ocean carbon export
Partners: University of Bergen, Norway and University of Belize, Belize.
Key words: Land-use change; land-ocean fluxes; terrigenous dissolved organic matter; corals; deforestation
This project will leverage freely available satellite data, a published water chemistry dataset, and newly obtained coral cores to reconstruct the transport or terrigenous dissolved organic matter (tDOM) from the Mesoamerican rainforest to the world's second largest barrier reef system (Belize, Central America). We will produce a temporal record which can be investigated relative to historic land-use change and climate records in order to better understand the relationship between upstream activities (including deforestation and agricultural expansion) and downstream tDOM export, increasing scientific capacity and knowledge in Belize, providing crucial information for local ecosystem managers, and enabling collaboration between UoS and NTU.
Scaled Urban Explosion Models To Predict & Mitigate Harm
Partners: University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Key words: Modelling, blast experiments, injury modelling, CFD, conflict, security
Explosive violence increasingly occurs in urban settings and is an enduring global issue affecting both military and vulnerable civil populations. I will collaborate with the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Blast Impact and Survivability Research Unit (BISRU) to perform highly-specialist blast experiments to investigate the effects of blast interaction with structures. The experiments will assess the feasibly of reduced-scale urban blast models and resulting datasets will be used to validate advanced computational models, to be published in co-authored, peer-reviewed journals. This project will renew and strengthen partnerships between UoS engineering and UCT and demonstrate unique technical capability for collaborative funding applications.
View the current projects below
Partners: University of Western Australia and Zhejiang University.
Key Words: Marine pollution, plastics, microplastics, marine litter, ocean health, transcontinental network.
Our understanding of plastic and its deleterious environmental effects is growing and there is an urgent international need to address this problem. This project seeks to build new relationships between specialists with complementary knowledge on plastics pollution from three Worldwide Universities Network members, spanning three continents, to develop a core Transnational Plastics Network (TransP/as). This will bring a transcontinental perspective to existing member research programmes on plastics, by sharing data, resources, and methodologies, and exchanging staff and students, to investigate the transfer of marine plastics from terrestrial to marine environments, their ecological and human health effects, and potential control measures.
Partners: University of New South Wales, Australia.
Key Words: Visual attention, Learning, Selection, EEG, Modeling.
Our visual system is confronted with more information than it can process at any given moment. We must, therefore, filter relevant from irrelevant information, a mechanisms called "visual attention". This project will examine how visual attention is affected by learning. For example, if a person learns to associate the colour blue with reward, we ask whether their attention is automatically captured by all blue objects. We will use electroencephalography (EEG) to track changes in attention due to such learning processes, allowing us to better understand how the brain selects information and how this can be optimised by learning experience.
Partners: University of Western Australia, UNSW (Canberra), University of Tasmania.
Key Words: Wireless sensor networks, environmental sensing.
Organise a series of multi-disciplinary workshops to bring together specialists from the environmental sensing field in Australia to share best practices and challenges.