York Maastricht Partnership announce £2m of research projects

Posted on Tuesday 15 October 2019

The partnership was set up earlier this year to support research and education collaborations between both institutions. This first tranche of funding – made up of contributions from the Partnership, University departments, research council grants, and private sector funding – will support joint research initiatives across York and Maastricht.

Research

The money will be used in areas including medical imaging, data science and to fund research programmes investigating the future of Europe and global development. Every project will run jointly between Maastricht and York, co-led by researchers on each side. 

Projects include:

• Research using state-of-the art imaging technology to understand how immune cells regulate their metabolism and use this to tackle diseases like breast cancer and the parasitic disease leishmaniasis, in which York and Maastricht already have world leading expertise.
• Work to bring together world-class scanning technology to understand how information flows through the brain and apply this to our response to aging and mental health challenges
• A significant investment to support responsible data science, designing new approaches to handling personal data that could restore public trust and confidence in how major corporations handle personal information
• A partnership between York and Maastricht’s centres of excellence in global development that will investigate development transformations in the context of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and their challenge of ‘Leaving No One Behind’

Professor Charlie Jeffery, Vice-Chancellor of the University of York said: “These projects bring together world- leading expertise across a range of exciting projects at two Universities committed to collaboration in tackling some of the most urgent and important challenges facing the world today.”

Collaboration

President of Maastricht University, Professor Martin Paul said: “The chosen projects show the potential of our Dutch/British university collaboration, creating synergies in a number of fields that will increase our competitiveness and resilience in the European higher education arena - independent of political challenges.”

Ian Wiggins, Director of the York-Maastricht Partnership said: “Wherever the Brexit negotiations end up, this partnership demonstrates the value of European collaboration, and how much more we can achieve when we work in partnership across Europe.”