The York Maastricht partnership (YMP) has announced its first round of funding, supporting £2m (€2.2m) of research collaborations across nine distinct projects – including initiatives to tackle serious health problems and solutions to global sustainability.

Partnership

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 worldclass 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’

A full list of the nine funded projects is available here.