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Based in Houston, Texas, Rice University is a leading interdisciplinary research university which is regularly ranked one of the top 20 universities in the USA.

Edinburgh and Rice University work as partners to foster deep collaborations in research and education. The Rice-Edinburgh seed fund has been established to facilitate and support joint initiatives that will strengthen the two universities’ strategic priorities as well as develop multi-disciplinary cutting-edge research to create academic and societal impact. Our seed funding partnership with Rice University started in 2023 and will run until 2025 offering opportunities for Edinburgh researchers to fund collaborative projects. 

Key academic themes 

The Edinburgh-Rice collaborations aim to build leading global partnerships across specific academic themes:  

• Energy and sustainability
• Robotics 
• Data and imaging for space and satellites
• Healthy ageing and healthcare technologies

Recent collaborative activity

Eight projects were fully funded via the Edinburgh-Rice Strategic Collaboration Awards, and a further seven projects received partial funding from Rice. The successful projects span all three colleges and a range of disciplines. 

Our collaboration with Rice represents a step change in terms of how we engage with US universities. We are hugely excited about sparking ideas between our academics, delivering opportunities for our students, and developing a shared vision for a new type of partnership, that allows us, together, to make a real difference in the world.

Professor James SmithVice Principal International, The University of Edinburgh

Increasing our international research collaborations is a cornerstone in expanding our research program at Rice. The University of Edinburgh partnership plays an important role in that endeavour.

Professor Ramamoorthy RameshVice President for Research, Rice University

Awarded projects 

• Interplay between cellular differentiation and contact-based interactions during early development

• Intelligent Particles: Learning to Design Adaptive and Online Particle Filters 

• Determining the Kitaev interaction in van der Waals ferromagnet CrI3 

• Algorithmic Foundations for Variational Quantum Algorithms 

• Fluidic Control Schemes for Next-Generation Soft and Wearable Robots

• Towards improved assurance of carbon removal using biochar: the key to accelerated market demand and deployment

• Proposal for an Edinburgh-Rice Climate Infrastructure Research Network

• Futures of Engineering Life: Past Potentials and Present Prospects

NASA and the Rice Space Institute

A recent visit from NASA astronaut Dr Kate Rubins and Professor David Alexander, Director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University, reinforced Edinburgh’s relationship with Rice University. Rice University has had very close ties to NASA since it was founded. The visit supported Edinburgh’s aim to be a leading institution in the application of space technology and data.

Dr Rubins toured Edinburgh’s National Robotarium and the University’s Higgs Centre for Innovation at the Royal Observatory before taking part in a panel discussion on the future of space exploration. 

Working in partnership with Rice University, we can achieve our ambition to be the Space Data Capital of Europe. We host the fastest university-based supercomputer in Europe, deliver world-class research data, and have the first NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot outwith North America. I visited Rice last year and was struck by how much we have in common. Our projects reach across the breadth of our expertise and feature key areas of shared interest, including energy, climate and sustainability, and robotics. It’s great to see all of these first steps and I’m looking forward to where this can lead.

Professor Iain GordonVice-Principal and Head of the College of Science and Engineering

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The University of Toronto is based in Ontario, Canada and was founded in 1827, with a longstanding reputation for innovation and research.  

Recent collaborative activity

We began a seed funding partnership with Toronto University in 2021. This initiative will run until 2024 offering opportunities for Edinburgh researchers to work with colleagues in Toronto to fund collaborative projects.  Six collaborative projects recently received seed funding through this partnership to help strengthen the positive impact that universities can have by working with local and global partners.

Project case study: Reimagining Platforms 

One of the projects to receive funding was Reimagining Platforms: Technologies, Markets and Labour, led by Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh, and Tero Karppi, University of Toronto.

Platforms refer to the interaction between technology, software, and data. These platforms include social media, apps, and businesses like food delivery services. Most of us will interact with a platform daily, whether browsing social media to see what’s happening in the world, listening to a podcast as we travel to work, or choosing to have our dinner delivered. 

The initial stage of the project saw Edinburgh host a one-day symposium late last year which brought together academics, community, and local partners to discuss the future of platforms. Attracting 35 speakers from across the globe, the event aimed to develop methods and concepts to analyse the different futures of platforms and platform economies. The Reimaging Platforms symposium explored and discussed the impact that platforms can have on our lives as well as what impact society can have on them. 

The team’s community partner for the project is the Workers Observatory, based in Edinburgh, which collectively challenges conditions in the self-employed and gig work economy to help improve and modify working conditions. 

Other awarded projects 

• RNA Communication: Mechanisms, Applications, and Public Engagement 

• Trauma-informed care for children and youth: Bridging knowledge and practice between Canada and Scotland

• Photovoltaic Imagination: Solar Strategies for Community Integrated Research-Creation and Graduate Training 

• Youth Sport: Learning from the Pandemic 

• Reparative Work and Care in Cultural Institutions: Bringing Cultural and Professional Action into Relation 

• Imaging in the Book of Psalms: Past, Present, and Future 

Cornell University is a private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is one of the leading universities in the USA.

Edinburgh and Cornell have collaborated on seed funds which bring staff from partner institutions together to develop joint projects to strengthen shared strategic priorities and develop multi-disciplinary cutting-edge research and teaching to create academic and societal impact.  We began our seed funding partnership with Cornell University in 2023. This initiative will run until 2026 offering opportunities for researchers at Edinburgh and  Cornell to fund collaborative projects. 

Recent collaborative activity

Eight projects received funding through our partnership with Cornell as part of their Global Hubs initiative. The grants were awarded in December 2022 and will run for a year. 

Project case study: Frontiers of Finance 

Led by Edinburgh academic Kevin Donovan (African and Development Studies) alongside Amiel Bize (Anthropology) from Cornell, this project explores the “Frontiers of finance: Debt, Insurance, and Financial Innovation" in Kenya. 

Contemporary Kenya is leading in financial innovation, with products being designed to meet a range of needs and focusing on “financial inclusion”. These products target groups previously marginalised by the financial industry. Yet the risks of over-indebting and further marginalising people experiencing poverty are stark.

The project analyses micro-insurance schemes and digital debt products and considers what financial expansion looks like in practice. They plan to use this research as an opportunity to cultivate a broader conversation about financial frontiers - both in the teaching and by creating a research network that can bring together scholars working on similar questions in other regional contexts. 

Other awarded projects 

• Does a strange subunit of nature’s primary CO2-fixing enzyme change its kinetics and promote liquid-liquid phase separation? 

• Preparing for flight: How do malaria parasites maximise transmission 

• Did we spot life? False biosignatures in exoplanet reflectance spectra

• Assisting Bird Audio Identification with On-Device Machine Learning Model for Species Range Estimation 

• Making the Thermal Future: A Cornell-Edinburgh Platform for Interdisciplinary Collaboration 

• GEOHUB: A Trans-Atlantic Collaboration on Deep Geothermal Energy Risk Communication 

• Advancing Cornell-Edinburgh Leadership in Sustainability Education