Q How are these schemes going to work, exactly?
A There will be two routes. One is to have a short PhD student placement funded entirely by impactQM. The other is to have a collaborative research project to employ someone (6-12 months), where the company and impactQM both contribute: one third from the company if it is an SME, and half otherwise, and impactQM puts in the rest. The person would be employed by QM, and could be a QM PhD student or postdoc, or someone new. (There will be some fine print, which we are still working out.)
Q What's an SME?
A A company with fewer than 250 employees.
Q I have an industry partner already lined up who is keen to take part, what should I do?
A Contact Ian Llewellyn iplATdcs.qmul.ac.uk or Lisa Hearty lmhATdcs.qmul.ac.uk who can start to get things moving. We are still putting the details of the schemes together, but can certainly talk informally.
Q Times are tough for companies at the moment - how about using the funds to bring industry people here?
A Good idea - maybe as a secondment if we can navigate any tax and HR implications ....
Q Can a Queen Mary funded start-up be an industry partner ?
A For a PhD placement, yes. For a collaborative research project , yes, if Queen Mary owns less than 50% of the shares in the start-up.
Q What is the scope of the research covered by this project? Does it have to be work already funded by EPSRC at Queen Mary?
A It can be anything that falls within EPSRCs remit, not necessarily work that is already funded by them. In particular EPSRC are keen to encourage interdisciplinary work. So, for example, something that applied a piece of maths (maths and computing are in EPSRC's remit) to a problem in biology, medicine or social science would count, as well as something applying maths to science and engineering areas).
