“There’s a big push in the UK for developments in battery energy,” says Mauro Pasta, researcher and Project Leader at the newly established Faraday Institution. Founded in 2017 to fund research into electrochemical energy storage, the Institution aims to make batteries lighter, cheaper and more efficient. St Edmund Hall academics Peter Bruce and Mauro Pasta are at the helm of this new research.
The founding of the Faraday Institution itself was the result of a collaboration between Peter Bruce and his colleagues, including Professor Sir Mark Walport. Following their proposal, signed jointly with the Ford Motor Company, they received £246 million of governmental funding for the establishment of the Faraday Challenge. £78 million of this sum was earmarked for the Faraday Institution, based at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Didcot, whose aim is to tackle fundamental scientific problems at scale with multidisciplinary teams from both industry and academia.