Cambridge University’s Museums and Botanic Garden secure significant funding boost from Research England and CUBG’s Director is awarded prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant.
The Garden is to receive funding from Research England’s Higher Education Museums, Galleries and Collections (HEMG) programme. This vital financial support – £3 million a year – spanning a five-year period, will support nine of Cambridge University’s museums and collections, including the Botanic Garden.
The funding will ensure the incredible resources contained within the University’s Museums and Botanic Garden collections can be widely shared to broader audiences. It will also inspire new avenues of research and support the wider academic community.
CUBG’s Director, Professor Beverley Glover says:
“We are delighted to receive this funding which recognises the value of our work making our excellent living collection of plants accessible to researchers in the UK and around the world.”
The University cares for the country’s highest concentration of internationally important collections outside London, with more than five million works of art, artefacts and specimens across its collections.
In addition to the Research England funding, we are also delighted to share that CUBG’s Director, Professor Beverley Glover, is one of four Cambridge researchers to be awarded the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant. This funding provides leading senior researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
The news was announced today, 11 April, with 255 Advanced Grants made to outstanding research leaders across Europe, as part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. Four University of Cambridge researchers are amongst those to receive this prestigious and competitive funding.
It is only possible for me to do this work because of the amazing living collection at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, and I’m thrilled that the ERC is keen to support it.
Beverley is Professor of Plant Systematics and Evolution in the Department of Plant Sciences as well as CUBG’s Director. She was awarded funding for her project Convergent evolution of floral patterning through alternative optimisation of mechanical parameter space.
She says: “This funding will enable us to explore how iridescent colour evolved repeatedly in different flowers. We think it will shed new light on evolution itself, as we think about the development of iridescence structure from a mechanical perspective, focusing on the forces acting as a petal grows and the mechanical properties of the petal tissue.”
