ERC support

Super excited to announce that the European Research Commision (ERC) has agreed to fund a project called NANOVR (NANOscale design using Virtual Reality) under their ‘Consolidator Grant’ scheme. The ERC’s generous financial support will commence in summer 2020, enabling us to continue our efforts developing the Narupa VR tools as open source community resources, and carry on exploring all sorts of interesting research applications across domains like biochemistry, materials engineering, and nanoscience!

Project Description:

Virtual reality radicalises control and design of molecular systems at the nanoscale

As scientists have made progress engineering the structures of molecular systems at the nano-scale, a new fundamental challenge has emerged: namely, our ability to understand and engineer molecular dynamics and flexibility. Drawing on the state-of-the-art in high performance computing [HPC] and virtual reality [VR], the EU-funded NANOVR project will develop a new paradigm for nano-scale design, engineering, and simulation. The project team will develop an intuitive open-source framework which enables scientists to use VR-enabled interactive simulations for understanding complex molecular systems, which they will apply to understand important problems – for example the protein-ligand interactions required to tackle emerging strains of influenza. In so doing, we will obtain new insight into molecular flexibility, and accelerate molecular design across important domains spanning biochemistry, materials chemistry, & catalysis.