BBSRC FTMA 2024-2027 St Andrews Dundee JHI

The University of St Andrews, the University of Dundee, and the James Hutton Institute are partnering to address the BBSRC priority area 'Building a Green Future'. Their FTMA 2024-2027 programme uses leading plant, microbial and sustainability-relevant research to develop cross-disciplinary knowledge and enhanced career opportunities for early-career researchers (ECRs) and research technical professionals (RTPs) in East Scotland.

The partnership will build tighter working relationships with agri-food businesses, reducing carbon emissions and expensive wastage by improving crop farming efficiency, and enhancing crop resilience in a changing climate. The Research Organisations will learn from business and policy challenges facing the transition to net-zero agriculture, and support innovation by enabling secondments and exchanges between academia, research institutions, and industry. The partners will focus on new technical skills development for advancing net-zero agricultural food systems. It will also support sustainability training to decarbonise research methods in the BBSRC remit. The partners will share their learning with BBSRC and the sector.

The partnership represents the Organisations' distinctive dual commitment to research for advancing agri-food and environmental sustainability, and to decarbonising our research activities more generally. St Andrews (USTAN) will be carbon neutral by 2035 and sources energy from its £25M biomass plant and new solar array. The University's life sciences research is shaped by the BBSRC-remit St Andrews Network for Climate, Energy, Environment. The University of Dundee's (UoD) research divisions of Plant Sciences and Molecular Microbiology tackle issues relevant to net zero agriculture and soil carbon sequestration, and their Research Sustainability Officer supports and promotes sustainable research design throughout the School of Life Sciences. The James Hutton Institute (JHI) aims to be carbon neutral by 2040. In...