Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE)

The Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering draws lessons from nature to engineer innovative solutions to our grand challenges in energy, water, materials, health, and living space. It focuses on the discovery and application of fundamental mechanisms behind desirable traits in nature (such as scalability, efficiency or robustness) that can be applied to enable transformative solutions to challenging engineering problems (such as those related to resource efficiency, the environment and scalable manufacturing). In 2013 at the Royal Academy of Engineering Global Grand Challenges summit, the Centre received a £5M “Frontier Engineering” Award from the EPSRC, one of only five such Awards in the UK. Using theory and simulation-assisted rational design, complemented by experiments, synthesis and testing, the Centre unites a highly interdisciplinary team of researchers, from genetics and computer science to chemical and materials engineering, and architecture. Collaborations with a wide range of industrial partners allow us to accelerate the translation of research findings into practice.