Manchester University - Sir Henry Royce Institute

As the UK’s leading organisation for advanced materials research and innovation, the Henry Royce Institute plays a pivotal role in the country’s ambitions to develop groundbreaking materials and technologies, while fostering in parallel sustainable growth and development. Its purpose is to provide industry large and small as well as academia with the capability to develop, make, test and characterise innovative products, components and systems. To this effect, it provides easy access to state-of-the-art equipment worth more than £150m (175m euros) and to a highly trained support team.

The Henry Royce Institute, known to many simply as ‘Royce’, operates from its brand new building at the University of Manchester and works in close coordination with eight additional, leading institutions across the UK – the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Liverpool, Oxford and Sheffield, the Imperial College London, the National Nuclear Laboratory and UKAEA (UK Atomic Energy Authority) – as well as Associate Partner, the University of Cranfield. All in all, Royce coordinates over £300m (350m Euros) of facilities, making it one of the global leaders in material science: it was at the University of Manchester, just a stone’s throw away from the new Hub, that graphene – a game-changing, carbon based supermaterial 200 times stronger than steel – was discovered for the first time.