HEC Materials Chemistry Consortium


Application Procedure (last updated: 3rd January 2025)

Membership

To become a full member of the Materials Chemistry Consortium (MCC), please contact Scott Woodley (Principle Investigator and Project Manager) and CC klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk. Applicants will: (a) have an academic appointment where he/she is eligible to apply as a PI for standard EPSRC funding; (b) provide a summary (two sides of A4 max) of HEC based research that they would like to conduct (now and in the future) and how this complements the remit of the Materials Chemistry Consortium; and (c) have an opportunity to give a presentation of their work to other members at the next convenient meeting (a good opportunity to establish new collaborations!). Full members can also request user accounts for their group. Typically, I refer to "full members" as "group leaders", whereas the term "MCC members" will also include their researchers who have access to our HEC resources (e.g., have an account under project e05 on ARCHER2 or an account with MCC on YOUNG). Please note that requests for HEC time will need to be justified later, following the guidelines given below. Note also, when there is an oversubscription of time resources, constraints on requests may be imposed on new members; a cap which will itself be relaxed over time. Finally, please note that membership applications are typically considered just before one of our one-day meetings (see below) and I may not contact you until just before such a meeting. If you have not had a reply 1 week before the next advertised meeting, then it would be prudent to send Scott Woodley an email to check all is well.



Requests for HEC Resources (ARCHER2 and YOUNG)

One-day meetings are typically held online or at Daresbury just before a new six month allocation period on ARCHER2. During MCC meetings we decide how to redistribute our allocation of national HEC resources (CPU time) for the next six month period for Tier-1 and Tier-2 HEC facilities, namely ARCHER2 and YOUNG, to full MCC members (group leaders), once submitted proposals have been assessed by the executive committee. Note that all members can send questions about any submitted proposal to "klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk" and authors have an opportunity to defend their proposed work. Dates of our next meeting, along with deadline for submission of proposals, will be advertised on our main noticeboard (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/klmc/mcc) and are typically held in January and just into the Summer break (June/July).

Applications for national HEC time from each full member should be sent to "klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk" as attachments (one spreadsheet and one pdf per theme you are appying for resources from) of ONE email, either from the full member or from a member chosen from his/her group (who should also CC the application to the full member of the group). Please also refer to latest info/instructions given below and on the MCC noticeboard.

Note that upon accepting HEC resources distributed via the MCC, you agree to the MCC management holding data required in order to conduct the work of the MCC, support our 3-day annual conferences (at least attend once every three years), and help the MCC in its obligations to report back to EPSRC, promote good practice and disseminate outputs of the MCC (which includes the correct acknowledgments where appropriate). Help with reporting back to EPSRC may include the production of an annual report and the completion of ResearchFish; typically this requires each group to: (a) keep our Google forms up-to-date with regards to your publications, and the qualifications obtained and destinations of your group members; and (b) complete their own short annual report for each theme you have had resources and which will be required by 1st February. Incomplete group summaries, missing data in Google forms or missing reports may invalidate submitted proposals.

Note that I upload a summary and all proposals within the restricted part of our website before the meeting (and previous documents provide examples of what is expected!). At least two days before the MCC committee meeting, please check the summary I upload onto the website to ensure that your projects are listed correctly (only the Group Leader and names listed in bold will be given access to allocated time).

Remember, for each proposal one of the named applicants must be present at our meeting - particularly the project leader (full member) if making large requests, but we understand this is not always possible - to answer any questions put forward by other members. The MCC committee may decide to run this procedure via email. For large time requests, we may ask for one of the named applicants to give a short summary of the proposed work or a short presentation. We also run 3-day annual conference, and expect members to report their work at these events (or if invited to present their work during the morning of one of our one day meetings).


Further details and Templates
I will copy details straight from your submitted group-summary into the master spreadsheet, which will be posted online for you to check as it is also be used for calculating allocations, whereas the pdfs of proposed work will be uploaded straight onto our website. If the "group summary" spreadsheet and the name of the pdfs or annaul report is completed as requested, then this makes my life much easier. Please remember that we have over 100 full members, so let's share the effort to collect and present the details online!! If you have used the wrong name for your pdf or the details in your group summary is incorrect then this may lead to your request being missed or your request reduced or even declined.

Group summary form: please download and complete this group summary form. Full instructions can be found within the spreadsheet.

Proposed Work: for each theme you are applying for resource from please create one pdf using the Proposed work template for each project requiring HEC time. Within the template, update the red text and then change this text to black and remove instructions given in a blue font. If submitting more than one proposal within a theme (a current list of which is given below), please concatenate the proposals in that theme into one document so that the proposal requesting the most time resources starts on the first page, followed, on a new page, by the next most time resource request, etc. Remember to rename the proposal documents, before sending, using the convention:

{theme code}-{group code}.pdf

where hopefully you can also convert the Word document into a pdf. The theme codes are also listed below and the group code consists of three letters and is based on the name of the full member (please ask if you do not know your group code).

Time will be allocated to the budget code:

e05-{theme code}-{group code} on ARCHER2 and MCC_{theme code}_{group code} on YOUNG

Google forms: The details of all publications that contain an appropriate acknowledgment and reference to our EPSRC grant number should be provided. Where a publication involves more than one group, please only list the publication within the group which supplied the largest fraction of HEC time. Please enter the details directly into our Google Forms. As well as details of publications resulting from your use of HEC resources obtined via the MCC, we also need to be able to report how access to HEC resources have helped members with their careers. For example: for members that leave your group please supply employment details of where they moved on to (job title and name of company or university); if they were a member of staff (PDRA) please also provide which months/years they worked in your group; if they have graduated then please provide the name of the student, title of their degree, which university and the year it was awarded. Specific examples pre-2014 can be found here, which is kept on our "password protected" part of the MCC website. Please note that any member of your group can submit the data, after which you will receive an email that will contain a link that you can use later if you need to update this data (I would keep the links to destinations/qualifications for each of your members and, if details correct, delete links to publications).
Updates on details of invited / prestigious presentations at conferences, where MCC supported work was disseminated will be captured in the short annual report.

Annual Report: please download and complete the annual report template for each theme and send to klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk by 1st February. Full instructions can be found within the template - please follow these as the template has been designed to make it easier to transfer information (cut and paste) into our full annual report (if requested by EPSRC) and/or onto our webpages for disseminating MCC work to the public.


Please note, any unused time that was previously allocated at our last meeting will be lost to us at the end of the allocation period, so we will actively redistribute from budgets that are currently underspent if the MCC is also currently underspending - EPSRC expects our usage to be fairly constant throughout the allocation periods.



Current themes for the ARCHER and YOUNG service

Biomaterials and Soft Matter
Energy Generation, Storage and Transport
Environment and Smart Materials
Fundamentals of Bulk Materials
Fundamentals of Surfaces and Interfaces
Fundamentals of Low Dimensional Materials
Materials Discovery
Reactivity and Catalysis

complete list 		Theme code

biosoft
power
enviro
bulk
surfin
nano
discov
react

-


Old themes for the ARCHER and THOMAS service

Biomaterials
Catalytic Science
Energy Generation and Efficiency
Energy Storage
Environment
Nano and Defect Structures
Organic and Soft Matter
Surfaces and Interfaces

complete list
 Theme code

biomat
react
gener
store
enviro
nandef
softm
surfin


Old themes employed on the HECToR service

Biomaterials
Environmental materials research
Materials for energy technology
Nano and defect chemistry
Quantum Devices - Modelling of Quantum Optical Devices
Reactivity
Surface and interfacial science

complete list 		Theme code

biomat
enviro
power
nandef
qmdev
react
surfin