Evolution over the eons has made Nature a treasure trove of clever solutions to sustainability, resilience, and ways to efficiently utilize scarce resources. The Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering will draw lessons from nature to engineer innovative solutions to our grand challenges in energy, water, materials, health, and living space.

Rather than imitating nature out of context or succumbing to superficial analogies, research at the Centre will take a decidedly scientific approach to uncover fundamental mechanisms underlying desirable traits, and apply these mechanisms to design and synthesise artificial systems that hereby borrow the traits of the natural model. The Centre will initially focus on three key mechanisms, as they are so prevalent in nature, amenable to practical implementation, and are expected to have transformational impact on urgent issues in sustainability and scalable manufacturing. These mechanisms are: (T1) "Hierarchical Transport Networks": the way nature bridges microscopic to macroscopic length scales in order to preserve the intricate microscopic or cellular function throughout (as in trees, lungs and the circulatory system); (T2) "Force Balancing": the balanced use of fundamental forces, e.g., electrostatic attraction/repulsion and geometrical confinement in microscopic spaces (as in protein channels in cell membranes, which trump artificial membranes in selective, high-permeation separation performance); and (T3) "Dynamic Self-Organisation": the creation of robust, adaptive and self-healing communities thanks to collective cooperation and emergence of complex structures out of much simpler individual components (as in bacterial communities and in biochemical cycles).

Such nature-inspired, rather than narrowly biomimetic approach, allows us to marry advanced manufacturing capabilities and access to non-physiological conditions, with nature's versatile mechanisms that have been remarkably little employed in a rational, bespoke manner. High-performance computing and experimentation now allow us to unravel fundamental mechanisms, from the atomic to the macroscopic, in an unprecedented way, providing the required information to transcend empiricism, and guide practical realisations of nature-inspired designs.

In first instance, three examples will be developed to validate each of the aforementioned natural mechanisms, and simultaneously apply them to problems of immediate relevance that tie in to the Grand Challenges in energy, water, materials and scalable manufacturing. These are: (1) robust, high-performance fuel cells with greatly reduced amount of precious catalyst, by using a lung-inspired architecture; (2) membranes for water desalination inspired by the mechanism of biological cell membranes; (3) high-performance functional materials, resp. architectural design (cities, buildings), informed by agent-based modelling on bacteria-inspired, resp. human communities, to identify roads to robust, adaptive complex systems.

To meet these ambitious goals, the Centre assembles an interdisciplinary team of experts, from chemical and biochemical engineering, to computer science, architecture, materials, chemistry and genetics. The Centre researchers collaborate with, and seek advice from industrial partners from a wide range of industries, which accelerates practical implementation. The Centre has an open, outward looking mentality, inviting broader collaboration beyond the core at UCL. It will devote significant resources to explore the use of the validated nature-inspired mechanisms to other applications, and extend investigation to other natural mechanisms that may inform solutions to problems in sustainability and scalable manufacturing.

Potential Impact:
The Centre will be a national hub, an enabler, with a unique "platform" approach to innovation. It will stimulate many areas of critical, national importance, in particular in the focus areas of sustainable manufacturing and resource efficiency. This is underscored by letters of support from over a dozen industries (Maxeler, Shell, Johnson Matthey, AFC Energy, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Harris, Aedas, Sabic, Synfuels China, Antecy/BIOeCON, Air Products/MATGAS, GE, PSRI, ExxonMobil, and Quantachrome). More than half of these are based in the UK, or have very significant commercial, manufacturing and/or R&D activity in the UK. There is a balance of SMEs and multinationals, start-ups and companies with a long history.

Senior technical representatives from these companies will serve on the Centre's Advisory Group, and will be involved in workshops, sandpits and annual "show and tell" events. Companies will share expertise and resources. There will be joint UCL "Impact" studentships (co-funded by industry and UCL), as well as internships and secondments. This boosts the success and practical relevance of the projects, and opens roads to implementation and commercialisation. This mechanism also trains researchers to be future leaders.

UCL Business will facilitate the generation and exploitation of intellectual property, and has ample experience in doing so. An example is the Electrochemical Innovation Lab, headed by co-I Dan Brett, and established in 2011 to identify commercial opportunities early in the development cycle and accelerate progression through Technology Readiness Levels, via targeted research programmes. This already led to two spin-outs this year.

The nature-inspired engineering approach is a "natural" pathway to scalability, via its core themes of hierarchical transport networks, force balancing, and dynamic self-organisation. It enables the more efficient use of scarce resources (energy, water, materials), while delivering innovative methods to create smart materials, products and processes. The Flagship Projects developed initially in the themes are intimately related to energy, water, sustainable chemical production and the built environment. Contributing to the long-term viability of the Centre, there is an opportunity to expand beyond these areas in other projects that are seeded by the Centre, with support from industrial partners and involvement of academics from other universities. Such short- and medium-term projects will be evaluated by the Management Group and a subset of the Advisory Group to ensure quality and a close fit to the Centre Objectives.

Public engagement is an important objective of the Centre. We believe that nature-inspired engineering is a concept that can inspire the general public, including school children, in realising the significance of scientifically led engineering research. Research findings will not only be disseminated via high-impact scientific and engineering journals, but also via the popular media, a professional website, social media, public exhibitions (UCL Slade School of Fine Art, and UCL Grant Museum), and other engagement activities. This will be facilitated by our Faculty Communication Officer, Kate Oliver, and Co-I Mark Miodownik, who is himself a writer and broadcaster with regular appearances on TV and radio.

With this, the Centre aims to become recognised as the world-leading centre in nature-inspired engineering, and, thanks to its agenda focusing on sustainability, resource efficiency and scalable manufacturing, be a strong enabler to innovation, the economy and a higher quality of life.