Today's consumers are trying to eat healthier, fresher, and consume less processed foods. Such a change in lifestyle necessitates new improved requirements on food traceability and quality. Companies require systems to guarantee their products' freshness, healthiness and high standard. A time-temperature indicator (TTI) can display the history of temperature over time for pharmaceutical, medical and food products to indicate whether they have been exposed to excessive heat or cold to guarantee the product's quality and safety. There are chemical, physical, and biological TTIs already on the market based on different principles of colour change that are divided into: partial and total indicators, depending on their response mechanism. There are still a number of problems with them, such as the inaccuracy of temperature monitoring, difficulty in accustoming the kinetic features and the high cost. A novel method for creating strongly coloured temperature sensitive polymer photonic crystals has been developed. Contained within the polymer crystals are ordered 2D one-atom thick sheets of carbon (called graphene). These crystals are mechanically robust, freestanding and flexible. They are structurally coloured materials that are iridescent so the colour changes with the viewing angle and orientation. Their sensitive mechano-chromic response (simple visible colour changes induced by mechanical deformation) is suitable for a variety of sensing applications. The aim of this project is to engineer low-cost, non-polluting and highly sensitive TTIs based on photonic crystals that change colour with temperature outperforming commercially-available TTIs. The shelf-life data and the activation energy are the key design parameters for a TTI that will constitute main research questions. It is essential that the activation energy of a TTI matches the activation energy of particular products.

Detection of special nuclear materials (SNM), is of vital importance to prevent nuclear terrorism and to secure states’ national security. Neutron detection is a particularly useful tool to identify SNM and neutron-sensitive scintillators have many promising properties, such as ease of use, good time resolution, and high detection efficiency. In this project we develop a new state-of-the art neutron sensitive scintillator using on nanostructured scintillating materials. Based on the early advancements that our research team has made, we propose Li (or B) incorporated nanostructured ZnO devices for highly efficient thermal neutron detection. These devices use a novel nanorod array design that greatly increases the effective surface area and efficiency of the sensor. Cost effective low temperature hydrothermal growth is used to obtain ZnO nanorod arrays. The state-of-the-art design of the nanorod array combines the key advantages of a low cost growth technique together with environmentally friendly and widely available materials. The Global Fellow (GF) has outstanding experience in Nuclear Science and Technology and has wide expertise in radiation and nuclear physics. The supervisor at the partner organization (Georgia Tech, USA) is a renowned Professor in radiation physics and holds a highly relevant patent. The supervisor at the beneficiary organisation (University of Surrey, UK), has a strong background in the physics of materials for new detectors and has recently developed novel nanocomposite scintillators and organic neutron detectors, both of which are highly relevant to the project. The GF worked on neutron measurements under the supervision of the host at Georgia Tech between 2013-2015, and therefore has the required expertise to deliver this program through effective collaboration with both partner institutions.

SusTPol [Sustainable Tourism evidence-informed Policy] advances the understanding of using sustainability indicators to inform the governance of urban tourism. EU tourism policies recognise the importance of sustainability for competiveness, and the Commission contracted the University of Surrey to develop the European Tourism Indicator System. Yet the Commission still equates success to tourism’s contribution to growth and employment, and both Eurostat and European Cities Marketing measure tourist volume and expenditure, but not data on the impact that tourism has on residents or the environment. This IF contributes to implementing Communication “Europe, the world's No 1 tourist destination – a new political framework for tourism in Europe” and the Europe 2020 Strategy, by 1) experimenting with performance indicators of how tourism contributes to the EU policy on the Urban Environment, and 2) empowering policy makers so tourism contributes to implementing policies for sustainable urban planning and design. SusTPol analyses how tourist boards learn about sustainability indicators, adapt them to their needs, transform their governance systems and exploit the competitive benefits accrued. SusTPol collects baseline data (O1), supports tourist boards implement change in the form of policy-making experiments to support sustainable tourism development (O2) and conducts a Realist Evaluation (O3) of the contextual factors that allow for the use of indicators to support the selection and implementation of policy mechanisms that promote sustainable development. The tourist boards in the cities of Amsterdam (Netherlands), Barcelona (Spain), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Vienna (Austria) agreed to participate as pilots, adapting their tourism planning, visitor management and marketing based on the results of residents’ social impact assessment of tourism. The outcomes will inform European Cities Marketing, enhancing the transferability and impact of this project.