Our activities cover all things aquatic, from the headwaters of river catchments out to the shelf sea. Our applied research varies from exploring new ideas with the academic community through the development of models, guidance and manuals, to the provision of specialist and often bespoke solutions for industry.

As a non-profit-distributing organisation, our profits are used to fund our own research programme and a range of activities that help make outputs from this programme available to the broader industry.

Delivering research excellence

The majority of our research projects are commissioned by clients who need to find solutions to specific problems.

In the private sector, we provide innovative engineering solutions in response to challenges that our clients need to address.

In the public sector, we work with policy makers, executive agencies and their consultants to help develop policy and to deliver and implement research advances in their organisations.

We also lead and coordinate national and international consortia, and carry out interdisciplinary, collaborative research projects on nationally and internationally funded programmes.

This commissioned research is carried out alongside our specialist consultancy projects, and this continuous exchange between practitioners and researchers helps us to focus our self-funded research agenda where there is a real need.

Putting research into practice

A core business objective is to help the wider industry take-up and exploit new knowledge. We do this by taking knowledge developed in the academic sector and helping transfer it in to tools and technology that can be used in practice.

We disseminate this knowledge in a number of ways. Research outcomes are published through peer-reviewed scientific journals, conferences, training courses, academic theses and books. We make papers and reports available via our ePrints repository. Summaries of our internal research projects are also published on our website.

We are an Open University Affiliated Research Center (ARC) and we have strong links with universities and research centres in the UK and beyond. We facilitate closer collaboration between academic research groups through our openly available software platform (www.fluidearth.net).

We are also committed to working in partnership with others on the implementation of new methods and techniques.