‘Proof of Concept’ Awards
The ‘Proof of Concept’ fund, the first of its kind in the UK, is designed to help Scottish universities to take forward ideas at pre-development stage to test their validity and investigate their commercial potential. Three of nine successful projects were submitted by this University which took the lion’s share of the biotechnology funding.

Scottish Diet

Professor Annie Anderson, Applied Nutrition Research Centre, is co-author of a study into Scotland’s dietary health which concludes that Scots’ propensity for unhealthy foods goes almost all the way up the social scale. Professor Anderson was also involved in drawing up the Scottish Diet Action Plan whose recommendations have been endorsed by the Scottish Parliament.

Heart Research Centre
The proposed £3 million Institute for Cardiovascular Research will pool the strengths of existing specialist teams to examine heart disease in terms of vascular medicine, food and diet, and population studies. Project co-ordinator, Professor Jill Belch, has recently completed a study on the effect of various oil supplements in the diet and has recommended eating fish four times per week to reduce heart disease.

Partnership with St Andrews
The Universities of Dundee and St Andrews have embarked on a pioneering partnership, backed by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, to build on their complementary strengths and discover new opportunities for collaboration. Among the early developments are new degrees in optoelectronics and environmental biology with input from each university. Partnerships with other universities are also being developed.

Discovering new alliances

A Wider Access Study Centre has been established to co-ordinate the University’s highly successful access schemes which have made higher education a reality for hundreds of adults and young people from all sectors of the community. The new Centre offers a range of year-long, part-time and shorter full-time access courses tailored to individual students’ needs. The Access Summer School was praised as an example of best practice at a major UK conference on social inclusion. Dundee was one of only five Scottish universities included in the Royal Bank of Scotland’s bursary scheme for disadvantaged students. Some 10% of the undergraduate intake comes via our access courses.