New grant to advance OU software engineering

Shutterstock-531875605 Software engineering

The Software Engineering and Design (SEAD) research group in the OU’s School of Computing and Communications has been awarded a prestigious five year Platform Grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The £1.3 million grant called Secure, Adaptive and Usable Engineering (SAUSE), will provide strategic financial support for the group over the next five years, to sustain and grow the group's research agenda, amplify its research impact, and support early career researchers.

Platform grants are made to internationally leading UK-based research groups, to ensure their continued international leadership in their discipline. The grant will also continue and grow the ongoing collaboration with Mark Levine, Professor of Social Psychology and his colleagues in the social psychology group at the University of Exeter.

Over 15 academic and industrial partners will support the group’s research, and have pledged over £900,000 in cash and in-kind support.

Principal Investigator, Bashar Nuseibeh, OU Professor of Computing, said:

“This platform grant provides both financial support for and peer recognition of the international standing of our research group, and will enable group members to engage in exciting new pilot projects to advance our software engineering and cybersecurity research in applications areas such as aviation, healthcare, sustainability and policing. The collaboration with our social psychology colleagues at the University of Exeter underlines the multi-disciplinary nature of our research programme, which is necessary in order to advance our understanding of software security and human behaviour.”