Interdisciplinary research facilities

The York-JEOL Nanocentre

This purpose built, £5.5 million interdisciplinary facility is home to some of the world’s most powerful and sophisticated microscopes, enabling scientists to probe deep into the very stuff of life and matter. Created in collaboration with Japan’s leading manufacturer of high-tech scientific instruments – Tokyo based JEOL – the new facility and its research teams are playing a key role in developing the Natural Sciences programme.

Professor Gai said: “Our technology is going to take us into a new and completely different world of nano and molecular technology providing access at the most fundamental level – that’s the really exciting part about it.”

Centre for Hyperpolarisation in Magnetic Resonance (CHyM)

Most people will be familiar with an MRI scanner. But the scientists at this recently built £7million facility are developing new imaging techniques that will transform the quality, precision, and speed with which doctors can assess the needs of a patient using scanning technologies developed at York.

Here chemists, biologists, psychologists, engineers, clinicians, and the private sector, are collaborating in research projects that could lead to Alzheimer's disease being diagnosed in minutes using a simple brain scan; and where the sensitivity of an average hospital scanner could be increased by 200,000 times. This project once again demonstrates how a multi-disciplinary approach is able to make breakthroughs in medical science that would otherwise have been impossible. 

Biological Physics and Biophysics

Biological Physics and Biophysics at York involves biophysics research and teaching which includes experimental and theoretical biophysics and physical science tools and techniques to address biophysics questions in the life sciences, physical methods of relevance to applications in biomedicine, and approaches which use biophysics in the context of biological-derived material to explore new physics.

The Biophysics Group is an enthusiastic, growing team comprising multiple biophysics research groups spanning multiple research themes in the Physics Department at the University of York, and we interface closely with the University of York’s Biological Physical Sciences Institute (BPSI) and through a range of cross-departmental collaborations between physical and life scientists focused on a range of biophysics questions.