"This proposal brings together Procter and Gamble (the world’s largest producer of packaged consumer goods), with Durham University (a world top-50 science faculty in a research-intensive university) to train ESRs capable of bringing market-changing research innovations to a wide range of product areas. Modern consumer products have to be highly sophisticated to achieve the performance levels consumers demand, and often have to be significantly over-engineered to deliver acceptable levels of reliability and stability. This can lead to significant sustainability issues. Product innovations enabling the reduction of active ingredients, better performance with lower consumer energy consumption and lower post-usage waste will have significant impact.
The simultaneous requirement for stability in storage and efficacy during usage requires product formulations to be remarkably complex multi-component multi-phase systems with many interacting molecular species. Transformative innovations can therefore only be achieved through molecular-level insight, understanding and control. The Molecular Interactions in Complex Systems European Industrial Doctorate (MICSED) will provide the theoretical tools, molecular scale experimental probes and mechanistic understanding required to achieve real insight and predictive ability. The toolkits it provides will enable sustainable innovations in Hygiene, Laundry and Personal Care products. The new insights into underlying molecular interactions and the capability to quantitatively predict how systems behave have potential to enable disruptive innovation and paradigm-changing new sustainable technology platforms which can be reapplied well beyond P&G’s fast moving consumer market.
MICSED will showcase Europe as a centre for industry-academia partnership working. With P&G serving 4.5 billion of the world’s 7 billion consumers the potential for economic and environmental impact is significant."