Facilities
We’ve invested in a modern campus with cutting-edge research departments and facilities to meet the need of our global network of students, staff and partners.
Facilities and resources for industry
While our equipment and facilities primarily support teaching and research, we're closely linked with businesses, including through research partnerships, industry-funded postgraduate researchers and knowledge transfer partnerships.
Our Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) and business incubation centre are just two examples of state-of-the-art facilities that support industry innovation – explore the full list of facilities available at each of our Faculties in the accordions below.
Our Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health invests heavily in its research infrastructure, which are also made available to academic, clinical and industrial partners. These include:
- An extensive array of technology platforms, staffed by experienced research technology professionals.
- A number of challenge-focussed interdisciplinary initiatives developing cross-platform pipelines, including our Single Cell Research Hub, Stoller Analytical Centre for Clinical Discovery and Diagnosis, and Wellcome Discovery Research Platform.
- World-class cancer facilities under our Manchester Cancer Research Centre, including our Proton Beam Therapy and Research Centre and CRUK Radiotherapy Centre of Excellence.
Our Faculty of Humanities offers discipline-focused and dedicated research laboratories, workshops, and performance spaces, as well as the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, the Whitworth (art gallery) and Manchester Museum.
- The John Rylands Research Institute and Library is home to our special collections – ranked second in the UK and in the top five internationally.
- The Whitworth art and design collections are housed in an award-winning building transformed by a £15 million investment, which created improved research and engagement facilities and new exhibition spaces.
- The Manchester Museum collections span more than one million objects, with research collaborations and public engagement further enabled by a £13 million investment to create expanded exhibition space and new South Asia and Chinese Culture galleries.
- The Martin Harris Centre incorporates two major performance spaces: the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall and the John Thaw Studio Theatre. The Centre also has electroacoustic composition studios.
- The Data Visualisation Observatory, the first of its kind in the UK, is a 3D immersive visualisation facility that offers interactive visualisation of large data sets (such as health, manufacturing processes etc) with laser-sharp definition on a cylindrical matrix of 72 full HD screens.
Our Faculty of Science and Engineering has a substantial portfolio of large equipment infrastructure, shared by research groups and other academic and industry partners.
- The Jodrell Bank Observatory which operates the UK’s e-MERLIN telescope array and hosts the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) headquarters.
- The Henry Royce Institute, the hub for the UK’s national facility for advanced materials, which is accessible to other higher education institutions and industry. The Institute's 2D materials focus is underpinned by equipment offered through our National Graphene Institute and the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre.
- The world-leading Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility.
- The National Grid Power Systems Research Centre, the largest high-voltage laboratory at any UK university.
- A number of EPSRC National Research Facilities including our Michael Barber Centre for Collaborative Mass Spectrometry based at our Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, and the Dalton Nuclear Institute’s Cumbrian Facility, part of the UK government's National Nuclear User Facility.
- The Firs Environmental Research Station incorporates the University of Manchester Botanical Grounds, and the Manchester Air Quality Supersite and is a green hub for research, teaching and community engagement.
The University of Manchester Library is the only National Research Library in the north of England. With more than ten million items, it is the largest non-legal deposit library in the UK, holding the most extensive digital collections of any UK academic library.
Our ESRC-funded SafePod facility allows researchers to access sensitive and secure datasets from participating data centres (including the Office for National Statistics Secure Research Service, UK Data Service, and SAIL Databank) on campus in the Main Library.
The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE (Race Archives and Community Engagement) Centre, based at Manchester’s Central Library, holds unique collections and archives that tell the story of race, migration, anti-racism activism and the fight for social justice in Greater Manchester and beyond.
Our research IT infrastructure includes:
- High Performance and High Throughput Computing (HPC/HTC) including ‘free-at-point-of-use’ access for smaller-scale users;
- a Research Software Engineer Team to provide a fully cost-recovered service;
- research applications support and training covering programming, software engineering and research IT facilities;
- research data storage (8TB) per researcher, with higher requirements costed into grants;
- significant IT investment to extend the digitisation, curation and access to the University’s cultural assets and to support open research.