The N8 Research Partnership is a partnership created in 2006 of the eight most research-intensive universities in Northern England – Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York. The N8 Research Partnership aims to maximise the impact of this research base by identifying and co-ordinating powerful research teams and collaborations across the North of England. Collectively, the N8 universities undertake more than £650 million of research income per annum and employ over 18,000 academic staff. The N8 Research Partnership also works closely with industry. History The N8 Research Partnership initially focused on five areas of research: Ageing and Health, Energy, Molecular Engineering, Regenerative Medicine and Water. The themes were chosen to build on existing research within the partnership which had the potential for economic and social benefit. In March 2007, the N8 Research Partnership was awarded grant funding of £6 million from The Northern Way Growth Fund to set up 'virtual' collaborative Research Centres around each of these themes. N8 launched a project to map the research equipment across universities in the North and has published a toolkit and a white paper to point the way to greater collaboration between universities and improved research links with industry. A toolkit, and database, have been developed to advance this area nationally. The N8's key aim of fostering greater collaboration with industry was boosted in January 2012 when the N8 Industry Innovation Forum launched. There have to date been five IIF meetings focused on topics where there is significant cross-sector, industry-led demand for new insights and research capability on topics such as advanced materials, Food Security, and Active and Healthy Ageing. New collaboration ideas emerging from these have generated £10 million of external funding including £3 million from industry partners. Another development was the launch of the N8 High Performance Computing facility in March 2013 (now the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research; N8 CIR). This provides industry and university researchers with access to high performance computing alongside consultancy and e-infrastructure training. The original HPC supercomputer, hosted at the University of Leeds, was capable of performing 110 trillion operations per second, the equivalent of half a million iPads. In 2020 the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council granted £3.1 million funding to a new supercomputer, the Northern Intensive Computing Environment (NICE), to be hosted by Durham University on behalf of the N8 Research Partnership. The overall cost of the new