Durham University (officially known as The University of Durham) is a collegiate research university in Durham, North East England. It was founded by an Act of Parliament in 1832 and granted a Royal Charter in 1837. It was one of the first universities to open in England for more than 600 years and has a claim towards being the third oldest university in England.
Fusion research at Durham University is concentrated in the Department of Physics, which hosts the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation (CfAI) and the Centre for Material Physics (CMP). CfAI specialize in the development of new diagnostic instrumentation for magnetically confined fusion plasmas (tokamaks), hardware-accelerated computer simulations and interpretation of fast ion diagnostics. The research includes both new optical instrumentation and methods for efficient handling of large volumes of real-time data. CMP host a superconductivity group investigating the behaviour of high temperature superconductors in high magnetic fields of relevance to future fusion tokamaks including ITER. Durham is a mmber of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Fusion Science and Technology, in partnership with the universities of York, Liverpool, Manchester and Oxford.