Cambridge Graphene Centre

The Cambridge Graphene Centre gained fresh prominence in April 2026 when Professor Andrea Ferrari, the Centre's founder, announced that the European Commission had approved €211m of Italian state aid for CamGraPhIC, the graphene photonics company he co-founded with Dr Marco Romagnoli. Ferrari described the award as the largest single grant ever made to a University of Cambridge spinout. The Centre supplied the foundational graphene research and the academic leadership from which CamGraPhIC emerged.

The Cambridge Graphene Centre is a research centre at the University of Cambridge focused on graphene and related two-dimensional materials. Established around 2013, it sits within the UK's graphene research ecosystem alongside the National Graphene Institute in Manchester, but is oriented towards photonics, electronics, and composite materials rather than Manchester's broader manufacturing focus. Its mission combines fundamental research with the commercialisation of graphene-derived technologies and industry partnerships, of which CamGraPhIC is the highest-profile product to date.

The CamGraPhIC outcome crystallises the strategic tension in the Centre's position. Its research is world-leading and its spinout capabilities are evidenced by the grant described as ten times any prior UK Cambridge award, yet the resulting manufacturing, jobs, and industrial capital have landed in Italy rather than Britain. The Centre thus becomes a case study in the lab-to-factory gap that Onward's Venturing Out policy series has been documenting for four years, and against which the UK Government's quantum commercialisation programme was explicitly designed as a corrective.