Cutting-edge research into priority areas
UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) flagship Future Leaders Fellowships allow universities and businesses to develop their most talented early career researchers and innovators and to attract new people to their organisations, including from overseas.
This round’s list of successful projects include:
- a project that examines aluminium-ion batteries (AiBs), which lower supply chain risks and lower environmental footprint compared to lithium-ion batteries
- research into the lived experience of criminal justice systems that critically examines participation and coproduction in criminal justice
- research into the links between democratic stability, economic inequality and political polarisation
Climate-proof agriculture
Among the future leaders announced today is Dr Sarah Guiziou at the Earlham Institute.
Dr Guiziou will lead research on understanding how plant roots develop complex structures that enable access to unevenly distributed soil resources.
This fellowship will engineer root and root microbiomes, developing plants with deep-root architecture.
These plants will be suited to foraging for limited water supplies and engineering interactions between plants and beneficial microbes, promoting nutrient uptake.
In the long term, this work will develop new tools and approaches for engineering plants and bacteria and provide solutions for sustainable agriculture.
This has the potential to help tackle the twin challenges of unpredictable rainfall and rapid expansions in the geographical ranges of pests and pathogens due to climate change.
Medication for strokes
Another project, led by Dr Jatinder Minhas at the University of Leicester, will lead research into strokes, the second leading cause of death worldwide.
This project focuses on the possibility of sodium bicarbonate helping to improve brain blood flow.
To test this, this project will confirm that blockages after bleeding are caused by reduced blood flow within the brain.
This fellowship will provide advanced training from international experts in brain blood flow and techniques to assess the brain blood flow and imaging.
This collaboration will support the development of innovative networks across the UK to enable capacity to deliver studies that bridge the gap between our understanding of strokes.
Developing new ideas into knowledge
UKRI Chief Executive, Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, said:
UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowships provide researchers and innovators with long-term support and training to develop ambitious, transformative ideas.
The programme supports the research and innovation leaders of the future to transcend disciplinary and sector boundaries, bridging the gap between academia and business.
The fellows announced today demonstrate how these awards continue to drive excellence, and to shorten the distance from discovery to prosperity and public good.
Projects announced today
Some of the projects announced today include:
Dr Laura Lander, King’s College London
Dr Lander will lead a project that advances the development of AiBs as an innovative, sustainable and resilient alternative to lithium-ion batteries.
This project will employ a multidisciplinary research approach combining materials science with environmental, economic, policy and supply chain considerations.
Despite important advantages to lithium-ion batteries, AiBs are still under-researched, and this project lays out an ambitious programme to address these key technical challenges holding back AiB development.
Dr Gillian Buck, University of Chester
Dr Buck will lead research into lived experience within criminal justice.
This fellowship is urgent given the growing numbers of people cycling through systems of punishment.
This project examines participatory criminal justice, wherein people draw on experiences of criminalisation to re-evaluate and co-deliver justice systems.
This approach has the potential to promote desistance from crime and offers people new social skills, connections and opportunities to ‘do and make good’.
Dr Miriam Sorace, University of Kent pending transfer to University of Reading
Dr Sorace’s project focuses on two contemporary challenges to democracy that go hand in hand: economic inequality and political polarisation.
This project argues that economic inequality is connected to political polarisation through changes in individuals’ social networks caused by inequality.
It will investigate this hypothesis of the inequality-polarisation link by probing two sub-mechanisms: the social contact and interaction micro-mechanism as well as the social comparison micro-mechanism.
This research opens the ‘mechanism black-box’ of the inequality-polarisation link that is essential to design appropriate interventions, which can in turn stop the growth of both inequality and polarisation.
Dr Shilpi Srivastava, Institute of Development Studies
Dr Srivastava will lead a project that focuses on droughts and floods in India, Bangladesh and the UK.
The scientists on this project will observe and work with emergency and disaster managers, water infrastructure operators and engineers, and control room operators to explore their strategies of uncertainty management.
The project will draw on cross-disciplinary perspectives and methodological innovation combining social sciences, arts and design, and storyline approaches.
Through this the researchers will identify what is working best, where, and why, and co-produce excellent applied research to amplify reach and impact.
Dr Marie Yang, ReNewVax Limited
Dr Yang’s fellowship studies a pathogen known as Streptococcus agalactiae, also known as Group B strep or GBS.
This is one of the World Health Organization’s most wanted pathogens, with a disease-burden estimated at 319,000 new-born cases globally, resulting in 90,000 deaths.
Unfortunately, there is currently no vaccine for the prevention of GBS disease.
This project aims to address two of the key technical gaps in the development of a vaccine to Streptococcus agalactiae, which includes the development of a highly sensitive and predictive human cell-based model.
It also pre-empts the regulatory and ethical hurdles involved in a maternal vaccine by proposing a model with healthy volunteers in a controlled, safe environment.
Dr Stephen Green, University of Nottingham
Dr Green will lead a fellowship that combine gravitational waves and AI.
The project uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyse gravitational-wave data and uncover secrets about our universe, aiming to develop AI tools to analyse gravitational-wave data more quickly and accurately.
This project will use these tools to make new discoveries in astrophysics and cosmology and use gravitational waves to test our understanding of gravity and fundamental physics.
In doing so, this research will benefit a variety of groups, including the gravitational-wave research community through open-source software development for data analysis.
Dr Ahsan Akram, The University of Edinburgh
Dr Akram’s research will focus on lung cancer, which is the leading cause of cancer related deaths worldwide.
This project will investigate the potential of a technology called fluorescent lifetime imaging (FLIM).
FLIM can detect emitted light from cells in the body, and the light emitted from cells within a cancer differs from that of non-cancerous cells.
The project will utilise FLIM technology during bronchoscopy (where a camera is inserted into the lungs) to obtain real-time metabolic profiles of the cancerous tissue, enabling immediate cancer diagnosis.
Further information
Future Leaders Fellows
Full list of Future Leaders Fellows and their institutions:
- Yixian Sun, University of Bath. This fellowship was awarded in round seven and is included in this announcement due to UKRI delay in confirming the award
- Pedi Obani, University of Bradford
- Rachael Durkin, Northumbria University
- Megan McDonald, University of Birmingham
- Sarah Guiziou, Earlham Institute
- Andrea Laybourn, University of Nottingham
- Xiaolei Zhang, University of Strathclyde
- Sandra Pertek, University of Birmingham
- Marie Yang, ReNewVax Limited
- David Lines, Sixfold Bioscience Ltd
- Kathryn Hesketh, University of Cambridge
- Joanne Littlefair, University of Essex
- Shilpi Srivastava, Institute of Development Studies
- Stephen Green, University of Nottingham
- Juri Smirnov, University of Liverpool
- Toby Young, Guildhall School of Music & Drama
- Karen Dempsey, Cardiff University
- Arun Advani, University of Warwick
- Jessica Moody, University of Bristol
- Yunqing Yu, The James Hutton Institute
- Fiona Jane Whelan, The University of Manchester
- Pallavi Singh, University of Essex
- Ralitsa Madsen, University of Dundee
- Rachel Edgar, Imperial College London
- Luc Rocher, University of Oxford
- Lloyd Fletcher, UK Atomic Energy Authority
- William Peveler, University of Glasgow
- Laura Lander, King’s College London
- Matthew Coak, University of Birmingham
- Jatinder Minhas, University of Leicester
- Frank Schindler, Imperial College London
- Ieuan Seymour, University of Aberdeen
- Sophie Nightingale, Lancaster University
- Tolga Birdal, Imperial College London
- Allegra Franchino, Durham University
- Kate Vredenburgh, London School of Economics and Political Science
- Mohammad Amir Anwar, The University of Edinburgh
- Miriam Sorace, University of Kent pending transfer to University of Reading
- Nikolaos Papadogiannis, University of Stirling
- Dennis Timo Egger, University of Oxford
- Katja Kornysheva, University of Birmingham
- Gillian Buck, University of Chester
- Michael Howcroft, University of Southampton pending transfer to University of Glasgow
- Katrina May Dulay, City, University of London
- Jade French, University of Leeds
- Emily Patterson, Occuity Ltd
- James Clarkson, Neo4j UK Limited
- Ahsan Akram, The University of Edinburgh
- Zoi Diamantopoulou, University of Glasgow
- Jessie Baldwin, University College London
- Ian Cadby, University of Bristol
- Tom Freeman, University of Bath
- Rachael Barry, Imperial College London
- Anna Muggeridge, University of Worcester
- Anna Subiel, National Physical Laboratory
- Laura Richards, The University of Manchester
- Zoë Thomas, University of Southampton
- Cameron Watson, University of Leeds
- Jamie Wilson, University of Liverpool
- Matthew Adesanya Adeleye, University of Cambridge
- Matthew Hannaford, University of Lincoln
- Amy Penfield, University of Bristol
- Ricarda Beckmann, The University of Edinburgh
- Balint Koczor, University of Oxford
- Daphné Lemasquerier, University of St Andrews
- Luke Caldwell, University College London
- Vanessa Graber, Royal Holloway, University of London
- Ashlea Kemp, Science and Technology Facilities Council Laboratories
- Luke Barnard, University of Reading
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