DURHAM UNIVERSITY

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-01

The energy trilemma, which encompasses the balance between sustainability, security, and affordability, continues to present a formidable challenge within the UK's energy sector. As the cornerstone of future energy systems, the power grid is increasingly vulnerable to climate-related hazards such as storms, which pose a significant risk to the continuity of power supply and our communities. Additionally, the importance of addressing social equity and energy vulnerability cannot be overstated. The transition towards a sustainable energy system in the UK necessitates a comprehensive, equitable, and inclusive strategy that considers the environmental, economic, and social facets of future energy systems. SAT-Guard project is committed to addressing these multifaceted challenges through the development of innovative Satellite-aided "Forecast-Flex-Fortify" mechanisms. These mechanisms are designed to proactively manage power grids, thereby minimising power outages, enabling flexible and socially-conscious energy management, and ensuring swift and efficient power supply restoration following hazards. The specific objectives of SAT-Guard include: The development of Climate/weather-informed Digital Twins (CIDTs) to facilitate precise monitoring of renewable distributed energy resources (DERs). These CIDTs will incorporate predictive analytics of DER generation and the impact of hazards, thereby enabling proactive grid management and enhanced resilience to natural hazards. The development of flexible and socially-conscious energy management strategies to foster responsive and equitable energy communities. This will involve tailoring energy management methods to meet the unique needs of diverse communities. The formulation of hazard-resilient satellite-assisted strategies for post-hazard restoration and coordination, aimed at reducing recovery times following disruptions. The demonstration of the developed technologies within living labs to expedite their real-life impact. This will involve the integration of people, knowledge, resources, and systems to formulate effective responses to the climate change crisis. Through these objectives, SAT-Guard project seeks to pioneer a path towards a resilient, equitable, and sustainable energy future for the UK.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Supercomputers have become a core accelerant of progress in computational research disciplines and fields relying on artificial intelligence and simulations of physical phenomena. Tools including compilers, profilers, debuggers, parallelisation libraries, machine learning libraries, and so forth make this hardware infrastructure available to software developers. They unlock HPC. While there is a lot of entry-level training and material to get into development tools for supercomputing, there is no clear pathway how infrastructure professionals and researchers can transition from being ``good with HPC tools'' towards technical mastery. There is a lack of appropriate training or knowledge acquisition routes for the most advanced users already working with HPC and AI high-end computing (HAI-End computing). Since it is tools that allow us to engineer code systematically and to reason and find out why implementations behave the way they do, this lack leads into a situation where pioneer codes run and benefit from HPC - mainly through self-taught developers - but realisation variants and realisation workflows are seldom documented, assessed and compared to each other systematically. Intelligence "how to implement things" is not captured and shared. Consequently, developers struggle to benefit from HPC insight obtained through other codes, and HPC cannot unfold its full potential. In HAI-End, we deliver bespoke training for the most advanced HPC/AI user group. We recruit a small cohort of them every year from various career tracks and research fields. These future HPC champions are given an insight into how tools work, what they are capable of, what alternatives are on the table, where tools have shortcomings. Such an upskilling is only possible in close collaboration with the tool developers themselves. We therefore team up with them directly. The tool knowledge will allow the HPC champions who are already research infrastructure experts to argue in detail about different implementations, to compare them, to derive best practices and recommendations, and to identify what codes could in theory do. Their findings will be shared through papers, talks, social media and an annual conference in Durham. HAI-End trains DRI professional staff with new skills. It provides a seedcorn to allow professionals to start to argue about best-case implementations and methods, and gives them access to resources they typically do not have available: the tool experts themselves. While directly targeted on expert professionals, the acquired knowledge on "how to" indirectly makes HPC more useful to new users and communities from all research councils, and it helps all disciplines using computational infrastructure as supercomputing insight propagates into all computational disciplines. We embed our agenda into previous and current UKRI initiatives around exascale such as ExCALIBUR and AIRR to ensure that there is a direct link to UK research and UK infrastructure investments. HAI-End also aligns with recent investments in Durham around its Institute for Data Science and Advanced Research Computing, such that we can ensure that the upskilling programme will continue once HAI-End terminates.  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-01

When high energy radiation passes through aqueous materials, low energy secondary electrons are produced in high abundance. These then go on to induce chemical reactions, with the most ubiquitous one being that with a water molecule. While extensively studied though electron-impact experiments, understanding the underlying chemical physics of this two-body reaction has been challenging, in part because such experiments do not offer suitable time-resolution. Moreover, how the chemical dynamics evolve from the isolated reaction to that in a bulk aqueous environment is a critical question that remains open. Here, we propose to used time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy of water cluster anions as a direct probe of the electron-driven chemistry through the lowest energy resonance of the electron-water collision. The reaction will be monitored from the femtosecond range through to the microsecond range, offering a measure of both the initial dissociative electron attachment as well as subsequent reactions. The effect of hydrogen-bonding structure as well as cluster size will be studied to assess how the chemical dynamics and reactivity evolve within an aqueous environment. The broad objective of the proposal is to develop a new understanding of the primary processes taking place in the electron-water reaction and how this links to the bulk.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-01

This proposal aims to scope a new Collaborative Computational Project (CCP) for the Arts, Humanities, and Culture (AH&C) research community: CCP-AHC. CCP-AHC will be the first network of its kind to support the AHRC research community, and will have a significant impact nationally and internationally. We firmly believe that this proposal is timely, given the proliferation of computational tools and techniques—more specifically, HPC and AI—into various research agendas of the AHRC. With the AHRC research community increasingly dependent on all aspects of digital research infrastructure (DRI)—including skills development, compute platforms, software techniques, and the sustainable use of AI and HPC—and with few collaborative efforts focused on developing cohesive visions, initiatives, or DRI assets (including community-specific software), it is timely to launch a CCP-AHC. Over two years, we aim not only to engage all sub-communities supported by AHRC but also to involve other key players who are instrumental in shaping the relevant Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) landscape in the UK: AI/ML experts, Tier-1 and Tier-2 computing centres, training providers, AHRC data services, and the like. These intensive scoping activities will establish CCP-AHC as a viable and long-standing CCP in the UK. We believe that the proposed scoping exercise—consisting of town hall meetings, workshops, training sessions, and other engagement forums—will not only unite different communities but also seed a long-standing future for the CCP-AHC. An intensive programme of community engagement will aim to identify stakeholders in CCP-AHC early on. A first Town Hall meeting within the first six months will convene stakeholders in computationally intensive AH&C research, to disseminate and assess the suitability of the CCP model and to gather requirements for the future CCP. Shorter regional community engagement events will be held in each of the four nations before the end of the first year. In parallel, the project will identify those codes and related projects used by UK-based AH&C researchers and, importantly, their owners and maintainers. After these engagement activities, the first report will be prepared and published, including a roadmap covering the first five years of a proposed CCP and an agreed work plan for the remainder of the scoping project. Next, supported by CoSeC, a sociotechnical assessment of a shortlist of identified codes will determine their suitability for adoption by CCP-AHC. The criteria used will reflect subject-matter expertise, technical concerns, and strategic priorities relevant to UK-based AH&C researchers. At a final Town Hall meeting in the last months of the project, project staff will update the community, disseminate the final roadmap, and pave the way for a bid to sustain CCP-AHC. The delivery team is experienced in leading national, UKRI-funded DRI initiatives that serve AH&C communities and has deep technical expertise in the application of computationally intensive methods in interdisciplinary contexts. The project is augmented by an advisory group made up of internationally recognised experts: computationally intensive AH&C researchers, inclusive design specialists, DRI facilitators, and emerging platforms specialists. The approach embeds community consultation from the outset, so that the required deliverables represent a feasible and viable proposal that responds to actual rather than imagined AH&C user needs. A plausible timeline for delivery ensures that draft deliverables are circulated early. Their iterative development will lead to their success as plans to articulate a five-plus year vision for this exciting and impactful new community.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-01

Our best understanding of the inner working of the Universe demands that Dark Matter contributes about 80% of the total mass of the Universe, shaping its form at all astronomical scales. However, the composition of Dark Matter in terms of fundamental particles remains a puzzle and all attempts to solve it through measurements or direct observation have failed to date. Established experiments have focussed on searches for Dark Matter that scatters off heavy atoms in deep underground labs, assuming it behaves like slowly moving particles. This type of Dark Matter is called Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) and its mass is a multiple of the proton mass. For Dark Matter masses below the mass of a Carbon atom the momentum of the slowly moving WIMPs drops below the recoil threshold of the heavy nuclei used in these experiments and it cannot be detected anymore. If Dark Matter is much lighter, its properties are fundamentally different, and it would be better described as a homogeneous fluid-like substance instead of a cloud of massive particle. Experiments searching for elastic scattering are entirely insensitive in this case. This very light Dark Matter behaves more like a new force acting very weakly on electrons and nuclei or affecting their spin. In this case the expected effects are tiny and can only be observed in extremely precise measurements of fundamental constants and interactions. This project is a truly multidisciplinary effort to enable the search for dark matter with high-precision atomic physics experiments. Many of these experiments have made enormous progress during the last decades, increasing their sensitivity by many orders of magnitude. These high-precision experiments can potentially measure the very minute effects exerted by interactions of light and very light dark matter. The theoretical mechanism underlying the production of this type of dark matter in the universe helps, because it predicts resonantly enhanced time-dependent signals, if the experiment can be designed to pick it up. Depending on the specific interaction, one dedicated or a variety of experiments might be the right strategy. In order to answer this question a consistent theoretical framework will be developed taking into account the complex structure of quantum field theories necessary to describe dark matter at high energies. Even though high-precision experiments are performed at rather low energies compared to collider experiments or even some astrophysical processes these calculations are necessary to correctly derive observables and correlations between observables for these experiments. This framework further makes the different experimental approaches comparable and existing limits can be used to optimise future experiments. With this in hand we can collaborate with atomic physicists throughout the UK to design an experimental programme exploiting the untapped potential of high-precision experiments to search for and potentially discover dark matter.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-01

The ability of chemists to invent new reactions is at the heart of our modern society, as novel methods to forge bonds with increased precision and selectivity enable the more efficient preparation of the medicines, agrochemicals, fine chemicals and materials necessary for our world. Catalysis is a powerful tool to devise new reactions and render the existing ones more selective, thus contributing to a more sustainable use of natural resources. The importance of catalytic reactions to create new C-C bonds, for instance, has been recently recognised by the 2005 and 2010 Nobel prizes in Chemistry. Despite these incredible advances in catalytic reactions, control over their selectivity still remains very limited, especially when it comes to assembling molecules that not only have the desired connectivity (i.e. sequence of bonds), but also the required arrangements of atoms in space. This challenge is particularly evident in the preparation of chiral molecules. These are compounds that exist as mirror-image twins of each other, and -despite their similarity- often have wildly different biological properties, because they interact differently with the chiral receptors inside living beings. Chiral molecules are widely employed as pharmaceuticals, food additives, agrochemicals, and fine chemicals. More than half of the medicines currently in use are chiral. However, obtaining them as a single mirror-image is costly, difficult and time-consuming, as it requires the ad-hoc preparation of catalysts often specific for each target, and lengthy optimisation or separation campaigns. The present proposal seeks to address this problem by developing a general strategy for the rapid and cost-effective synthesis of chiral molecules from inexpensive starting materials, enabled by a new paradigm in catalyst design. The key idea is predicated on combining chiral "designer" additives to existing metal-based catalytic systems in order to improve their performance, enhance the reaction rate and impart user-defined selectivity to the resulting products. These new additives will replace the expensive and sensitive silver-based compounds currently used. Automation and data science will be integrated into our workflows, in order to speed up the discovery and optimisation of several C-C-bond forming transformations of vital importance in the pharmaceutical, agrochemical, fragrance and polymer industries, sectors which combined are worth approximately £80 billion to the UK economy. As part of this project, we will establish a highly automated, specialised facility for reaction optimisation that will be open to academic and business users, enabling us to translate our cutting-edge scientific results into industrial innovation over the course of the fellowship.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-12

This Core Equipment application will support research involving three experimental techniques: (i) mass spectrometry, underpinning a range of research applications in Chemistry (ii) broad-spectrum ultrafast detectors, underpinning research in photonic materials (iii) biaxial stress tensiometer, underpinning research in bioengineering

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-12

The aim of COGENT is to develop, analyze and apply efficient algorithms in three core areas where computer algebra plays an important role: Cohomology, Geometry and Explicit Number Theory. These will have applications to a broad range of mathematical problems, and will touch as well upon related topics like cryptography and quantum computing. Such applications of mathematics are expected to have a wide-ranging impact on economic and societal problems. Recent years have seen a plethora of high-flying projects and a dazzling variety of applications of methods in computer algebra. One of the emerging challenges is to combine ideas of different areas of computer algebra, to share expertise between them, and to educate young researchers in theoretical and practical methods with a focus of transferring knowledge and training software development skills. COGENT provides an innovative training program to facilitate this and has ambition to stimulate interdisciplinary knowledge exchange between number theorists, algebraists, geometers, computer scientists and industrial actors facing real-life challenges in symbolic computation in order to bridge key knowledge gaps. This will address the urgent need for computer assisted investigations of several longstanding conjectures in mathematics, and EU industry's need for workers with an advanced mathematical and computational skill set. Not only do we expect to merge the best known tools for these purposes with innovative approaches and ideas to extract previously inaccessible cohomological information of the underlying arithmetic groups, but we also anticipate finding new hitherto unknown concepts as we intend to enhance the currently available data pool by a whole order of magnitude. The latter will allow the researchers to find hidden patterns, with the ambition to form a solid basis for formulating novel cornerstone conjectures, ideally in the spirit of the famous Million-Dollar Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-12

Particle physics research at the intensity frontier has seen a ramp up of activity over the last decade. Within the next decade, an abundance of experimental data with unprecedented precision will become available from Belle II, BESIII, KOTO, LHCb, and potentially HIKE. To guarantee the full exploitation of that data, improving theoretical calculations through the development of novel methods and approaches is paramount. My proposed research will provide such methods in the sectors of strange, charm, and beauty quark decays. In the strange sector, I will develop new techniques to utilise mixing effects in rare kaon decay modes to construct and overconstrain the unitarity triangle. In the beauty sector, I will develop methods needed to improve our understanding of the strong dynamics of the constituents of the B meson. My research will allow the accurate determination of the so-called shape functions, thereby enabling the precision extraction of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix element |Vub|. In the charm and beauty sectors, I will formulate a new, all-order method based on the approximate flavor symmetry of the QCD Lagrangian to improve the precision of Standard Model (SM) tests. This will have a big impact especially on non-leptonic multi-body hadron decays. My research will provide new avenues for the handling of non-perturbative hadronic physics in low-energy strange, charm, and beauty decays. As a result, I will maximise the discovery potential for possible effects beyond the Standard Model in these processes. Flavour physics is unique in that it can be used to address both of the two biggest open questions in particle physics: How do we get a deeper understanding of the Standard Model? And where is the breaking point of the Standard Model? My project will make unique and transformative contributions to both of these questions.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-11

A super-massive black hole exists at the centre of almost every massive galaxy, but what role do they play in galaxy evolution? In about 10 percent of all galaxies, we observe energetic phenomena like outflows and jets of plasma that are powered by these black holes. When a galaxy shows these characteristics we call it an active galaxy, and refer to the black hole and its energetic output as an active galactic nucleus (AGN). We know from both observations and cosmological simulations that feedback between an AGN and its host galaxy can have a significant impact on that galaxy's evolution. What we do not know are the details of how this AGN feedback works. Observations of low-frequency radio emission are a powerful tool to pinpoint what is happening in AGN. This emission traces relativistic electrons in jets launched by a super-massive black hole and winds of outflowing material blown out into the galaxy by the super-massive black hole. However, due to their low spatial resolution, current radio surveys have difficulty distinguishing between this activity and radio emission from star formation. My FLF project overcomes this by using ultra-high spatial resolution radio observations, which rely on advanced calibration techniques I developed for the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), a unique array of radio antenna stations spread across Europe. LOFAR can be a smaller or a bigger 'lens' by using only some or all of the stations: the more we use, the higher the resolution that can be achieved, but this requires specialised calibration techniques. LOFAR is unique in that it can achieve high resolution across a field of view more than 20 times larger than any other similar resolution radio telescope, which is critical to build the large samples necessary to understand AGN activity. My ongoing FLF project is to enact the first wide area, high resolution survey. I am doing this by post-processing data from the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey (LoTSS). The survey is recorded with all LOFAR antennas, but standard processing only uses those located in the Netherlands, providing lower resolution. Already I have demonstrated that we can make small high-resolution images (>20 times better than the standard processing) across the field of view, and guided the development of wide-field techniques that image the full field of view, although at a high computational cost. Using these exciting new images, my initial scientific results include identifying an entirely new sample of galaxies where star formation and AGN activity have been simultaneously measured using a combination of these high-resolution and standard imaging techniques; this is the largest sample of its kind by two orders of magnitude. From this, we are already learning that the AGN contribution in faint galaxies is higher than previously thought, with implications for our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve, and this project will continue to quantify this to understand the role of AGN in galaxy evolution. Conducting the first high-resolution survey across the entire Northern sky will allow me to build robust samples, the largest of their kind, to study the physical processes by which AGN produce radio emission, what properties govern these processes across large samples of galaxies, and how these processes impact the typical growth of galaxies through star formation. I will drive forward major advances in AGN feedback studies with my UKRI-FLF project, and push the field to new and exciting territory in answering fundamental astrophysical questions. Over the next several years, my work will lay the foundation for future scientific surveys with the SKA, in which the UK has heavily invested. I will continue to develop international collaborations with SKA pathfinder teams in South Africa, the Netherlands, and India, while placing Durham and the UK at the forefront of this exciting new revolution in science.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-11

Myriad interactions between DNA and proteins that take place throughout the length of an organism's genome ultimately allow cells to read, repair, package, and copy DNA sequence. How cells properly orchestrate and control these critical DNA:protein interactions is a fundamental question in biology. A unifying theme across such diverse DNA:protein interactions is that they always require some form of local mechanical distortion of DNA like bending, twisting, or kinking. Therefore, DNA:protein interactions can potentially be modulated and controlled by the local mechanical properties of DNA such as its bendability. Structural studies, dynamic experiments, and computational works have suggested that the mechanical properties of the DNA polymer are not constant, but vary along its length depending on local sequence, via a "mechanical code". Over decades, this has given rise to the hypothesis that sequence may be able to significantly control the local mechanical properties of DNA, and via it, control the critical DNA:protein interactions that in turn allow sequence itself to be read, repaired, copied, and packaged. In other words, via the mechanical code, DNA sequence might be able to control its own regulation. If this hypothesis is true, because of its potential generality and likelihood of relevance in all examples of DNA:protein interactions in all organisms, it would represent a transformative step in our understanding of life and in our ability to control it. Towards this end, we recently developed high-throughput experimental methods to measure, for the first time, how the mechanical properties of DNA vary with sequence along large regions of the genomes of various organisms. Via other experiments, we showed that these sequence-encoded variations in DNA bendability regulate critical processes related to the reading, copying, and packaging of DNA. Genetic information in DNA sequence is further modified by chemical alterations to DNA such as methylation (addition of a methyl group mainly to the cytosine base of DNA). DNA methylation is of fundamental importance in altering which genes along DNA are expressed. While certain cellular factors have been found to recognise methylated DNA, how DNA methylation achieves so many broad downstream effects is not fully understood. Recently, it has been suggested that one of the ways in which DNA methylation could exercise control over DNA transactions is by modifying the local physical and mechanical properties of DNA. If true, DNA methylation might allow cells to dynamically alter the "mechanical code" itself, as a means of gaining a broad regulatory handle on many different DNA:protein interactions. A significant roadblock to exploring this hypothesis has been the lack of high-throughput methods to provide the basic characterization of how DNA methylation, at various points along an organism's vast genome, alter the local mechanical properties of DNA depending on local sequence context. Here we propose to extend the capabilities of our high-throughput experimental techniques to make it possible to characterize the mechanical consequences of DNA methylation in high-throughput throughout the genome. We will compare our findings with other genome wide data, and perform other high-throughput biochemical experiments on how DNA sequence and methylation affect protein:DNA interactions. We expect to develop a comprehensive understanding of how DNA methylation, via its impact on the local physical properties of DNA, impacts the local structure of chromatin and the expression of individual genes. As DNA methylation accompanies processes like embryonic development, cellular adaptation to environmental changes, and genetic diseases like cancers, this project lays the foundations for future efforts at understanding how such critically important processes in biology might, in part, achieve their effects by gaining a handle on the physical properties of DNA.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-11

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-10

Time averaging is one of the most essential tools in analysing fluid flows with multiple time scales, which are ubiquitous in nature and industries. A prominent use of time averaging is the flow decomposition into fast and slow parts to understand different phenomena associated with each time scale. For instance, in geophysical flows the wave dynamics is associated with the fast part, and the slow dynamics can be reduced to a balance between a few forces (geostrophic and hydrostatic balance). Another application of time averaging is to filter out the fast variations that are not fully captured in numerical simulations or observations to make meaningful inferences from the remaining slow dynamics. Similarly, the noise and error inherent in measurements or simulations are removed by averaging. For fluids, time-averaging can be performed in two different ways. The most straightforward approach is to average time series of flow variables at fixed spatial points, to obtain the so-called Eulerian mean. Another approach is to average flow variables along particle trajectories instead of fixed positions, which gives the Lagrangian mean. Lagrangian averaging has several pivotal advantages over its Eulerian counterpart as illustrated by a growing number of studies. For instance, it removes the Doppler shift that eclipses the separation of time scales between the background flow and waves. However, the widespread adoption of Lagrangian averaging has been hindered by computational complications. To compute the Lagrangian mean in numerical models usually particles are tracked using interpolated velocities at particle positions at every time steps. This is a computational challenge that requires extra memory space (considering time series of variables are stored at all grid points) and is ill-suited for efficient computational parallelisation. In this project, we develop a numerical approach that circumvents these difficulties. This new approach is based on the evolution of partial means instead of particle tracking. Partial means can be viewed as means over shorter intervals than the total averaging period. In this approach, we compute the Lagrangian means as solutions to a set of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) that describe the evolution of these partial means. This paradigm could be a breakthrough in computing Lagrangian means as these PDEs can be discretised in a variety of ways and solved on-the-fly (i.e. simultaneously with the dynamical governing equations). Hence, they do not require storing any time series and substantially reduce the memory footprint compared to particle tracking. The basic idea of this numerical technique is put forward by the PI. The goals of this proposal are to 1) expand the theoretical underpinnings of this novel method, 2) develop and implement a set of numerical schemes to solve the associated PDEs, and 3) apply them to 3D fluid models and laboratory data.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

This document is in response to the invitation received by Professor Mark Wilkinson, Director of STFC’s DiRAC High Performance Computing Facility to bid to the URKI Call: ‘Digital Infrastructure: New Approaches to Skills or Software’. The original invitation to bid was sent to e-mail address miw6@leicester.ac.uk. This proposal sees the development of a prototype data curation service for DiRAC and IRIS communities, expanding on the existing service used by the VIRGO consortium.  By maximising the ability for these communities to share data in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) way, new data discovery approaches will be realised, leading to improved scientific productivity. This proposal is comprised of five key work packages which will be led by members of the DiRAC Technical Working Group.  This sees the development of a single-pane-of-glass data curation facility which provides an entry point to the service and hosts static weblinks and DOIs. A data cataloguing tool will be developed to enable communities to keep track of their data, to make their data searchable, and to be able to associate metadata with the data. The proposal also considers net-zero implications for storage by developing and configuring software to enable reuse of old disk storage systems thus reducing the embodied CO2 associated with the purchase of new systems. A user-centric tool for management of data in tape archives will also be developed providing a simple method for archiving and retrieval. Finally, a strong emphasis is placed on data security, which will see the implementation of quantum-safe communications on a DRI system and the configuration of a software stack monitoring tool.  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

The Green Deal has made it necessary to develop low power electronics, using sustainable materials and green processing. The successful implementation of AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diodes) displays in mobile phones, organic-based electronics illustrates that the Green Deal is possible. However, current organic electronics technologies have yet to be efficiency and not all are produced via low embedded energy processing methods. By using bio inspired organic materials deposited by green process technologies achieving these goals could be realised. During project GHOST, we will focus on inter molecular interactions to help address these issues. Irrespective of application; AMOLED, Organic PhotoVoltaics (OPV), Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFET) or Organic Thermoelectric Generators (OTG), the active materials are used in a solid matrix that stabilises them but also changes their properties relative to those in solution. There are many examples where guest-host interactions, e.g. donor-acceptor materials in OPV devices, completely change the properties of the system. Using light-emitting guests blended in a host or donor-acceptor exciplex systems leads to increasing OLED emission efficiency. But how to control these interactions is not well understood and is still largely emipirical. Interactions can change both the molecule conformation and electro-optic properties of the materials, but theoretical approaches to understanding these mechanisms are still in their infancy. Moreover, the varried effects of such intermolecular interactions in working devices is very poorly understood. Currently our limited understanding of these phenomena limit our ability to develop bio inspired materials and active components. All life on earth is organic and can perform complex of functions. Taking inspiration from living organisims, we aim to develop a new low energy organic electronics technologies.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

We often hear that humans are 'the great tool users'. Our ability to create and use tools is unique among all animals. All human cultures make tools, many with amazing complexity and diversity. Our homes, smartphones, and biomedicine are products of tool innovation. Given these achievements, it is particularly puzzling that children seem to remarkably bad tool innovators. A decade of research has shown that children find making very simple tools strikingly hard, and they fail to solve tool innovation tasks that crows easily can. Consequently, many have concluded that children are 'poor innovators'. Why is this? And is this true of all children around the world? Most research studying children's tool innovation is based on children in western countries - particularly North America and Europe. We have little understanding of whether the struggles that these children face are shared globally. A core aim of this project is to systematically study the development of tool innovation over childhood in eight culturally and geographically diverse countries, including the UK, USA, Brazil, Ecuador, South Korea, China, Namibia, and Ghana. Children in these communities live very different lives, have different ecological environments, social systems, and norms, and varying opportunities for, and attitudes towards, innovation. There are good reasons to expect that children outside of postindustrialsed western ones may be skilled innovators. Children in the postindustrialsed west are exposed to (increasingly digital) pre-manufactured toys and structured educational systems in which they engage in tool use under close adult supervision. This reliance on pre-made toys and learning tool use from adults may reduce opportunities for developing innovative skills. Conversely, children in less industrialised societies typically have less exposure to pre-manufactured toys and are encouraged to engage in self-initiated learning. We will also study the cognitive skills that support tool innovation over childhood. Specifically, we will examine the role processes such as executive functions, planning, creativity, and spatial ability play in children's tool making ability. Tool innovation is complex and we think it requires multiple cognitive skills such as these. Importantly, as these ones improve over childhood, so do children's tool innovation success rates, across populations. Children in our communities also have very different exposure to formal education. Some communities, such as those in the UK or South Korea have schooling systems typically performing at the top levels in global charts. Conversely, some of our other communities have far less access to schools, and the schools they can attend have fewer resources. Another core aim of this project is to study whether, and how, access to formal schooling and schools of differing quality, impacts the development of tool innovation. Attending school also increases children's exposure to peers, which provides collaborative opportunities and introduces them to new ways of thinking and therefore potentially may improve children's creative and innovative skills. Innovation is increasingly seen as a critical skill of the 21st century. Recently, several high profile global institutions have highlighted the value of innovation for future generations. The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Reports in 2021 and 2023 outlined innovative and creative thinking as the first and second most important skill for future generations, respectively. By providing knowledge on how children in diverse communities thrive and/or struggle at innovation challenges, this project will significantly improve our understanding of how to harness it from a young age.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-09

Large earthquakes in subduction settings rarely breach the sea floor, as the shallow portions of the fault mainly deform through non-earthquake creep processes. The 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake (Mw 9.0), hosted on a subduction plate boundary fault, boasted the largest displacements ever recorded in an earthquake and initiated a catastrophic tsunami which devastated the northeast coast of Honshu, Japan. The earthquake was so damaging because the fault rupture propagated to the sea floor. It is therefore important to investigate the dynamic processes occurring during slip in these shallow sediments that host such earthquakes to enable us to understand why some earthquakes grow so large. The fault was drilled by IODP Exp. 343 JFAST, 13 months after the rupture and achieved partial recovery of the fault-zone. In September 2024, IODP Exp. 405 JTRACK will return to the site and aims to recover the full thickness of the fault-zone; drill undisturbed sediments across the trench for comparison; and install an observatory in the Well drilled through the fault-zone. When earthquakes occur, they impose brief but extreme conditions on local fault rocks which can drive mineralogical and mechanical properties change. This dynamic material evolution is a control for the ease of earthquake propagation and post rupture restrengthening of fault material. Exploring the mineralogical and chemical reactions that occur during and after an earthquake are therefore a target to help us understand how and why earthquakes, under some conditions, can grow to be very large and damaging. The mechanical energy released during an earthquake enables reactions that normally require high temperatures, to occur under low temperature conditions within shallow fault hosting sediments near to the seafloor. Investigating these so-called mechanochemical reactions and their transient products elucidates the dynamic frictional evolution of fault material and their role in enhancing or halting earthquake rupture. Reactions that occur during and after an earthquake rupture can be investigated by analysing the rock and the fluid present within the zones that slipped during an earthquake. An anomaly in oxygen isotopes has been found in another plate boundary fault setting and has been experimentally resolved to show it is a marker of seismic (fast) fault slip. This anomaly is a result of mechanochemical reactions allowing breakdown of clay minerals under lower pressure and temperature conditions than if burial alone was driving the reaction. A sediment transect analysing oxygen isotopes through the Tohoku-oki earthquake rupture surface will show if these reactions also occur in marine trench subduction settings. Fluids circulating the fault during and after the earthquake are also important to the frictional evolution of fault zone material and that can also be traced with this stable isotope analysis and geochemical modelling. Sediments cored away from the fault will be analysed to show the relative difference between deformed and undeformed units; with undeformed units being exposed to earthquake conditions in the lab to elucidate conditions necessary to synthesis the fault zone isotopic signature. The signatures of different reactions in our experimental set up will enable us to disentangle what we see in nature to allow us to identify processes that facilitate the generation of very large, damaging earthquakes.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-08

The potential for mobile devices to expand access to healthcare (mHealth) has been widely lauded, especially in rural areas of Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). However, the practice has not yet lived up to the hype: heavy reliance on donor funding and poor integration into national health systems means that projects often fizzle out when the funding dries up. Meanwhile, Community Health Workers (CHWs) are taking matters into their own hands, using personal devices on their own initiative in their work: a phenomenon we call "informal mhealth." Of 3000 CHWs we surveyed in Ghana, Ethiopia and Malawi, over 97% reported using a personal mobile device for work-related purposes on a daily basis, calling/messaging patients, organising logistics, calculating medicine dosages, and even using the torch function to deliver babies (compared with only 15% using "formal" mhealth phones or applications). These developments were viewed positively by CHWs and service users, facilitating communication, logistics and patient care, and even saving lives. However, they also brought costs and challenges, especially for CHWs working in more remote communities, including financial hardship in managing phone costs, increased stress and burn-out from 24/7 availability, risks to patient confidentiality, and lack of digital literacy in assessing online information. These give cause for concern: informal mhealth is happening at scale but the costs are borne by the lowest-paid cadre of health-workers, most of whom are women. In discussions with CHWs and policy-makers, we identified three possible low-cost interventions to recognise and support CHWs' existing practices: (1) providing basic training on digital literacy, online safety and use of relevant open-access applications; (2) developing and implementing locally-appropriate guidelines on use of personal mobile devices in healthcare; and (3) compensating CHWs for work-related phone expenditure. We now seek to develop and trial a participatory intervention incorporating all three elements (training, guideline development and financial compensation) in 6 contrasting rural ("hard-to-reach") sites across Ghana, Ethiopia and Malawi (2 sites per country). In each site, we will engage a cluster of c.106 CHWs to receive the intervention, alongside service users (community members) and local managers/supervisors. Crucially, while the framework is common to all sites, the content and delivery of the training and guidelines will be co-designed with CHWs and community representatives and will be specific to each location, building on and supporting existing good practice. In order to assess feasibility and acceptability of the intervention, and to assess possible impacts on CHWs, service users and managers, we will collect relevant data at baseline and post-intervention. All participating CHWs (minimum 212 per country) will complete questionnaires to measure changes in working practices and work-related wellbeing (including burn-out and retention intentions). Follow-up focus group discussions will be conducted with CHWs, service users and local supervisors/managers in each site (minimum 16 groups per country), to obtain a more detailed understanding of the concerns and priorities of these different groups, and to help elucidate potential causal pathways and mechanisms for changes observed. Ongoing engagement of national and local stake-holders is core to the project. Building on strong working relationships developed during our previous study, we will convene a National Stakeholder Group (NSG) in each country to help oversee the project, provide input and plan for subsequent scale-up. In each study location, we will form a Local Steering Group (LSG), comprising CHW and community representatives, and local managers. LSGs will meet regularly to coordinate each stage of the project, and deliver the intervention to Community User Groups (CUGs) at each participating health post

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-08

Body dissatisfaction and related outcomes such as eating disorders are rapidly increasing in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), likely driven by increased exposure to globalized media containing unrealistic appearance ideals. High-risk or invasive appearance-altering behaviours, such as unregulated pills claiming to whiten skin or change body shape, are also increasing globally. There is thus an urgent need for scalable, evidence-based, and culturally appropriate approaches for building resilience against appearance pressures and their outcomes across diverse contexts. Existing body image intervention research, however, focuses on high-income, mostly Western populations, largely excluding LMICs. BIRes will establish an evidence base and theoretical framework for body image education in LMICs, through the delivery and systematic evaluation of a culturally-tailored intervention in multiple LMIC populations undergoing rapid economic and social change. This project innovatively develops our understanding of body dissatisfaction and ED risk across the diverse cultural settings in which these occur by reversing the typical focus on urban, middle-class samples. It also ensures strong cultural grounding by integrating controlled cross-cultural studies with locally-led participatory-action research. I will initially focus on two economically and ethnically diverse regions in the Caribbean Coasts of Nicaragua and Colombia, then extend into broader Latin America and Africa to finally encompass over 3000 participants in 6 countries. I have built a diverse and multinational team that is ideally positioned to capitalise on this urgent window of opportunity, and will build on pilot work in 3 countries, and established relationships with local governmental and educational stakeholders, to deliver this large and ambitious project to create new theory and practice in body image resilience, and achieve positive impact for individuals and communities across the globe.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-08

Vernacular heritage entwined with agroecological practices is under pressure from human induced climate change and manipulations of the environment. This project takes a framework for assessing local heritage in terms of its value, the risks it faces and adaptations needed for the future, that has been successfully developed in the mountainous headwaters of the rivers of High Asia, and looks to adapt it to address the situation in their deltas in Central Asia. The framework involves participatory mapping by local communities of the heritage they value as both individual asset and at landscape scale. This project takes this method to the environmentally stressed region of Uzbekistan in what was the delta of the Amu Darya river with the Aral Sea. Human environmental interventions, in the form of irrigation for cotton plantations, have drastically affected the water regime downstream. They have created both water stresses on ways of life and new risks to tangible heritage. Traditional ways of life have been threatened along with intangible heritages around agropastoral practices of yurt construction and fishing as local ecologies shift rapidly and radically. Tangible heritage dating back to the region's location on the silk routes, is threatened both by neglect and salinisation due to irrigation, which leads to salt intrusion undermining historic monuments. To adapt the approach to these conditions we will work with three sites chosen to cover the range of issues: one that exemplifies the legacies of agropastoralism, one that looks at largely overlooked tangible remains of Silk Route civilisation and one that focuses upon the loss of aquatic resources. All three sites are located in a marginalised region remote from national policy makers and the narratives of heritage that they promote. Along with local stakeholders, it will engage the communities in these sites to document the heritages they value, what risks it faces and processes of change. This will develop the local capacity to assess and promote heritage in the region. We will take these findings both in terms of modifications of the method, to help it be rolled out to more sites, and substantively about the three sites and engage Uzbek policy makers in the national capital, and showcasing the heritage in an exhibition there. In so doing it will support the priorities for capacity building and developing national profile identified in the regional tourism strategy in 2023. To enable a wider reach we will work with an independent documentary maker and researcher we collaborated with on a previous project, to produce an online film that can be used outwith the country to highlight the risks and potentials for the region's heritage.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

This project will address a first-order challenge in volcanology - understanding the controls on transitions in eruption style and intensity during the most hazardous eruptions. Most silicic eruptions begin with a high-energy, high-hazard explosive phase, then either wane and stop, or transition to hybrid and effusive behaviour that produces relatively short-range lava flows with much lower hazard potential. Understanding the timing of these transitions, and of the end of an eruption, is a major challenge that impacts hazard assessment and eruption response. Existing models assume that a transition from explosive to effusive behaviour is driven from below by a change in either the magma ascent rate or by the permeable release of pressurised gas, effectively 'defusing' the explosive potential. However, these bottom-up models fail to explain two fundamental aspects of silicic volcanism: (i) simultaneous explosive-effusive behaviour that was witnessed directly during the 2011-12 eruption of Cordon Caulle (Chile) and subsequently inferred elsewhere, and (ii) widely documented evidence for in-conduit pyroclast sintering preserved in the deposits from all phases of these eruption types. Members of the project team have used this evidence to develop a new paradigm for explosive-effusive transitions in silicic eruptions (Wadsworth et al., 2020) in which transitions are driven from above by shallow welding of fragmented magma and occlusion of the shallow conduit. In this 'cryptic fragmentation' paradigm, all silicic eruptions are explosive at depth, even when apparently effusive at the surface. This new idea demands a wholesale re-evaluation of silicic volcanic systems. Our new model proposes that apparently effusive lava is generated directly from explosive volcanism, assembled by the viscous amalgamation - sintering - of hot volcanic ash and pumice in the volcanic conduit in the shallowest parts of the Earth's crust (see CfS). The cryptic fragmentation model was developed in response to evidence from crystal-poor silicic systems. In this new study we go further, and propose that the model also applies to crystal-rich intermediate systems, which are much more common, and pose a global hazard. This hypothesis is based on abundant evidence from crystal-rich systems, similar to that summarized above. This project will deliver: (1) New analysis of dome-forming and crystal-rich lavas worldwide using existing samples from multiple laboratories. We will constrain the textures in the groundmass - with a focus on pore-textures indicative of sintering petrogenesis - and macro-scale textures associated with breaking and sintering, such as fractures will with partially sintered particles. This new textural work, coupled with analytical and petrophysical measurements, will underpin our extension of the cryptic fragmentation model to crystal-bearing magma systems. (2) A comprehensive suite of new experimental volcanology measurements of sintering rates with multiphase magmatic particles - glass with crystals. Relying on the PI's large body of experimental and theoretical sintering work, we will develop new experimentally-validated models for sintering rates with crystals in systems under elevated pressures, in the presence of magmatic volatiles, and under shear stresses. For the first time, this will push sintering theory to magmatic conditions and allow the first quantitative test of sintering rates at volcanoes. (3) We will apply these sintering rate equations to active crystal-bearing volcanic eruptions of the past at the same sites from which the sample suites were collected, with a focus on Colima volcano (Mexico) via engagement with stakeholders at volcano observatories. Cryptic fragmentation model reference: Wadsworth, F.B., Llewellin, E.W., Vasseur, J., Gardner, J.E. and Tuffen, H., 2020. Explosive-effusive volcanic eruption transitions caused by sintering. Science advances, 6(39), p.eaba7940

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2024 · 2024-07

The response of a structure to extreme loads, such as an earthquake, explosive blast, or impact is critical to the design of many structures. Building regulations require designers to consider reasonably foreseeable extreme loading events and design the structure accordingly. In most cases it is not feasible, or economically viable, to design a structure to resist extreme loads undamaged. Therefore, a strategy to limit the extent of damage and prevent disproportionate collapse is adopted. Energy-dissipating devices are incorporated into structures to absorb the energy from extreme events into easily replaceable elements. In seismic design passive supplemental damping systems consisting of devices such as hysteretic or viscus dampers can be incorporated without excessive cost. These devices dissipate seismic energy from the structure, reducing displacements and damage, but may need to be repaired or replaced after the event. For blast and impact scenarios, energy-dissipating systems can be adopted at a local level, for example in the cladding, to protect the main structural elements from excessive applied loads. Kirigami is a form of origami that also includes cuts. This enables complex morphing 3D shapes to be generated from flat sheets. Pop-up greeting cards are a familiar example. Researchers in a wide variety of scientific disciplines, ranging from engineering to biochemistry, have been fascinated by the variety of shapes and exciting mechanical behaviours made possible through the simple act of locating cuts in a flat sheet of material. This project builds on the surge of research into the mechanics of kirigami over the past ten years from the physics, applied mathematics, and engineering communities. While many kirigami studies highlight the potential of applications, so far these have not been realised. This project aims to translate the substantial body of fundamental research into kirigami mechanics to applications, specifically in structural engineering, by addressing the issues holding back the development of kirigami-based energy-dissipating devices, specifically the lack of predictive models and design methodologies for metallic kirigami structures. The results will then be applied to the design and testing of proof-of-concept devices for blast and earthquake protection of structures. Understanding these phenomena, and the development of design methodologies, will broaden the range of materials used for, and the applications of kirigami benefiting the national and international kirigami community. While the applications considered in this project are within structural engineering, there are also natural applications in many other fields ranging from Mechanical and Aerospace engineering to packaging design broadening the applicability of this project's outputs. Furthermore, our society more broadly will benefit from the safer and more resilient infrastructure made possible using kirigami-based energy absorbers for blast and earthquake protection.