UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-11

The human brain is the most complex organ in the human body, comprising billions of cells of many diverse types, with trillions of connections. Unfortunately, such complexity means that understanding and treating diseases of the nervous system is an enormous challenge, resulting in economic and societal burden. Limitations of existing model systems hamper discovery of new therapies for brain diseases. Cultures of single human cell types, whilst they capture the human genetic landscape, do not include interactions between cells. Conversely, rodent models permit exploration of a living brain structure, but there are significant differences to humans. Only living human brain tissue can fully capture the complexity of human brain diseases. The UKRI Edinburgh Human Brain Cluster (EHBC) will define the rules and limits of working with living human brain tissue for modelling complex diseases. Over the past 5 years, our team has established efficient pipelines to access brain tissue (normally discarded during neurosurgical procedures) from consented adults. Using this tissue, we have gained an internationally-recognised expertise in using living human brain slice cultures (HBSCs) to model brain diseases, but we believe we have only scratched the surface of what this tool is capable of. By collecting detailed data on the patients we receive our tissue from (their medical history, genetics, examination of biological samples), we will observe how variation between people impacts normal brain function, and how their brain tissue responds to experimental disease-mimicking conditions. All model systems have limitations, and HBSCs are no exception to this. To help neurosurgeons and neuroscientists to make human tissue more widely available and accessible, the EHBC will describe a deep clinical and molecular phenotyping that will assist us to determine the impact of underlying disease processes leading to neurosurgery. We will also investigate other sources of biological patient variation, and the impact these have on the complex disease models generated from living human brain tissue. For example, by performing detailed neuropathological assessment of the tissue we will identify latent/intercurrent neurodegenerative brain disease, such as early amyloid plaques, or tau tangles in our samples. This provides a unique opportunity to enhance our experimental models, as well as observe how pre-existing pathology interacts with experimental challenges. Through these investigations, we and other academic and industrial neuroscientists will be able to develop experiments that mitigate, account for, and even benefit from, patient variability, whilst exploiting the ability to study complex, multicellular interactions in living human brain tissue. This reflects a step-change in how we generate human “models” from patient tissue, ultimately improving the robustness and reproducibility of HBSCs as well as enhancing the potential for discoveries.  This, alongside our independent aims, will strengthen existing collaborations with research groups across the UK and industrial project partners. In particular, enhanced collaboration with Edinburgh’s UKRI Molecular Medicine cluster will add significant value to both teams. Overall, the EHBC aims to drive uptake of living human brain tissue usage in research, radically refining, reducing, and replacing the use of experimental animals. We will extend our Cluster to collaborating neurosurgical units and research centres across the UK and work closely with our industrial partners to enhance translational potential. We will develop a standardisation of patient and tissue characterisation for research and make experimental data available to the scientific community to inform development of their models.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-11

Context Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a disorder of the heart rhythm which becomes more common with age, increases risks of stroke and reduces quality of life. It affects ~25% of people during their lives. Although AF has been recognised for over 100 years, treatments for AF are frequently unsuccessful. AF can be treated by a procedure called ablation, in which parts of the heart are cauterised. However, ablation is only successful in preventing AF from coming back in 50-80% of patients. We also don't know how, or even if, ablation influences long term health. During ablation, large amounts of data are collected: up to 15Gb per patient, equivalent to >20 hours of video. This data describes the shape and electrical function of the heart. There is an opportunity to use data routinely collected from a first procedure to help decide what to do later, for example, if AF returns. There is also emerging evidence showing how these data can be used for diagnostic purposes, outwith ablation settings. However, until now there has been no way to analyse these data across large groups of patients. Unlike medical imaging data, electrophysiology data is not stored in central databases and manufacturer-specific file formats have limited analysis at scale. AF research has therefore fallen behind other fields in the use of "big data" and artificial intelligence. Recently, we released the Open Electrophysiology Framework for Research (OpenEP), which reduces electrophysiology/ablation data from 15Gb down to approximately 20Mb - equivalent to about 5 songs of data - per patient. This advance means that the data are now readily accessible for analysis across large groups of thousands of patients with AF. Aims and objectives Here, we seek to establish a nationwide cohort study, with international validation. We will combine our novel platform for extracting markers of atrial health from routine data with a bespoke study app and national data linkage. We will establish a clinical research network, called OpenEP|NET, to address important challenges in the management of AF. In this project, we initially study a sample of 2,300 AF patients to understand who will benefit from AF ablation in three areas: ablation response, patient reported outcomes and cardiovascular outcomes. Ablation response describes whether AF gets better after an ablation procedure. Patient reported outcomes are some of the key things that matter to patients such as quality of life or AF symptoms. Cardiovascular outcomes are the future problems, like stroke, that can lead to long-term consequences. Potential applications and benefits This project will develop algorithms for predicting outcomes and provide the data to support future randomised trials of these technologies. We will engage with patients, funders and the wider public to plan subsequent and wide-reaching clinical studies to test the clinical effectiveness of the algorithms developed here. OpenEP|NET will also begin a new future for electrophysiology research. An important consideration is planning for this future and co-ordination amongst centres. An important part of this project will therefore be focussed on making sure that the right technologies, know-how, infrastructure, access and resources are in place to allow other researchers to make use of OpenEP|NET in the future, both nationally and internationally.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-11

The Scottish Election Study is an independent ESRC-funded study of political attitudes and behaviour in Scotland. Its primary purpose is to collect attitudinal and behavioural data to identify the drivers of vote choice in the 2026 devolved elections for a wide community of academic scholars and practitioners. Our goal has been to widen access to data, to build interest in the analysis that can be conducted using it, and to build capacity to analyse Scottish quantitative data. We pursue this through dedicated mentoring of early career researchers, resources and awards for undergraduate and secondary school students, skills workshops and questionnaire space for devolved election scholars as a well through a range of practitioner- and public-engagement events.    We will collect data before and after the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, but also before and after the next UK General Election in Scotland in two-wave panels that maximize the representation of previous SES respondents. We will also collect data between elections, via our Scottish Opinion (SCOOP) monitor surveys three times a year, to provide essential data about changing trends in Scottish politics. This includes changing constitutional preferences, changes to government approval, evaluations of the economy and public policy and how Scots navigate the multi-level political worlds they inhabit, as well as rapid reaction data on Scottish, UK and international events to track their impact on attitudes and behaviour. This provides valuable data to facilitate evidence-led decision making by a range of data users, and injects useful factual information about the attitudes and behaviour of Scots into public life in the UK.   The SES 2026 will involve several methodological innovations. This will involve a world’s first youth panel, aided by new relationships with the Scottish Youth Parliament. We will recruit and then survey young people with a co-produced survey that provides essential information about the civic engagement of young people and helps us to understand generational divides. We will also conduct multi-generational surveys to evaluate the different responses of children and parents so as to identify possible improvements to data quality. We will undertake recruitment experiments to target under-represented groups, and will expand the number of qualitative questions on our survey, bringing valuable new data to qualitative researchers.   We draw on UK and international best practice on, for example, survey design, reaching under-represented groups and connecting web-tracking data to survey responses so as to improve the survey architecture and data quality within Scotland as a whole. This also contributes Scottish data to wider comparative debates about democratic engagement, the decision-making calculus in elections and opinion formation   Throughout, we will employ our existing networks with academics, journalists and practitioners, as well as our new stakeholder group to ensure that the SES data we collect reflects the needs of research users, that our data and analysis outputs are timely and informative, and will work to enhance capacity to access and analyse ESRC-funded data.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-11

Plastics have helped to build the modern world, and the current era has been dubbed “The Plastic Age” due to the ubiquity and influence of these materials. Yet plastics are both a friend and foe to the environment. While plastic pollution poses a very real environmental danger, plastics are also powering the green revolution as key components of wind turbine blades, batteries, and lightweight electric vehicles. Plastics have reduced CO2 emissions across Europe by a factor of 5-9, and address the global challenge of food security by reducing food waste by 20%. However, current production methods are unsustainable. Over 99% of plastics are currently produced from crude oil, and by 2050, annual plastic production is predicted to use 20% of global oil reserves and generate twice as much CO2 as the aviation industry. Approximately 60% of the 8300 Mt of plastic produced globally by 2015 has been discarded. Plastic waste is thus an attractive alternative feedstock to help conserve oil stocks and avoid energy intensive cracking processes. Transitioning from a linear plastic production model to a circular economy is of urgent importance, yet this requires innovative scientific technologies. Only 10% of plastics are currently recycled. This is partly because "recycled" materials are generally downcycled, with a reduction in material properties such as strength and flexibility leading to progressively lower value applications until recycling is no longer cost effective. This process is further complicated because plastic products often contain multiple types of plastic, such as polyethylene (PE) milk cartons which have lids and labels made from polypropylene (PP).  Recycling feedstocks thus often contain a mixture of different plastics that require intensive separation processes and subsequent recycling as individual components. Creative scientific solutions are crucial to address these problems in order to upcycle plastic waste into useful value-added products. The creation of "chemical zips" has enabled efficient recycling of a combination of PE and PP, avoiding the need for separation of these two materials. The "zip" is a molecule designed with different and alternating "teeth"; one set of teeth interacts with PE while the other set interacts with PP to stitch these two plastics together. Remarkably, the new hybrid plastics produced by combining PE, PP and the "zip" give upcycled materials that are stronger than any of the individual components. While game-changing chemical zips have been developed for PE and PP, analogous systems for polyesters remain underexplored. Developing effective chemical zips for degradable polyesters such as poly(lactic acid) (PLA) is an exciting and important target, as increasing consumer awareness has led to a rapid expansion of the PLA market. Contamination of recycling streams with PLA is problematic, as the current separation technologies are less well developed than for conventional plastics, and this challenge is set to grow. This Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) programme aims to develop a disruptive technology to repurpose waste plastic, by preparing transformative chemical zips to combine polyesters with other waste plastics to produce hybrid materials with improved properties. Strategies to produce these zips have been developed in the first phase of the FLF. In the renewal phase, these zips will be applied to the combination of polyesters with waste plastics including PE, PP and polystyrene (PS) to create a broad range of desirable, diverse and valuable materials, with important economic, environmental and energy benefits for society.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

Existing infections, coinfections, and health interventions interact in a complex way to impact upon disease severity and animal health. However, there are few tractable experimental systems available to study how these interactions affect vaccination outcome. This project leverages a combination of experimental platforms, immunological tools and recent advances in capabilities, to address how the immunosuppression induced by trypanosome infection in cattle impacts vaccine efficacy, using foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) as a well characterised model vaccine that acts via the B-cell and antibody responses. Trypanosome infections pose a major challenge to livestock health across sub-Saharan Africa, South America and Asia, where they are co-endemic with other significant diseases such as FMD for which vaccination is a key element of control.  Trypanosomes suppress the immune system, a process well-documented in mice, leading to the disruption and loss of B-cell populations and severe impairment of immune memory and B-cell/antibody recall responses – including to non-trypanosome immunisations. In mouse models, this phenotype is mediated by natural killer (NK-) cells through a perforin-dependent mechanism that kills B-cells. However, while field observations and preliminary data suggest that similar immunosuppression occurs in the clinically relevant bovine host, this important and relevant phenotype has not yet been characterised in cattle. This project will investigate to which extent Trypanosoma brucei infection may undermine vaccine-induced immunity in cattle. Key objectives are: - Examine the effect of T. brucei infection upon B- and NK-cell populations in cattle, identifying key  affected subsets and correlates of immunosuppression. - Assess the effect of T. brucei infection timing and clearance on vaccine recall responses, using FMDV as a model vaccine antigen. To achieve these objectives, we will employ advanced methods, including spectral flow cytometry for detailed NK- and B-cell subset analysis, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to assess impact of disturbance of spleen and lymph node structure on relevant cell types, and antibody repertoire sequencing to investigate the impact of trypanosome infection upon the antigen-specific antibody response. These tools will provide an advanced understanding of key immune cell dynamics and interactions during trypanosome infection in cattle, and the extent of any impact upon the antigen-specific antibody response, the critical effector component of the humoral immune response. This will substantially progress our knowledge of trypanosome pathogenesis and immunosuppression in the natural bovine host, and translate key findings from the mouse model. Importantly, the experimental design evaluates how the timing of trypanosome infection and treatment will influence memory recall in the context of FMDV vaccination, providing potentially actionable insights for optimizing vaccination strategies in trypanosome-endemic regions - such as treatment prior to prime and/or boost vaccinations. The outputs of this research can also establish a foundation for initiating research on the interaction between trypanosomes and other pathogen coinfections and/or vaccination, a currently poorly understood area. This work aligns with BBSRC priorities for sustainable agriculture and animal health. By addressing a critical gap in understanding host-pathogen interactions and immune responses, the project outputs have the potential to improve livestock health, productivity, and deliver economic benefits to farming communities in disease-endemic regions.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

The Carbon-Loop Sustainable Biomanufacturing Hub (C-Loop) partners, drawn from six world-leading UK institutions, have pioneered use of engineering biology technologies to valorize industrial waste by capturing and reusing the embedded carbon in sustainable biomanufacturing processes. These innovations have the potential to address carbon emissions and recover carbon from currently unrecyclable waste, and further, to defossilize industrial manufacturing processes that are reliant on finite resources and contribute to further carbon emissions. With a growing population, diminishing resources and a changing climate, there is now a pressing environmental, industrial and political imperative to rapidly utilize these engineering biology technologies to defossilize manufacturing and accelerate the UK’s path to net-zero. The Hub’s objectives are aligned to four key manufacturing challenges that must be overcome to enable industry uptake of innovative bio-upcycling technologies: Objective 1.  Application to UK industry: (UoE, UoM, UoN, IC, UCL) C-Loop will use state-of-the-art analytical facilities to characterise industrial waste streams. The appropriate spoke(s) will be engaged to investigate utilisation of the waste streams according to their area of expertise, and market interest in the bio-upcycling product. The Hub will assess new waste streams and biomanufacturing pathway opportunities throughout the programme, as new industrial partners engage. Objective 2.  Accelerated development & scale-up: (UoE, IC, IBioIC, CPI) C-loop will combine automated and AI and ML guided technologies with process optimisations for rapid progression of engineering biology workflows. Critically, the Hub will link early-stage bioprocess studies to national scale-up facilities, via a newly established BioFactory to bridge early-stage discoveries with UK scale-up facilities for rapid technology commercialization. Objective 3.  Internal waste management: (UoE, UoN) C-Loop will pioneer bio-upcycling of CO2 and biomass arising from biomanufacturing processes to be re-used as a feedstock or be converted to biochar for UK land reclamation, soil improvement and carbon storage. Objective 4.  Climate & economic assessment: (UoS, UoE) A dedicated Data Intelligence Unit will embed environmental and economic assessments and AI-led process optimization tools throughout all Hub processes. The C-Loop Hub comprises a multidisciplinary team of leading engineering biologists, chemists, analytical and computational scientists, with bioprocess engineers and life-cycle assessment experts. Building on existing collaborations, but working as a collective for the first time, C-Loop will establish a Hub (at UoE) and spoke model to provide a streamlined and holistic platform for workable and sustainable biomanufacturing solutions. Working alongside industry partners and national scale-up facilities, the Hub aims to enable the UK chemical manufacturing sector to adopt transformative engineering biology technologies that will allow the re-use of carbon embedded within waste streams. C-Loop is co-created with established industry partners, including those who can supply waste streams for upcycling and those who are end-users of the high value chemicals that will be produced. The hub-and-spoke model will provide a streamlined pathway for rapid acceleration of innovative, engineering biology-based, technologies to defossilize chemical manufacturing processes in the UK. This has the dual benefit of reducing carbon emissions from existing waste disposal processes and environmental pollution and propelling manufacturing towards a sustainable and net-zero circular bioeconomy. The bioeconomy sector will benefit from the development of new tools and guidelines for consistent and comparable analyses of bioprocess sustainability to demonstrate carbon efficiencies, and through the training of a multidisciplinary cohort of future research leaders with unique skillsets in quantitative sustainability assessment, bioprocess design, development and scale-up.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

We propose a new approach to genetically engineering yeast cells so that they make therapeutic molecules more reliably, quickly, and cheaply.  This involves providing yeast cells with a completely new, synthetic, extra chromosome into which multiple human genes can be inserted and then edited with precision. An increasing number of new drugs are proteins rather than small organic molecules. Virtually all therapeutic proteins have chains of sugars (or “glycans”) that are attached to them and hence they are called “glycoproteins”. Examples include monoclonal antibodies, clotting factors, cytokines and enzymes. More and more glycoprotein therapeutics are receiving approval for treating conditions from Alzheimer’s disease to arthritis, asthma, heart disease and cancer. They cannot be synthesized in the chemistry laboratory but must be “bio”manufactured, i.e. produced biologically, using genetically modified cells. Today, most glycoproteins are biomanufactured using engineered mammalian cells. Our study is a partnership with Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, the world’s second largest biopharmaceutical producer. The biomanufacture of therapeutic glycoproteins is a multibillion-pound industry and the cost and complexity of production in mammalian cells contributes to the expense of rolling out potentially breakthrough therapies. This delays approvals, or makes them barely affordable, exacerbating health inequalities across the globe. As an alternative to relying on mammalian cells cultured in expensive media and elaborate facilities, worldwide interest has focussed on “microbial cell factories” based on engineered bacteria or yeast that, unlike mammalian cells, grow quickly and cheaply to high densities in simple facilities. But a problem with using microbes is the need for the aforementioned glycans that are chemically complicated and must be attached at precisely defined locations on the protein. While mammalian cells decorate proteins with glycans that closely resemble human ones, this key capability is beyond most microbes. Bacteria do not add sugars at all while yeast produces proteins bearing chemically simple glycans consisting mainly of multiple mannose units, unsuitable for humans. Although high-mannose glycans can be removed, “deglycosylated” proteins are not as stable, long-lived in plasma, or functionally active as glycoproteins bearing human-like glycans. We propose to reprogramme the biochemical pathways that construct glycans in yeasts. Using the “biotechnology-friendly” yeast Pichia pastoris as host cells, we will insert a tiny but stable synthetic chromosome (a “nanochromosome”) of our own design, which has dedicated "landing pads" for new genes. We'll use these landing pads to add at least ten genes required to synthesise human-like glycans. Our engineered yeast cells will still attach high-mannose sugars to their own glycoproteins, a capability that can be repressed when the expression of human genes from the nanochromosome is induced. This will allow cells to grow healthily up to the point when they are instructed to start making the target humanised glycoprotein. The extensive genetic manipulations needed for this approach cannot be performed on the cell’s natural chromosomes without causing damage that multiplies with the number of gene insertions, since each insertion requires cleavage and repair of native DNA. Conversely, insertions of genes into our nanochromosome is, by design, more precise and reproducible, making it easier to use automation in order to systematically optimise the process, and to edit the inserted genes. By providing a dedicated vehicle, the nanochromosome, for carrying new genes, our strategy will yield robust yeast strains with pristine native genomes, suitable for commercial biomanufacture of human-like therapeutic glycoproteins or, indeed, other high-value products.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

At a time of increasing educational digital products, there is a growing recognition of the need for innovative, screen-free educational methods that engage young learners in meaningful ways. To address this need, this project evaluates the commercial potential of STEM Charades, a physical card game for 3–12-year-olds developed by Professor Andrew Manches. STEM Charades is informed by international research into the role of gestures in help children and adult to communicate their understanding, particularly in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). The game plays a core role in a broader initiative, supported by an accredited online training course, to communicate research with educators into Embodied Learning: the role of body-based experiences in how we think and learn and how gesture can bridge these experiences with more formal understanding and language. STEM Charades addresses the need for innovation in early years STEM resources and pedagogy. Unmet by increasing digital solutions, parents and teachers want fun, screen-free, and trustworthy activities. Parents (esp. home schooling) want to give their pre-school/early school children the best start. Early years/primary teachers want resources that extend beyond single topics and help their own professional development. STEM Charades also taps an emerging cross-cutting need to improve how all young children communicate. To date, STEM Charades has been played with >1,000 educators and many more children. Feedback has been highly positive, with teachers sharing how the game made them reflect more on how and why they naturally gesture in class, as well as noticing how children often gesture when trying to communicate their thinking. One unplanned outcome has been the positive experience for children who often struggle to communicate their thinking verbally. However, feedback has been from educators who have taken part in training sessions or received free STEM Charades resources; a sustainable, scalable, business model has not been validated. The overarching aim of this project is to commercially validate STEM Charades, to investigate who and how many educators may be willing to pay for the physical game, and use this knowledge to inform how to scale impact of the underpinning research. To achieve this, we will address the following objectives:  O1: Attend two national education industry events O2: Create and build a Customer Relations Management tool to capture and facilitate engagement O3: Create and build a research-informed social media presence O4: Secure two educational re-sellers for STEM Charades O5: Secure two retailers for STEM Charades (e.g. museum shop/bookshop) O6: Capture formal feedback on commercial viability from over 10 resellers and 20 educators/educational leaders By listening, and adapting, to market feedback for STEM Charades, this project will evaluate the potential and enable the scaling of a social science venture created to communicate research that can support everyday teaching and learning, for all children. By scaling STEM Charades commercially, teachers will be more informed about how children learn and the role that their gestures play in supporting learning. Children will ultimately benefit from clearer communication, and more confidence in ways they can communicate their own understanding beyond words. This project will also provide a powerful case example of the potential to scale the impact of educational research, and social science more broadly, through commercialisation. The project lead is well positioned to feed the lessons of this project back into academia, notably into early career development.  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

Cilia-AI will train a new generation of multidisciplinary biomedical researchers and entrepreneurs, and those specializing in emerging machine learning technologies, a subset of AI. The focus is the study of primary cilia, microtubule-based projections on cell surfaces that play a pivotal role in coordinating cellular signalling pathways during development and homeostasis of cells, tissues and organs. These tiny structures are essential for various physiological functions such as hearing, smell, respiration, excretion and reproduction. Dysfunctional cilia can lead to >35 severe human diseases known as ciliopathies, exhibiting diverse and overlapping phenotypes, affecting up to 1 in 400 people. To unravel the multi-level organisation and regulation of cilia in health and disease, Cilia-AI employs a multidisciplinary approach, integrating cutting edge technologies like structural biology, omics- and organoid technologies. Advanced imaging techniques, including super-resolution microscopy, cryo-electron tomography and expansion microscopy, will be used to generate high-resolution and versatile datasets. Processing such data requires sophisticated computational methods. Cilia-AI is at the forefront of implementing and developing machine learning approaches to decipher these high-content datasets and integrate diverse multidisciplinary data. Cilia-AI offers unparalleled training opportunities for 15 Doctoral Candidates (DCs) in both academic and industrial settings. The training involves individual research projects, secondments, and network-wide sessions. This training equips DCs with skills attractive to both industrial and academic sectors, enhancing their career prospects in these domains. Overall, Cilia-AI's research and training activities contribute to advancing the understanding of cilia in health and disease while fostering a new generation of skilled professionals with broad competences.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

Agriculture is operating in a state of urgency. Each year, farmers apply millions of tonnes of fertiliser—primarily nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K)—with limited visibility into their soils’ actual needs. This reliance on averages and guesswork creates systemic inefficiency, drives environmental damage, and increases financial risk. Nitrogen overuse releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas hundreds of times more potent than carbon dioxide. Phosphorus runoff contributes to algal blooms and aquatic dead zones. Potassium mismanagement weakens crop resilience. At the same time, farmers incur significant costs for inputs that may deliver little benefit and even accelerate regulatory scrutiny and ecological harm. The root problem is the absence of a viable sensor. Despite decades of research, there is still no affordable, robust, and user-friendly tool for in-field measurement of soil NPK levels. Laboratory testing is slow and expensive, modelling approaches often break down under real-world variability, and remote sensing cannot directly detect subsurface nutrients. Even the most advanced farms remain dependent on broad assumptions and outdated fertiliser plans. Precision agriculture is, therefore, incomplete. Our project will address this critical gap by developing a low-cost, in-field electrochemical sensor capable of quantifying nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in real time. The sensor will leverage advanced electrode surface functionalisation to selectively interact with target nutrient species. These interactions generate measurable electrochemical signals, enabling rapid and accurate nutrient analysis. Building on expertise in electrochemical sensing, soil health, and sustainability policy, the team will design sensors that combine high selectivity, durability under soil conditions, and practical usability in farming contexts. The result will be a portable, farmer-friendly decision-support tool that delivers actionable results at the point of use—a step-change from lab-based testing to real-time, in-field monitoring. The potential impact is significant. Global fertiliser consumption exceeds 185 million tonnes annually, costing the sector tens of billions. In the UK alone, over 4 million tonnes are applied each year, with nutrient-use efficiency remaining stubbornly low. Even modest improvements in accuracy could generate substantial economic, agronomic, and environmental benefits—boosting margins, improving yields, and reducing harmful externalities. The addressable market is broad and expanding, encompassing farmers, agronomists, cooperatives, ag-retailers, input manufacturers, regulators, and environmental monitoring agencies. Beyond productivity gains, there is rising demand for compliance, sustainability reporting, and transparent nutrient data to support carbon markets, water quality schemes, and regenerative certification. This innovation directly meets that need, aligning agricultural productivity with environmental responsibility and regulatory requirements.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

Post-harvest food loss is a major challenge for global food security, wasting valuable agricultural and financial resources at every stage of the food supply chain, from farmers to retailers to consumers.  Up to 50% of harvested vegetable crops are wasted due to senescence, wilting and disease.  Food waste such as this not only contributes to 6% of greenhouse gas emissions, but also imposes financial burdens on producers and consumers, and reduces consumer access to the beneficial fibre and micronutrients these crops provide. Extending post-harvest vegetable crop health and longevity would reduce this food loss and waste. Harvested vegetables are still alive and interacting with their environment, but their gene expression and disease susceptibility are very distinct from those of plants actively growing on soil. Current genetic crop breeding solutions focus on pre-harvest traits such as yield and disease resistance; this can inadvertently compromise post-harvest quality, and resistance to other diseases, further contributing to spoilage and waste. Furthermore, existing chemical or biological treatments to extend post-harvest longevity face increasing regulatory pressure, and may not be suitable for unpeeled crops due to safety concerns. Our solution is a genetically engineered technology that introduces harvest-inducible traits into brassica vegetables to improve post-harvest health and longevity, without damaging pre-harvest health or yield. The technology is currently aimed at leafy brassica crops, such as broccoli and rocket. Used alongside standard post-harvest vegetable processing practices of washing, rapid cooling and continuous refrigeration, our technology will enhance storage and shelf-life performance. However, crop breeding for post-harvest traits is a relatively novel area, and commercialisation of the technology requires an understanding of attitudes and economics along the supply chain and among consumers. This project will address this challenge through a series of interconnected work packages that identify and address consumer and stakeholder priorities for this technology, alongside a comprehensive economic analysis of its potential benefits.  The economic analysis will leverage proprietary supermarket data that include sales and inventory information to quantify consumer valuation on freshness and shelf-life. It will allow us to estimate consumer choices for produce with extended shelf-life under our technology and estimate the resulting reduction in waste. The outputs from this project will be identification of barriers to adoption from stakeholders along the supply chain; engagement with key industrial partners; and economic and consumer data to demonstrate the value and scope of the technology adoption. These data will support a step change in market readiness for the technology, and direct future strategies for stakeholder and consumer engagement. This project will support production of healthier, longer-lasting crops that are attractive and acceptable to consumers and stakeholders, and are more sustainable and affordable than current market offerings.  The economic and stakeholder analyses will ensure the commercialisation of the post-harvest genetic technology can achieve maximum positive societal and environmental impact.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; ME/CFS) affects approximately 67 million people worldwide, including >250,000 in the UK1. One in four people with ME/CFS are house- or bed-bound, often needing 24-hour care2,3. 63% of UK ME/CFS patients are unable to work2. ME/CFS costs £3.3 billion annually in the UK4. Recovery rates are low (<10%)5,6. In rare cases, ME/CFS is fatal7. Despite these statistics, people with ME/CFS - according to Mohammad Yasin, MP -"are often stigmatised and marginalised, as their conditions are not fully recognised by the Government or the medical profession” (Appropriate ME Treatment Debate, 2019). The UK Government’s Interim Delivery Plan for ME emphasises low critical mass of research8 despite the MRC’s long-standing Highlight Notice9. Currently ME/CFS research sits at the margins of science and medicine, and its findings are rarely replicated10,11 leading to myriad hypotheses that have yet to make a breakthrough for patients, biotech companies or clinical researchers. Internationally, ME/CFS has few established research groups or conferences, and no dedicated journals. ME/CFS has no available diagnostic markers or treatment avenues. For advancement, ME/CFS cannot rely on serendipitous interactions across institutions and disciplines because it currently falls far short of attaining critical mass of researchers and studies. Our project will inject ME/CFS questions and evidence into mainstream contemporary science, catalysing other biomedical expertise and disciplines to investigate ME/CFS. PRIME’s driving principles are to: (1) Accelerate ME/CFS biomedical research by catalysing novel interdisciplinary collaborations; (2) Enhance the quality and cross-applicability of ME/CFS biomedical research given the co-morbidities with other diseases; and, (3) Ensure that people with ME/CFS are at the heart of the governance, design and delivery of ME/CFS science. PRIME will take advantage of previous MRC/NIHR investment in DecodeME, its findings, consented-for-recall cohort and researcher/PPI co-production success. Its second focus on biomarkers draws on recent UK Biobank discoveries. Within 4-years PRIME will: Forge =15 novel collaborations with industry and/or other scientists who take advantage of DecodeME as a bioresource and catalyse =£1,000,000 in funding for replicable biomarker investigations, mechanistic experiments, and/or studies such as a ME/CFS Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) study with a UK-based Life Sciences champion. Help establish international ME/CFS and ‘Omics Consortia involving =6 groups from =4 countries. These will facilitate meta-analysis of ME/CFS data across diverse genetic ancestries to ensure inclusion and broad relevancy of results and lead to improved and accelerated research, highlighting best practice thereby saving both time and funds. Establish the world’s largest ME/CFS PPI expert pool with =100 PPI volunteer participants, helping to raise the quantity and quality of ME/CFS biomedical and clinical research. The PPI pool will provide a long-term resource for the research communities of ME/CFS’s comorbid conditions. In summary, PRIME will build a solid foundation for a permanent, enabling infrastructure for ME/CFS biomedical research that will reverse decades of under-investment and unreplicated research findings, ultimately leading to effective diagnosis and treatment. References Hanson & Germain (2020) doi.org/10.3390/metabo10050216 Pendergrast et al. (2016) doi.org/10.1177/1742395316644770 Montoya et al. (2021) doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9101331 Hunter et al. (2017) https://2020health.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Counting-the-Cost-CFS-ME.pdf Joyce et al. (1997) doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/90.3.223 Cairns & Hotopf (2005) doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqi013 McManimen et al. (2016) doi.org/10.1080/21641846.2016.1236588. My full reality: the interim delivery plan on ME/CFS, https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/improving-the-experiences-of-people-with-mecfs-interim-delivery-plan/my-full-reality-the-interim-delivery-plan-on-mecfs MRC Highlight Notice for ME/CFS https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/researching-me-cfs-highlight-notice/ Dibble et al. (2020) doi.org/10.1093/hmg/ddaa169 Maksoud et al. (2023) doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-02893-9

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

The Technology nEtwork for Social Care Innovation (TESCI) envisions a future where technology empowers individuals and their family’s.  We aim to improve quality of life, ensuring dignity, inclusion, and independence in a secure and safe environment.  Technology can transform social care services in the home, daycare and residential settings and improve the lives of the workforce, to build a more equal and sustainable social care system. Social care in the UK impacts over 10 million people, including older adults, adults with disabilities, mental health, children, informal carers and the paid workforce. TESCI will drive innovation in robotics, data science, and engineering, developing and applying these technologies to transform social care. For example, robotics can enable carers to physically help individuals through the use of exoskeletons. Robotic (e.g. robotic companion pets and humanoids) and digital assistants (e.g. Alexa and Google) can help reduce social isolation. AI can prompt individuals to complete daily tasks, such as preparing meals or taking medication. Data and planning systems can optimise schedules for care workers, minimising travel time between clients. Furthermore, remote monitoring systems can offer reassurance to those living independently and their families. The engineering and physical sciences community has the potential to play a transformative role in addressing challenges in social care. However, to date, research in the community has predominantly focused on health and not on social care which faces its own unique and diverse challenges. It is therefore crucial for TESCI to unite these communities, fostering a shared understanding of the opportunities technology offers to drive innovation in social care and to inspire the next generation of academics and practitioners. TESCI acknowledges the vast, diverse, and unique challenges faced by social care. A key objective of the network will be to build awareness within the engineering and physical sciences research community about the specific needs and opportunities within the social care sector. To achieve its goals, TESCI will create a vibrant ecosystem where stakeholders across the social care sector—including people with lived experience "Nothing About Us Without Us", service providers, government, and industry—join forces with researchers.  Together, they will identify gaps and unmet needs and will co-create technological solutions that improve the lives of those receiving and delivering social care. People with lived experience are central to the TESCI network. Their insights and expertise will guide research priorities, ensuring the relevance and accessibility of proposed research. TESCI will facilitate multidisciplinary grant applications focused on enhancing social care through technology. We will encourage collaborative proposals addressing a wide range of needs, from AI solutions to tangible assistive devices. By actively exploring emerging trends and future challenges in social care, TESCI will ensure its efforts remain relevant and impactful, leading to the identification of new research opportunities. TESCI will develop a roadmap of research and innovation to inform the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for guidance of future funding priorities.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

The aim of particle physics research is to explore, model and understand how the Universe works at the smallest accessible scales. The Particle Physics Experiment research group at the University of Edinburgh is engaged in a programme of collaborative research that will enhance our knowledge of the constituents of matter and the forces that govern their behaviour. There are many outstanding questions in particle physics that we hope to help answer, including: What is the nature of the quantum interactions that govern the behaviour of the known subatomic particles, the quarks and leptons? How does the Higgs boson behave? How do neutrinos behave and why are they so light? What is the origin of the cosmological observations of dark matter? Are there other subatomic particles that we are yet to discover? What are the differences between matter and anti-matter? To try to address these questions, our research programme includes research at the energy frontier, on flavour physics, on neutrinos and on the dark sector. We undertake this research along with our collaborators who are based at other universities and research institutes in the UK and worldwide. On energy frontier physics, we collaborate in the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN - the world's highest energy collider. We analyse the collisions to examine how the Higgs boson behaves and to look for evidence of new particle production. In flavour physics, we are members of the LHCb experiment collaboration, also at the LHC. We analyse data collected by the LHCb detector to characterise the small, but important, differences between bottom & charm quarks and bottom & charm anti-quarks that are produced copiously in LHC collisions. On neutrino physics, we participate in the SuperNEMO collaboration; SuperNEMO will make its first science run in 2024 and is optimised to search for evidence of neutrinoless double-beta decay which would indicate that neutrinos are their own anti-particles! We are also collaborators on the MicroBOONE and SBND neutrino experiments that observe accelerator neutrinos at Fermilab and we participate in the construction of the DUNE long-baseline neutrino experiment due to start at the end of this decade. In the Dark Sector, we are searching for direct evidence for particles that may explain dark matter. We are members of the LZ collaboration and also the DarkSide experiment currently under construction. Both these experiments have excellent potential to observe dark matter particles, depending on exactly what form this takes. In all our collaborations, we also contribute to the ongoing operation of the experiment and to the development, testing, and construction of new or upgraded detectors for the experiments. Our analysis techniques and the detector technology that we develop have applications outside of particle physics.  As an example, our expertise in computer modelling of detectors and in detecting single photons, can be used for optimising medical imaging applications; we are establishing new work in PET detection as part of this research programme. The nature of our research into fundamental physics means we do not know what we will uncover!  But with our group's expertise and innovative approaches we are well placed to interpret our experimental observations to understand more deeply the subatomic structure of our Universe.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

In 2028, the Fitzwilliam will celebrate the centenary of the largest private ceramic collection to enter a museum-3,443 pieces bequeathed by Dr Glaisher, which have long been a mainstay of visitor experience but remain severely under-researched. This object- and archive-based studentship uses historical sources to interrogate the formation of Glaisher’s collection, expanding outwards to explore his methods and biases in relation to race, national identity, class and gender, and to re-centre the hidden histories of those involved, alongside participatory practice methodologies to consider what his collection means today. This project aligns with the museum’s vision, ‘opening up the past to transform our futures’, and will unlock new pathways for future re-presentation as part of the Masterplan. This project uses the Fitzwilliam’s archive of Glaisher’s unpublished 41 notebooks, detailing precise acquisition details, to investigate his motivations and mechanisms of collecting, through local (East of England), national and international networks. Its objective is to discover Glaisher’s attitudes towards regional and national identity via material culture, especially in relation to colonial power dynamics, tracing the evolution of Glaisher’s ‘private’ collection to its ‘public’ role, at the Fitzwilliam and other CC-EE partner institutions. It considers key agents involved in this transition including Frances Dickson, who first curated the collection, a rare opportunity for a woman in the 1930s. It fits within the CC-EE CDP framework of Society & Identity and poses questions about what it means to collect from different places and peoples, and investigates the significance of Glaisher’s collection, both then and now  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Technologically important materials are increasingly not the most stable arrangement of atoms. Instead, useful materials such as glass or complex alloys are often metastable, meaning they are somehow prevented from transitioning to a more stable state. One method to achieve this is through quickly cooling a sample, freezing the metastable structure before it can undergo a phase transition. This approach is common at high temperatures, but has not been exploited for transitions occurring below room temperature due to technical challenges with rapid, cryogenic cooling. Given the importance of low temperature materials in areas such as space or quantum computing, a low-temperature route to discovering advanced materials would have clear benefits. This project aims to solve the challenges of rapid cooling to liquid helium temperatures, and use the resulting technology to accelerate discovery of new metastable materials. The optimum approach to rapidly discover new metastable materials is to directly determine the atomic structure during rapid cooling. Synchrotron X-ray diffraction provides the perfect tool for this, allowing crystalline structure to be measured with millisecond time resolution. Diamond Light Source is one of very few synchrotrons with a cryostat having the potential for rapid cooling while simultaneously measuring diffraction, but currently this technique is unavailable. This collaboration seeks to achieve the technical developments required for such measurements, and use this approach to discover new advanced materials. The first objective of the project is to develop sample holders for diffraction with the high thermal conductivity required for rapid cooling, and precisely characterise the cooling behaviour using in-situ diffraction. The second objective is then to use rapid cooling to quench structural phase transitions below room temperature. The class of materials chosen are those with the rhenium trioxide structure, many of which show the unusual behaviour of expanding as they are cooled. The reason for choosing these materials is that there is a direct competition between this negative thermal expansion behaviour and a structural phase transition; if the phase transition can be avoided by rapid freezing, there is a high chance that a negative thermal expansion material will result. As well as being of fundamental scientific interest, these materials offer a materials-based solution to thermal cycling in applications ranging from satellites to fuel cells. The impacts of this project will be threefold; firstly, the technological developments which enable rapid cooling could enable new discoveries for other low temperature transitions, from superconductivity and charge ordering to ferroelectricity and magnetism. Secondly, a large number of new negative thermal expansion materials will be discovered, although such materials have also seen interest as battery electrodes. Finally, discovering that low temperature structural transitions can be quenched could readily be applied to other materials, opening up a plethora of new low-temperature materials and their physical properties.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Never has the merge between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Science being so strong with AI being progressively used to drive productivity enhancements in engineering innovations and technology. The EPSRC APRIL AI Hub is established with the mission of bringing the electronics and AI communities together for developing and bringing to market AI-based tools that boosts productivity across the entire electronics industry supply chain. Through our first year of operations, we were able to attest to: (1) an exceptional demand – significantly greater from what we originally captured – for developing, validating and deploying such AI tools across the whole electronics sector, as verified via additional members joining APRIL and with industry sharing openly their needs through our stakeholders’ events. (2) a range of challenges related to the availability and usability of accessible data, along with access to state-of-art technology, next-generation AI compute infrastructure, and the necessary practical know-how and appropriate benchmarks for using all of these to propel impactful and trustworthy innovations. APRIL established an efficient collaborative framework that has already proven our ability to address #1 with speed and at scale. Here, we propose a range of additional actions, not originally accounted for in our original proposal due to funding and other resource constraints. These are inspired and supported through our extensive stakeholders’ engagement over the past year and bring additional prospects in maximising APRIL’s impact and reach across the UK through: (1) a nation-wide access to emerging tools and technology, (2) shaping the skills of engineers internationally, (3) the curation of state-of-art AI models and benchmarking parameters on the latest electronics technologies these run, (4) boosting the UK emerging AI compute capability and national access to it, and (5) disrupting our approach to knowledge creation and exchange through hands-on activities/events. This extended programme (APRIL+) of activities will be co-supported through additional matched funding from industry, ensuring the realisation of impactful deliverables over the next 6 months.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

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 2025 · 2025-09

As other sectors of industry decarbonise, and if current trends and technologies continue, aviation will be responsible for 39% of the UK’s total carbon emissions by 2050, up from 8% in 2021. Rolls-Royce is committed to achieving net-zero operation of all its products by 2050. There are three pillars to its strategy: (a) maximise the efficiency of current products; (b) ensure fleets are compatible with 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF); and (c) develop alternatives such as electric and hydrogen propulsion. Fully electric flight is not suitable for long haul operations, for which hydrogen has been identified as a viable zero-carbon solution. VECTA’s ambition is to realise a unique Exascale multi-physics capability for modelling complete hydrogen gas turbines with the requisite resolution to credibly capture and remedy emergent behaviours. Our vision is that these capabilities contribute, in no small part, to the introduction of safe and efficient hydrogen powered gas turbines. VECTA builds on the highly successful “ASiMoV Round 2 Prosperity Partnership'” and takes it to a new level, with both new physical and computational modelling challenges. The project consortium, which like ASiMoV is led by EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh, together with Rolls-Royce, also includes the universities of Cambridge, Warwick, Surrey and Queen's University Belfast, as well as two further companies, ITI and Turbostream.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

The Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS) is a largescale research ready record-linkage study of 5% of the Scottish population created and supported by the Longitudinal Study Centre Scotland (LSCS). It links the Scottish Census from 1991 through time to administrative data on major life events (Vital Events – birth, deaths and marriages and hospital and primary care treatment), other censuses, maps changing residential location (through the NHS Central Register (NHSCR) data) and for children, their progress through the educational system. The SLS is therefore a very rich source of health and socio-economic data that allows the longitudinal analysis of complex demographic and epidemiological questions – and crucially analysis that would not be possible in smaller (or cross-sectional data) studies. Since its creation, the SLS has been used to examine a wide range of research questions feeding into government social, health and housing policy. Importantly many of the users of the SLS are postgraduate students. Through our very close support and training of these students, we have been establishing a new cohort of longitudinal administrative data users who will be the future users of the major new investments such as ADR UK. The LSCS at the University of Edinburgh (UoE), in partnership with National Records of Scotland (NRS), constructs and maintains the SLS. It carries out data linkage and curation (making it research ready), manages the secure and private access to the data, along with training and supporting researchers in the use of this complex data source. We seek funding to support the core service of the LSCS for the next 5 years but also to enhance the study through: New data acquisition, extending the studies potential to answer new and different questions and Growing its research user base by making the data readily accessible through the SafePod Network across the UK Working closely with the new Integrated Data Service (IDS) within the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to support research across all three of Longitudinal studies in the UK. We aim to achieve this through 5 core work strands: 1. Creating research ready datasets - enhancing the SLS through linkages to new datasets 2. Providing the SLS User Support service: Support access and use of the SLS by researchers Maintain the SLS and SLS Safe Setting Conducting methodological development work 3. Capacity building – acting as a training centre for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and promoting the research potential 4. Communications, knowledge mobilisation and impact - promote the impact of the SLS 5. Development of UK-wide analysis and CALLS-HUB (Census and Administrative data Longitudinal Studies Hub)[1] In our last phase of funding, we created a unique linkage for a cohort of the study born in 1936 to data in childhood including a measure of cognitive ability. This has allowed ground-breaking full life-course research. The new datasets we will explore will also include more early life datasets for older members of the study.   [1] https://calls.ac.uk/about/ CALLS-HUB is a resource of information for working with more than one LS

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

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 2025 · 2025-09

This project investigates whether, where, and how quantum machine learning (QML) can offer real-world benefits in genomics. Despite sequencing trillions of base pairs, our understanding of how genetic instructions translate into biological processes and disease remains limited. A major challenge is the computational cost of modelling complex, higher-order interactions among genes, cells, and environmental factors—most current analyses are restricted to pairwise associations. Quantum computing could help address this by modelling complex correlations more efficiently than classical methods. Potential benefits include faster training, improved generalisation, and lower energy use. However, practical limitations remain, and it is unclear if today’s quantum technology can realise these benefits in genomics. In collaboration with the UK National Quantum Computing Centre, we will construct test models of genomic systems, identify simplified biological datasets suitable for near-term quantum experiments, and assess what computational resources are needed to achieve practical advantage. The project also includes community-building activities to guide future partnerships between quantum computing and genomic science. While focused on one use case, this work contributes more broadly to understanding how quantum AI might accelerate discovery across scientific domains.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Effective flue gas cleaning to remove sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions from industrial sources, including Energy-from-Waste (EfW) plants, is crucial for mitigating environmental damage, protecting public health, and meeting stringent regulatory standards. Current technologies must be significantly upgraded to comply with the 2030 National Emission Ceilings Regulations and support the UK’s circular economy goals. The UK government’s comprehensive resource and waste strategy, which aims to eliminate all avoidable waste by 2050, underscores the importance of EfW solutions with efficient flue gas cleaning systems. These solutions reduce the volume of waste sent to landfills, cut emissions, generate energy, and facilitate material recovery, thereby contributing to a closed-loop circular economy. Semi-dry flue gas desulphurisation employs chemical reagents like hydrated lime to absorb SO2 from flue gases. Given stricter emission regulations, it is essential to significantly enhance this process without disproportionately increasing operational costs. Enhanced SO2 removal can facilitate compliance with emission standards through a single-stage flue gas treatment system, significantly lowering capital expenditure for EfW plants and making the technology more accessible, especially for developing countries. Efficient SO2 removal with reduced reagent consumption will decrease production and delivery costs of hydrated lime, thus reducing transportation carbon emissions and making the overall operation more economical and sustainable. Moreover, it will minimise the production of residues that need treatment or landfill disposal. Minimising residue production also lowers the fouling risks and the need for plant shutdowns for manual cleaning, thereby increasing plant availability and potentially saving costs. Achieving SO2 removal enhancements requires moving beyond trial-and-error methods and developing a robust theoretical foundation for process design and optimisation. A prerequisite for further improvements is a fundamental understanding of the underlying physics of two common semi-dry technologies: Particle-Powder Spouted Beds and Circulating Fluidised Bed Reactors. Both technologies involve interactions between solid particles (e.g., hydrated lime), liquid droplets (e.g., water or slurry), and gas phases (flue gas). Factors such as temperature, humidity, particle size, and particle spatial distribution significantly influence these interactions, making numerical modelling and accurate SO2 removal predictions challenging. Furthermore, physical models characterising the interfacial transport and chemical processes require further experimentally informed development. Fulfilling this modelling gap is the main aim of the present proposal. We will take a micro-to-macro scale approach to comprehend the SO2 removal process in semi-dry desulphurisation, which involves (i) understanding the effects of operating conditions, (ii) exploring the effects of complex particle interactions, and (iii) developing online monitoring techniques to characterise inter-particle dynamics and quantitative SO2 removal rate simultaneously. Non-uniform temperature and velocity distributions in large-scale desulphurisation reactors cause particles to experience different localised conditions based on their position. To address this, we will develop a parametric regime map for micro-scale transport phenomena by conducting single-particle experiments in an acoustic levitator under high temperature and humidity conditions. The complex interactions between solid particles and liquid droplets in semi-dry desulphurisation reactors introduce significant hydrodynamic challenges. We will investigate inter-particle interactions in an innovative vertical wind tunnel with a diverging cross-section to develop experimentally informed models. Furthermore, the impact of inter-particle behaviour on overall bed performance and SO2 removal is not well understood. We will adapt and utilise the experimental methodology of the Depth-from-Defocus to evaluate particle spatial distribution and inter-particle distances and combine it with quantitative SO2 measurements using Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence to create an online monitoring system.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Snakebite, designated as a neglected tropical disease by the World Health Organization (WHO), claims approximately 137,000 lives annually and leaves up to 500,000 victims with permanent disabilities and disfigurements due to local tissue damage. The impact is most severe in rural, low/middle-income tropical regions, where snakebite-related morbidity has devastating socioeconomic consequences through loss of income, interrupted education, and social stigma. In response, the WHO has set a goal to halve snakebite deaths and disabilities. Local envenoming occurs when venom toxins either directly damage cells, disrupt blood vessels or trigger inflammatory responses. This can cause extensive swelling, blistering and tissue death around the bite site. Whilst normal wound healing is an uneventful process typically resulting in scar formation, an estimated 3–6% of snakebite victims develop chronic wounds. Treatment options for these patients are limited to invasive surgery or even amputation, as antivenom therapy is considered ineffective unless rapidly administered after the bite. Despite the severity of this issue, the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms of snakebite wound formation and healing remain poorly understood. Our project will address this knowledge gap through comprehensive characterization of preclinical and clinical snakebite wounds. We have recently established novel preclinical models of venom-induced chronic wounds using three medically important venoms (Dawson et al, 2025). We will expand this research by analysing clinical wound biopsies from snakebite patients in Brazilian Amazon hospitals. These samples will enable us to spatially visualise and quantify the microscopic change in tissues, identify genes associated with chronic wound development, and understand how local envenoming affects healing processes and inflammation.  We will also compare our findings with data from chronic wounds caused by other conditions to identify any common and distinct pathological patterns. Using our preclinical venom chronic wound models, we will evaluate both existing and novel therapeutic approaches. While antivenom is currently the only approved treatment, its effectiveness in preventing tissue damage is limited by speed of administration post-bite. Our research will, for the first time, determine the precise time window that antivenom treatment delivers therapeutic benefit after a snakebite, helping to guide local envenoming management in the clinic. Additionally, we will investigate the efficacy and mechanism of action of novel therapeutics that support the healing pathway, with our preliminary results showing that MC1R agonist delivery  positively impacts closure of chronic venom wounds. This research directly supports the WHO’s goal of reducing snakebite deaths and disabilities. Our project will contribute significantly by systematically analyzing snakebite chronic wound pathophysiology in both novel preclinical models and human biopsies. Our evaluation of antivenom efficacy will inform treatment policy for local envenoming, while our investigation of novel therapeutics could improve outcomes for snakebite patients across the remote, rural tropics.  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

An essential human behaviour is our ability to effectively integrate signals arising from external sensory information (e.g., visual input) with internal cognitive representations (e.g., memory). Such integration allows us to complete seemingly trivial everyday behaviours, such as recalling where you left your keys or imagining your partner's face. However, the mechanisms by which the brain achieves this integration are not fully understood. For example, evidence suggests that perceptual and memory responses might share neural resources in early visual cortex. But, whether this sharing of neural resources extends to other brain regions and different cognitive tasks that also engage externally, and internally orientated processes is less clear. Recent work from our group has shed light on this question by demonstrating the presence of an opponent visuospatial coding scheme in memory-related brain areas. This opponent visuospatial coding was driven by population receptive fields that either responded positively (+ve pRFs) or negatively (-ve pRFs) to a stimulus within their receptive field in a push-pull manner: That is, as activity in one went up, the activity of the other went down and vice-versa. Importantly, at present this opponent visuospatial coding scheme has only been shown to operate within a specific set of brain regions and during a single internally orientated task - cued memory recall. The current proposal aims to test whether opponent visuospatial coding represents a fundamental organising principle of the brain by quantifying the extent to which opponent visuospatial coding structures the brain’s responses during a broad range of externally orientated tasks (controlled and naturalistic visual perception, listening to naturalistic spoken narratives) and internally orientated tasks (cued recall, free recall, speech production and resting-state). We will ask whether opponent visuospatial coding structures the brain's responses across these internally and externally orientated cognitive tasks in both space (where in the brain) and time (when in time). We aim to capitalise on the success of recent precision-fMRI approaches (e.g., Natural Scenes Dataset, [NSD]) that emphasise fewer participants but large volumes of high-quality data. We intend to follow the NSD framework by making these data freely available. To achieve this, we will complete two large-scale projects: During Project 1, we will use cutting-edge functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques to densely sample opponent visuospatial coding in each participant and capture each participant’s responses during tasks that emphasise internal or external cognitive processes. Such an approach will allow us to quantify the strength of opponent visuospatial coding within each participant and the degree to which that coding scheme structures that participant’s responses within the brain (i.e., space). During Project 2, we will use electroencephalography (EEG) recordings during the same internally and externally orientated tasks and in the same participants to capture the temporal dynamics of the brain’s responses. We will then use state-of-the-art computational modelling techniques to quantify the extent to which opponent visuospatial coding structures the brain’s responses across different cognitive states in time. By adopting these complementary approaches this proposal has the potential to identify whether opponent visuospatial coding represents a large-scale fundamental organising principle of the human brain and answer central questions about how the brain integrates internal and external cognitive representations. These are critical issues in Psychology and Neuroscience and fit well within the BBSRC’s Advancing the frontiers of bioscience discovery – understanding the rules of life strategic priority.