Newcastle University

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-09

Hot Jupiters were the first exoplanets to be observed around main sequence stars and, despite representing only 10% of observed exoplanets, remain some of the best characterised planets outside our solar system, due to their favourable observing conditions.  Although they were discovered nearly 30 years ago, two fundamental physics questions remain: How are they formed and why are they so large? In addition to these two longstanding questions, many new avenues for investigation have arisen due to recent observational advances, including the role of clouds, disequilibrium chemistry and magnetic fields. This proposal will investigate the role of magnetism in hot Jupiters. There are three key reasons for this choice of focus: first, magnetism (via Ohmic dissipation) is one of the leading contenders for explaining the long-standing “radius inflation” problem. Second, magnetism impacts atmospheric dynamics, affecting both the day-night circulation efficiency and the (observable) hot spot displacement.  Finally, the highly inhomogeneous environment plays host to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities and dynamics which have received little attention, but may play a role in Hot Jupiters and other planets. In this project we will carry out a series of high resolution numerical simulations (using both Cartesian and spherical geometry), modelling the effects of magnetic fields upon the dynamics of the outer layers of a typical Hot Jupiter. In addition to the inclusion of magnetic fields, the key novel ingredient of these simulations is that they will include not only the radiative atmosphere of the planet, but also the upper layers of the (underlying) convective interior. The inclusion of both of these regions in these simulations will significantly enhance our understanding of heat transport in these outer layers, thus providing crucial new insights into the (long-standing) radius inflation problem.        

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-06

“What if surviving global warming depends less on genes—and more on how organisms develop?” Context: As global temperatures rise, species must adapt to survive. Traditional models of adaptation focus on genetic variation, selection and inheritance. But they overlook how developmental processes—how organisms grow, allocate energy and interact with their environment—shape traits like body size, and thereby steer adaptation to global warming. This proposal introduces a new framework, development-centric demography, to better understand and predict how species adapt to warming. Challenge: A species’ ability to adapt to warming depends on its demography—survival, growth and reproduction traits that shape populations. Most demographic models use statistics to describe how these traits change with temperature, but they do not explain how they arise in the first place. Simultaneously, conservation focuses on short-term actions like shielding animals from heat, overlooking developmental processes that support long-term resilience. To reduce extinction risk, we need demographic models and conservation strategies that mechanistically include development, offering causal understanding of species adaptation. Aim: To develop, analyse and apply a development-centric demographic framework that incorporates two key mechanisms—developmental bias (how internal processes shape trait variation exposed to selection) and agency (how organisms influence their own developmental environment, altering the selection they experience)—to inform adaptation-smart conservation interventions that reduce species extinction risk under global warming. Beyond pushing the frontiers of evolution and conservation science, the project will: Translate findings into an interactive Minecraft Education experience, enabling students to explore adaptation and interventions through game-based learning. Engage the public through popular science articles and museum exhibits that communicate how species adapt to climate change. Objectives: We focus on ectotherms (coldblooded animals) because they are most abundant but also most threatened. Develop novel, development-centric demographic models that integrate temperature-dependent energetics and capture how developmental bias and agency shape ectotherm developmental trajectories under warming. Analyse how development-centric demography alters predictions of extinction risk under warming and determine which ectotherm developmental trajectories and interventions enhance adaptive capacity. Apply the framework, empirically testing how developmental bias and agency shape adaptive responses in a tractable, well-characterised bulb mite system, assessing generality across ectothermic species in silico, and informing the design of conservation interventions. Engage students and the public through Minecraft Education, science communication and museum exhibits. Scientific Impact: This project pioneers a development-centric perspective in evolutionary biology, offering new insights into how developmental processes shape adaptation and evolution. It will advance demographic theory by integrating developmental bias and agency, revealing how organisms influence their own evolutionary trajectories. The work also informs interdisciplinary discussions on how development and agency shape adaptation in non-human and human ecology. Conservation Impact: By shifting focus from short-term protection to long-term adaptive capacity, this research will support more effective conservation strategies by identifying which developmental stages are most sensitive to warming and how they can be targeted in conservation interventions. The models developed will be applicable across a wide range of species, supporting biodiversity policy and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Educational and Societal Impact: We will inspire and educate through a custom-built Minecraft Education experience, where players manage a wildlife reserve under global warming. This game-based learning reinforces key scientific ideas and promotes climate awareness. Public engagement through science writing and exhibits will promote climate literacy and encourage public dialogue on species resilience.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-06

Chronobiological rhythms, such as the sleep-wake cycle, regulate nearly every aspect of human health. Disruptions to these rhythms are linked to poor health outcomes; yet, we lack clear biomarkers to measure disruptions or strategies to restore them. My fellowship seeks to address this gap by investigating how disrupted biological rhythms underpin disease conditions such as epilepsy and exploring whether targeted interventions could aid treatments. We will leverage wearable technologies to measure biological rhythms in both healthy individuals and people with epilepsy. By collecting and analysing multimodal data—including heart rate, temperature, movement, light exposure, and glucose levels—we will establish a foundation to understand what constitutes a ‘healthy’ rhythm, how disruptions can manifest, and which disruptions relate to disease. Key Objectives Define healthy and disrupted rhythms: We will collect multimodal wearable data from healthy individuals and people with epilepsy, creating a unique dataset to determine the best physiological markers of rhythm disruption. This will lead to a standardised library of biomarkers, useful beyond epilepsy, for broader research in chronobiology. Identify environmental influences: We will investigate how factors such as artificial light, temperature changes, exercise patterns, and meal timing contribute to rhythm disruptions. By analysing real-world data, we aim to pinpoint modifiable lifestyle factors that either support or destabilise biological rhythms. Test interventions: Using insights from our data, we will trial targeted interventions—including structured light exposure, meal timing adjustments, and exercise regimens—to restore disrupted rhythms. These interventions will be tested first in shift workers and frequent travellers experiencing jetlag, before potentially being expanded to individuals with epilepsy to assess potential health benefits. Impact and Applications This research will provide new tools to measure and understand biological rhythms, offering potential benefits in multiple domains. Healthcare: Identifying biomarkers of disrupted rhythms could improve early diagnosis of conditions linked to rhythm misalignment. Public health: Findings will inform guidelines on work schedules, lighting regulations, and lifestyle recommendations to promote chronobiological health. Technology & industry: By collaborating with wearable technology companies, we will refine devices for chronobiological research, helping consumers and clinicians monitor and improve sleep and health.   Ultimately, this project will generate re-usable datasets, open-source analytical tools, and practical interventions that can be widely applied to improve well-being and disease management. By bridging fundamental chronobiology with real-world applications, we aim to pave the way for a future where wearable technologies help individuals maintain healthier biological rhythms.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-03

Our Milky Way galaxy is home to hundreds of billions of stars and this is just one of countless billions of galaxies in our Universe. Extragalactic astrophysics aims to understand how these galaxies formed, how they evolve, and why they have a diversity of shapes, sizes, and colours. My fellowship is aimed to establish the role in galaxy evolution played by the supermassive black holes that reside at galactic centres. These objects, which contain millions to billions times the mass of the Sun, release extraordinary levels of energy when gas falls onto them via accretion: events called ‘Active Galactic Nuclei’ (AGN). Whilst current theories of galaxy evolution assume that this energy is crucial for producing the observed properties of galaxies, many questions remain on the physical processes that connect AGN to the evolution of their host galaxies. My fellowship takes a multi-faceted approach to tackling this complex problem. Firstly, I will use spectroscopic surveys that observe millions of galaxies from the local Universe through to the distant Universe (that are observed as they were during the peak cosmic epoch of galaxy and black hole growth). Through my involvement in a new infrared multi-object spectrograph, it will be possible to characterise an unprecedented number of the most dusty AGN; recent evidence suggests these objects are key to understanding galaxy evolution. Secondly, these surveys have been, and will continue to be, used for careful selection of galaxies to be studied in exquisite detail using multi-wavelength facilities. This includes data from the world’s best observatories (e.g., European Southern Observatory, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the James Webb Space Telescope). These observations make it possible to characterise how the energy from growing black holes is influencing dust, and the state and motions of gas in different phases (i.e., cold molecular gas and hotter ionised gas). Radio observations will be used to search for jets of charged particles (a key candidate for how AGN transfer energy into galaxies) and to map where the gas is shocked by AGN-driven outflowing gas. In parallel, bespoke, high-resolution simulations will be tailored to make meaningful comparisons to these observations. These simulations will help both interpret the observations and be used to test different theoretical models for how AGN inject energy, and interact with the dusty, multiphase gas in their host galaxies. Scientifically this fellowship aims to: (1) establish the link between AGN-driven outflows, dust, and radio emission across galaxy populations; (2) make robust measurements of the mass and energy contained in AGN-driven outflows; and (3) establish a theoretical framework that can explain the observed connection between dust, outflows, and shocks in AGN host galaxies.  In addition to the core science objectives, novel methods for inspecting large and complex spectroscopic datasets will be developed throughout the fellowship. This includes sonic inspection (i.e., representing the data with sound) and new statistical tools. These will benefit astronomers using these data, will be transferable to other sectors using similar datasets, and will provide a more accessible mode of data exploration for those who require non-visual methods. Furthermore, development and engagement activities will be used to: (1) promote and enhance the UK’s involvement in developing and using ground-breaking astronomical facilities; and (2) facilitate skills transfer between academic research and non-academic sectors using large and complex datasets.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-03

The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified antibiotic-resistant pathogens as a major threat to global health, food security, and development, affecting people of all ages and nationalities. The increasing number of pathogens resistant to current antibiotics highlights the urgent need to act against these rapidly adapting bacteria. Even in advanced medical settings, untreatable infections lead to longer hospital stays and, in severe cases, death. The WHO warns of a looming post-antibiotic era where common infections and minor injuries could once again become deadly, urging greater investment in pathogen research to develop effective treatments. To guide this effort, the WHO has prioritized a list of critical pathogens, with Gram-negative bacteria at the top due to their near-untreatable status. This research proposal focuses on understanding how Gram-negative bacteria construct their protective cell envelope, aiming to develop strategies to overcome their resistance to antibiotics. The bacterial cell envelope, a multi-layered structure, shields cells from hostile environments, including antibiotics. Gram-negative bacterial envelopes are particularly significant because they serve as both a structural component and a permeability barrier. This barrier, created by an asymmetric lipid bilayer called the outer membrane, blocks toxic compounds, including many antibiotics, from entering the cell. Identifying the genes that maintain the envelope’s structure and impermeability is crucial for understanding bacterial self-protection and finding new ways to breach this barrier for antibiotic delivery. However, genome-wide screens to assess envelope integrity in Gram-negative bacteria are currently lacking. This proposal addresses that gap by developing genome-wide, high-throughput assays to map the gene network involved in Gram-negative envelope biosynthesis. To study gene function, I will systematically delete individual genes from the genome and analyze the effects, such as changes in antibiotic response. Using a collection of single-gene deletion mutants, I will investigate envelope biogenesis in the Gram-negative pathogens Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. This approach will reveal how each gene deletion impacts responses to various antibiotics and environmental stresses. The resulting stress-response maps will provide insights into how these bacteria maintain envelope integrity under challenge. By analyzing these networks, I will identify genes critical to envelope biogenesis. Following the identification of key genes or pathways, I will further explore their cellular roles using my expertise in molecular biology. This will involve studying genetic interactions to determine if other genes depend on these key players. These findings will help pinpoint potential drug targets and strategies to overcome the envelope’s molecular barrier, ultimately improving treatments for Gram-negative bacterial infections. By deepening our understanding of envelope biogenesis, this research will contribute to addressing the global challenge of antibiotic resistance, aligning with the WHO’s call to tackle critical pathogens.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-01

  This research project will generate crucial new insights into how to develop and sustain local skills ecosystems capable of supporting the green transition in England. The challenge The UK government has committed to reaching ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions by 2050, necessitating a transition to a sustainable economy (i.e. the ‘green transition’). A key challenge in achieving this transition is meeting the skills needs arising from the growth of green or low carbon sectors, including renewable energy, carbon capture and storage, and retrofitting (UK Government, 2024). Crucially, these skills need to be available in the regions where green sectors are growing fastest. While retraining current workers or attracting labour from outside regions can address some short-term skills demands in these regions, the project emphasizes the need to equip the next generation of workers with the skills necessary for green growth. Thus, while existing studies tend to focus on re-skilling workers already in the labour market, this project focuses on young people (aged 16-24), examining how their skills can support the growth of new green industries. Aims and objectives The overarching aim of the project is to identify how regional educational institutions, employers, and policymakers can better align education and training provision with the skills required for emerging local green sectors. A mixed-methods approach will be used, combining quantitative analysis of education and employment data with qualitative insights from interviews. The quantitative analysis will examine the types of education and training pursued (i.e. the types of skills developed) by young people across several areas of England, using data from the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset. Complementing this, qualitative interviews with local stakeholders, including education providers, employers, policymakers, and young people, will be conducted in two case study regions: the Tees Valley and the West Midlands. Both regions face the challenge of transitioning from ‘brown’ to ‘green industries. Examining local skills ecosystems in these regions, the project will assess the alignment between education, training, and the needs of emerging green industries. Academic and policy outputs The research will contribute to several academic literatures, including research on industrial path development examining how new economic sectors emerge and the role of skills in this process, and research on local skills ecosystems investigating how education providers, employers, labour market institutions, and government shape local skills provision and outcomes. Additionally, the project will draw on work in transition studies and labour economics anticipating the demand for green skills, contributing to existing work in these fields by examining the question of how these skill demands can be met while delivering positive outcomes for young people. The project will culminate in a set of policy recommendations designed to help local and regional governments better align skills provision with economic needs, particularly in green industries. These recommendations will be developed through workshops with local stakeholders to ensure they are aligned with local realities. The project's findings will be shared with policymakers, educational institutions, and employers to support the development of more effective skills systems that can meet the demands of the green economy.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-01

Context Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming an increasingly common part of research practice, assisting with tasks such as idea generation, literature searching, and data analysis. While AI offers significant promise to enhance research innovation, existing studies reveal the prevalence of anxiety about AI tools among students and researchers, as well as concerns about the potential negative impact of researchers’ overreliance on AI tools and its diminishment of originality. Strategies have been proposed to reduce research anxiety in students, but little research focuses on early-career researchers (ECRs) nor individual differences. The challenge the project addresses This project will address the challenge of understanding how early-career researchers emotionally navigate the integration of AI into their research practice, focusing on the interplay between research anxiety, emotional creativity (EC), and creativity. As AI tools increasingly influence idea generation and research outputs, researchers face growing anxiety and uncertainty about maintaining their creative contribution. ECRs are particularly vulnerable to the impact of AI as they often lack experiences and resources; it is at this key stage of their career these researchers need to develop experiences which enhance their perspective and over-reliance on these tools could stifle critical experiences necessary. EC is linked to emotional processing and creative abilities. Individual differences in EC may help explain why some researchers adapt positively to AI while others feel more anxious in response to AI advances. Under the current financial pressures on higher education in the UK, this project could offer timely and impactful insights to develop guidelines for policy and use in implementation for researchers in managing anxiety to sustain creativity in an AI-enhanced research environment. Aims and objectives The aim of this fellowship is to enhance ECRs’ emotional resilience and sustain creativity in response to the fast-growing use of AI tools in research. Specifically, the project seeks to understand how EC shapes ECRs’ experiences of AI-related anxiety and their creativity. The objectives are (1) to generate new evidence on the relationships between EC, anxiety, and creativity across disciplines; (2) to capture the lived experiences of ECRs adapting to AI integration; (3) to develop practical strategies that support researchers and institutions in building healthier, more creative research environments. Using a mixed-methods implementation science framework, a combination of surveys, in-depth interviews, and facilitated workshops will be used to achieve the objectives. Potential applications and benefits This project will generate new knowledge on how ECRs across disciplines experience the integration of AI into their research practice, providing fresh insights into emotional responses and creative processes in an AI-enhanced research environment. By introducing EC into this investigation, the study offers an innovative, interdisciplinary perspective on individual differences in managing AI anxiety and sustaining creativity. The findings will inform practical recommendations for researchers and institutions, offering practical strategies for training, support, and research culture development. At the policy level, the research will highlight which disciplines and researcher groups are most impacted, guiding future funding priorities and institutional practices to foster a healthier, more inclusive research environment in the age of AI.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-01

Treebanks, corpora of syntactically-annotated sentences, have revolutionised the study of language change by providing the data needed for large-scale and precise investigations, combining grammatical analysis with statistical analysis of changes over time. However, while many interesting hypotheses require tens or even hundreds of millions of words to test, the slow speed of manual annotation limits manually-corrected treebanks to at most 1-2 million words. Our project builds treebanks for two underserved minority languages, Yiddish and Scots. We begin by building smaller, manually-corrected treebanks, which are crucial for research into historical linguistics and language variation and change. We then use recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically annotate texts of much larger size than could be done manually. These larger treebanks will contain c.650 million words for Yiddish and c.13 million words for Scots, both spanning time periods of several hundred years. Building these new treebanks allows for the development and testing of novel hypotheses at a new level of precision, including in the application of information theory to language. First, word order variation in modern and historical Yiddish provides an ideal testing ground for novel information-theoretic hypotheses about syntactic planning. Scots provides another important testing ground for information-theoretic work, but in the domain of morphosyntactic variation. In order to accurately assess information spread and test subtle quantitative hypotheses about how information spread affects the syntactic form of sentences, we need far more examples of word order variation with syntactic annotation marking the subject and objects than can be provided with the smaller manual corpora. Additionally, the larger Scots treebank will allow investigation of socially conditioned variation and change in Scots. By including material from before and during the 17th century decline of Scots features in favour of English, the larger treebank allows exploration into whether Scots syntactic features, possibly less salient than, e.g., orthography in the minds of users, persist in largely English writing. The ability to automatically construct such large treebanks with sufficient accuracy is due to the massive improvements in recent years in the accuracy of syntactic parsers, such as the ones we will train on the manual treebanks to annotate the larger treebanks. Recent work has focused in particular on parsing historical material specifically for purposes of linguistic research. We will take advantage of these developments within the context of a joint effort of linguists who are experts in corpus creation and use, and NLP researchers with knowledge of linguistics. This joint effort will even directly impact the linguistic research itself: the language models developed for the NLP work will themselves form the basis for a new method of assessing sentential information distributions, a novel application of these models to basic science research. Both the Yiddish and Scots texts contain errors resulting from Optical Character Recognition (OCR), along with a great deal of orthographic variation, a situation common to many languages. Our solutions to these issues will therefore be applicable for research in other languages that face similar challenges (e.g., Welsh or Irish). The outcomes of this work will also impact fields outside of corpus-based linguistic research, e.g. historical, literary, and philological studies. Beyond academia, the resources and subsequent research will increase research-informed awareness of Yiddish and Scots as important minority heritage languages, which will aid efforts to preserve and promote these languages and speaker communities.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-01

This project will examine how changes took place in historic landscapes, especially in local economic systems. By focusing particularly on small-scale societies, we will examine the environmental appropriateness and effects of decisions made at the local level as reactions to greater environmental and societal changes in short- and long-term perspectives. We will consider decision-making processes, and how responses to change were manifested in the material fabric of local landscapes. We will examine how effective the adaptations made by small-scale societies were in the long term, and how durable they proved to be. For a long time, scholars imagined that pristine nature once existed in a state of stable equilibrium, inhabited by non-modern societies that seemed almost unchanging. We once thought that it was only modernity which alienated people from nature and broke up this harmonious co-habitation. Prompted by growing awareness of present and pressing environmental issues like pollution, overexploitation of resources and climate change, modern archaeological, anthropological and historical research has shown the assumed equilibrium of nature and the imagined harmony in human-nature-engagements never existed. Today, we understand that nature itself and all its components (e.g. climate, geology, vegetation, fauna) are in permanent flux. Societies are likewise permanently changing at all scales. Landscapes are shaped and transformed as much by humans as societies change as they are altered by environmental factors. Researchers recognise that change is one of the fundamental characteristics of landscape, experienced everyday at scales from daily rhythms, through the changing seasons, to the passage from life to death. 'Historic' landscapes are understood as the result of myriad processes and practices which have changed in step with the societies who have inhabited them. Although both physical features and practices can persist from the past, their social value and practical uses may have changed over time. Relating changes to each other in terms of cause and effect can be demanding for researchers, and especially so when these changes appear at different scales. Such challenges of up- and downscaling are even greater for historical contexts with highly fragmented records. This project will combine innovative theoretical and methodological approaches developed by members of the team to investigate (in terms of cause-and-effect) the relationships between environmental and/or societal changes with transformations of economic systems and landscapes. Our project will focus on the Middle Ages, primarily the ‘first Middle Ages’ (5th - 11th centuries), when Europe was organised much more at small and local scales and the landscapes of our case studies were fundamentally (re-)shaped. Taking a diachronic perspective, we consider repercussions through the major changes of the second Middle Ages (12th - 16th centuries), e.g. the start of the Little Ice Age, the growth of towns, and environmental disasters such as the Black Death. We will our apply innovative approach to investigate in detail three contrasting case-studies in south-west Britain, southern Germany and southern Greece.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Human memory performs a demanding task when it temporally orders the complex set of overlapping emotional events that comprise our lives. Temporal ordering of our emotional memories provides shape and story to our lives. Without it, we are literally lost in time. Temporal ordering can enhance the detail, context, and accuracy of our memories or be susceptible to distortions. Conditional distortions could include the observer’s previous personal experiences, the social context in which events unfold, the emotional content of the events, or post-sequence events.  Even the conditions of memory recall or recognition can reorganise our representations of event sequences. For example, the order in which an investigator queries the content of memory (the question order effect) and the role of repetition in such queries (response replicability effect) can dramatically alter an observer’s memory of event order. Predicting and modelling these combined effects remains challenging. Modelling vulnerability to temporal distortion effects pose even greater challenges when emotionally charged yet may be critically important to explaining memory processes, especially when accuracy and veracity are scrutinised.  Therefore, developing tools which can model these effects is a key priority for the field of psychology, as these tools will allow us far greater understanding of memory, with impacts on areas such as mental health and the criminal justice system. Quantum mechanics also considers questions of temporal order. Although the quantum formalism (the language of quantum physics) successfully describes the differences we observe when we measure the properties of quantum systems in different orders (through noncommutativity of the operators mathematically describing our measurement of these properties), we don’t know physically what this noncommutativity means. This noncommutativity underpins the contextuality paradoxes commonly discussed in quantum foundations, where quantum systems can violate inequalities based on measurement result probabilities we would expect classically. Our lack of understanding of what this noncommutativity means physically, or why it allows us to violate our classical expectations, frustrates our efforts to practically harness quantum effects. For example, despite the hype surrounding quantum computers, those devices use only two inherently quantum algorithms which we can use on such devices - Shor's, and Grover's -– the most recent of which was discovered nearly thirty years ago. To further develop tools that use quantum effects for human good, we must better understand the quantum formalism itself. We can approach this task by examining the physical manifestations of analogues of these aspects of quantum formalism (noncommutativity, contextuality, measurement back-action) in macroscopic systems in which temporal order interacts with other non-temporal manipulations to determine the system’s behaviour. These analogue effects have already successfully been observed and used to model such effects in human decision making. Here, we propose to apply the quantum formalism to experimental observations of human emotional memory performance and the neural systems that support it to better understand both systems. The quantum formalism provides a natural mechanism for modelling combinations of difficult-to-reconcile memory effects, such as the question order effect (which predicts that the impact of question order may change the respondent’s answer) and the response replicability effect (which predicts that repeated presentations of a question should produce the same response across contexts). Conversely, the paradoxical temporal effects often observed in human memory performance suggest that it may provide a useful theatre for observing quantum phenomena that remain hidden at the sub-atomic level.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Adolescence is a period of nutritional vulnerability. Many adolescents do not meet the dietary requirements for good health (1). Unhealthy dietary patterns established in this period can continue into adulthood, leading to obesity and associated diseases, e.g. cancer and diabetes, costing the NHS £6.5 billion per year (2-4). Food and drinks purchased at school contribute 30% of all the food and drink an adolescent eats, and around 60% of secondary pupils consume a school meal at least four days per week, making school an important setting to improve diet (5, 6). However, evidence suggests secondary school pupils eat poor quality food at school (7). Improving what pupils choose to eat requires urgent action. Despite many initiatives that aim to improve what pupils eat at school, there is a lack of robust evaluations (8, 9). Consequently, it is difficult to know which initiatives are best and should be implemented widely. Self-reported dietary assessment methods, such as dietary recalls and food diaries, can be used in the school setting to measure food intakes, but challenges exist. Memory, unstructured eating occasions, social desirability and a lack of motivation, can lead to errors in the foods and drinks recorded by adolescents (10). In addition, gaining access into schools to conduct research is difficult (11). There is a need for novel methods to assess adolescents’ dietary intakes in school-based studies (10).  An alternative approach is the use of school food purchase data (SFPD), which can be obtained directly from secondary schools. These data provide information on pupils’ food and drink purchases across the whole school day and include the date and time of purchase, details of the type of food/drink purchased, item cost and whether the pupil receives free school meals. Using SFPD to explore pupils’ dietary intakes at school, offers an alternative approach to traditional dietary assessment, simplifying the data collection process for both researcher and school and improving consistency in the method. Supermarket purchase data have been used successfully in public health research, for assessing food and drink intakes and patterns (12-14). Despite this, there has been little research using SFPD to assess pupils’ diets. The aim of this project (SCOPE) is to explore whether SFPD can be used as an objective measure of secondary pupils’ food and drink intakes across the school day; this addresses key challenges of dietary assessment in adolescents and supports the need for novel methods (15). The research questions (RQ) are: RQ1: Can secondary pupils’ SFPD be used as a measure of their nutrient and food group intakes in school? RQ2: Does the process of obtaining the data, and the information contained within, differ between regions? RQ3: What is the acceptability of using these data to explore food intakes and patterns, among stakeholders (pupils, parents and school staff)? The project will contribute to the advancement of dietary assessment in the secondary school setting, potentially providing an objective, cost-effective method of obtaining school food intakes in a large population of pupils that does not disrupt teaching. SFPD may offer a consistent approach as datasets will be comparable across regions, enabling much needed large-scale evaluations of school food interventions and policies. 

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

The United Kingdom (UK) is experiencing an acute crisis in the recruitment and retention of health care professionals. Across the country, there are critical shortages of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and dentists (King’s Fund, 2024). The UK is increasingly reliant on overseas migrant workers to care for us in hospitals, at home, and in GP surgeries. At the same time, refugee health professionals—who have risked their lives finding sanctuary in this country—are often denied the right to work. This project addresses these intersecting crises, documenting lived experiences and exploring pathways for refugee medical retraining and employment in Northeast England. Our aim is to understand the long-term socio-economic effects that inclusion and exclusion to retraining programmes are having for refugee healthcare practitioners and their extended communities in the region (and beyond). Refugees Care is forged in partnership with Investing in People and Community (IPC), a refugee-led charity that provides critical support to refugees across Northeast England. Since 2016, IPC has organised the Resettlement Programme for Refugee Doctors (REPOD), a programme supporting the reaccreditation of refugee care professionals. Funded by NHS England, 108 refugee candidates have accessed REPOD, with 33 successfully requalified and now working in the NHS, most of whom live and work in Northeast England. Despite its successes, we know little about the long-term effects of this retraining and even less about those who leave or are ineligible for the programme. Our project brings together a dynamic multi-disciplinary research team of frontline refugee advocacy workers, human geographers, a medical researcher and a filmmaker. We will conduct 106 semi-structured interviews to document the lived experiences of refugees who have completed, left, or were deemed ineligible for REPOD. This work is important in three key respects: firstly, there is little existing knowledge concerning the long-term socio-economic integration and wellbeing of refugee health professionals who have completed REPOD; secondly, we do not know why substantive numbers leave the programme; thirdly, there is a gap in knowledge about the possible deskilling of refugee health professionals (nurses, dentists) for whom there is no pathway to reaccreditation. Our study is particularly significant as there has been little scholarly or media focus on the experiences of refugee health workers in Northeast England—a crucial region that, per capita, has the UK’s highest concentration of dispersed asylum seekers (Walsh and Jorgensen, 2024), many of whom reside in areas of high deprivation (Hirschler, 2021). Our objectives are three-fold.  One, we will document ‘best retraining practices’ across the UK, evaluate and inform revisions of IPC’s REPOD, and produce academic publications and presentations. Two, guided by our advisory council of senior NHS manager and refugee doctors, if supported by our findings, a key output would be a formal partnership between the IPC and Newcastle University’s (NU) School of Medicine, providing refugee doctors access to NU resources and clinical placements. This would create a model used to forge other such partnerships in the northeast. Three, we will create a 40-minute documentary film offering powerful insight into the lives of refugee health professionals. This output will be deployed to substantively raise the public understanding of refugees in the UK. With accompanying public forums, the film will be screened in locations across the UK. Taken together this work stands to transform the understanding of employment pathways for refugee care workers in the northeast.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Human rights campaigns accelerated in post-war Britain, driven by the National Council for Civil Liberties, the United Nations, and charities, which increasingly advocated rights-based activism rather than paternalistic philanthropy. Emerging disability rights and children’s rights movements sought respectively to dismantle the medical model of disability and assert disabled people’s rights to independent lives; and to position children as independent political actors or protect the rights of children as a vulnerable, dependent group. Attitudes towards and experiences of disabled children changed significantly after 1945. Mass vaccination programmes curtailed fatalities and impairments from infectious diseases, leaving a cohort of disabled survivors. Paediatricians developed treatment approaches for infants born with congenital anomalies, improving life expectancy but fuelling debate about the value of disabled babies’ lives. Thalidomide led to a cohort of children born with limb impairments, while prenatal screening and diagnosis caused a drop in the number of babies born with congenital anomalies. In social policy, educational integration and community support slowly displaced institutional care and special schools, while medical and social understandings of disability expanded, including more invisible impairments and chronic illnesses. This project will build relationships with Down’s Syndrome Association, Shine, Scope and Wellcome Collection to examine whether the emergence of children’s rights and the disability rights movement transformed attitudes towards, and experiences of disabled children, and identify policy implications from this history. Did disabled children benefit from sitting at the intersection of disability and children’s rights activism, or were they doubly disadvantaged by their age and impairment, and overlooked by both sets of campaigners? When and how did this change? I’ll scope diverse primary materials, and collaborate with partners to develop a robust methodology for a large research project which writes disabled children in as subjects and agents, identifies appropriate approaches to study different eras after 1945, and addresses beneficiaries’ needs. Aims and Objectives Scope sources and develop methods for a research project that examines disabled children’s rights, highlighting how experiences varied by age, impairment, ethnicity, class and gender. Build relations with beneficiaries, identifying scope for research collaboration and potential benefits for partners from historical research. With partners, pilot an inclusive, participatory approach to cataloguing relevant archival collections. Author an article on methodological approaches to locating disabled children in historical records, and another on writing disabled children into histories of childhood and disability rights. Potential applications and benefits I’ll develop tools to locate disabled children’s experiences in historical records, aiding historians of childhood and disability. Piloting an inclusive approach to cataloguing materials, it’ll help unlock archival collections for researchers and disabled people. It’ll examine intersecting constructions of childhood and disability, interrogating whether disability challenged typical future-oriented constructions of children as the citizens they will become and exploring debates about which lives merited investment. It’ll identify how historical research can support disability organisations’ campaigns to enhance services, policy, and advocacy, producing outputs for these organisations. This research would establish a large research project that exploits diverse primary sources to systematically examine the development of disabled children’s rights in postwar Britain.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-11

Trophic interactions, the consumption of one organism by another, move matter and energy through natural systems, influencing everything from individual organism health to how ecosystems function. Therefore, finding general patterns in foraging decisions is paramount to understanding and, ultimately, preserving and restoring natural habitats and the services they provide. Ecologists have long investigated trophic relationships at the community scale, uncovering trophic niche variation between species. However, since foraging decisions operate at the scale of individuals, there has recently been a growing interest in understanding trophic variation both within and between individuals. Surprisingly, there is relatively little synergy between community-level and individual-level research, and the current examples exclude recent advances across both sub-fields. While this is important from a conceptual perspective, it is also relevant in an applied context as food webs across the globe are constantly being rearranged in our rapidly changing world. Given that these food webs are changing before we even understand their structure and functioning, our ability to mitigate these impacts and restore their biodiversity and services is severely limited, demanding new research approaches and creative collaborations. Recent technological developments have revolutionised our ability to measure the use of food resources by organisms in ecological systems with unprecedented accuracy, presenting new opportunities to bridge individual and community-level approaches. In particular, advances in molecular, isotopic, and nutritional analyses have increased the resolution of resource use data, and novel analytical approaches have expanded our ability to study the mechanisms driving interactions; however, we are still far from exploring the full potential of these new tools to understand niche variation across levels of biological organisation. More important than integrating these methodological advances is developing a framework that can address real-world problems by determining how individual foraging shapes whole ecosystems affected by human activity globally. This collaborative project aims to develop a novel individual-to-community integrative framework for analysing foraging data across these scales by implementing conceptual, methodological and applied approaches. To achieve this, the project will combine digital and in-person workshops alongside empirical pilot studies to exchange and build capacity across continents, fostering the development of a novel analytical framework based on existing and newly generated data from both tropical and temperate ecosystems. Pilot studies will provide a real-world opportunity to refine the novel framework in two contrasting systems: populations of an invasive generalist snail in the tropics and arthropod communities under the influence of light pollution in a temperate agricultural landscape. Together, these activities will realise and demonstrate the full potential of bridging foraging research across levels of biological organisation and ecological contexts. By combining diverse expertise and worldviews, we aim to develop innovative ideas and pathways to apply an individual-to-community framework to larger projects and systems. The project will initiate a partnership between Dr Jordan Cuff and Dr Raul Costa-Pereira, bridging the Foraging Ecology Research Group at Newcastle University, UK and the Intraspecific Diversity Lab at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, with workshops throughout to widen participation further. This collaboration, fostered by shared academic interests and principles as early career scientists, has immense potential for significantly advancing our ability to study foraging across a range of scales, and elucidating the drivers and consequences of biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer and the leading cause of cancer death with 49,200 new lung cancer cases in the UK every year (>130 per day), 2.2 million cases and 1.8 million deaths per year worldwide.[www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/lung-cancer; www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lung-cancer] Estimates suggest there could be around 66,200 new cases of lung cancer per year in the UK by 2038-2040, with around 14,300 cases each year in England linked with deprivation. The cost of treatment could represent up to 0.8% of total healthcare spending. [DOI:10.1016/j.vhri.2022.07.007] A significant proportion of lung cancers are driven by changes (mutations) in a protein called epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which accelerate the processes that make cancers grow. Drugs that stop EGFR from working are used to treat these cancers. They are effective for 1-3 years, but after this time, the cancers become resistant to treatment. In a large proportion of cases, this resistance arises from further mutations in the EGFR protein that stop drugs from binding to it. [DOI:10.1016/j.lungcan.2022.05.011] Patients affected by this have no current treatment options and drugs that can treat these resistant forms are needed urgently if lung cancer patients are to live longer, healthier lives. This project aims to develop new drugs that can treat EGFR resistant cancers by binding to the mutated forms of EGFR. We have discovered a series of molecules that are capable of this and have proven, in laboratory experiments, that they are effective in stopping the growth of lung cancer cells, including those resistant to current treatments. The next phase of the project is to develop molecules that are effective in animal models of resistant cancers to prove that this approach has promise for use in patients. This involves making chemical modifications to the existing lead molecules so that they are absorbed into the blood after being taken by mouth and are stable in the body, whilst maintaining their ability to bind to EGFR. Once this key milestone is reached, we will subsequently progress the project to achieve the necessary safety and effectiveness in a molecule that can be progressed into clinical trials, thus providing a potential new medicine for drug resistant lung cancer patients who currently have no treatment options. Based on the projected incidence of lung cancer and the proportion of patients developing resistance through EGFR mutations, this could provide life-saving therapy for >5,000 patients per year in the UK alone.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

This project investigates measurement in quantum mechanics. In classical physics, looking at a system has no intrinsic effect on how it behaves — we can measure anything we wish without it affecting what we would see if we measured anything else, so long as we measure carefully enough. In quantum physics, however, certain variables in a system cannot be measured simultaneously, such that we obtain the values of both, error-free, with certainty. This measurement-incompatibility of certain pairs of (conjugate) variables is a key part of quantum mechanics (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). Unfortunately, these conjugate variables are often pairs we want to know simultaneously — for instance, the position and momentum of an electron, or the energy and the time-of-arrival of a photon at a detector. A trade-off exists: the more information we have about one variable, the less we can have about the other. Beyond this measurement disturbance, for some quantum systems, even treating incompatible variables as simultaneously having defined (measurement-independent) values leads to contradictions. The values of variables in systems with this property (contextuality) seemingly vary depending on the context in which they are measured, and combining inferences from the results of different measurements together leads to paradoxes. Because of this, contextual systems can possess combinations of properties which we would expect to be mutually contradictory. As well showing the peculiar nature of a quantum world, contextuality appears to be the key property which allows quantum computers an advantage over classical computers. This project considers the relationship between contextuality, quasiprobability negativity, and nonclassical measurement dynamics in genuinely quantum interactions. It involves identifying the meaning of negative quasiprobabilities (e.g., negative Kirkwood-Dirac distributions), and anomalous weak values; investigating how they link to contextuality; and applying the knowledge gained to help resolve key problems in quantum technologies, such as identifying the origin of, and learning how to leverage, quantum computational and metrological advantage to develop new quantum technologies. This research combines foundational questions regarding the paradoxical nature of quantum statistics with a search for more efficient applications of quantum resources, and for indicators to help us identify scenarios where there will be quantum advantage. It also links this theoretical work to experimental reality, fostering collaboration with experimental physicists, and identifying and demonstrating real technological benefits from the research. Worldwide, there is a race to develop useful quantum technologies. All quantum technologies were initially based on theoretical quantum foundational work. This illustrates how critically important quantum foundational research is, and why foundational work is necessary if we want to develop truly new quantum technologies (rather than just making short-term minor enhancements to current technologies). It is becoming increasingly apparent that we are facing difficulties developing new algorithms and approaches which provide quantum advantage. For instance, aside from classically-inspired and energy-minimisation algorithms, we only have two real useful quantum algorithms, Shor’s and Grover’s, both of which were found nearly thirty years ago. A reason for this thirty-year lack of progress in quantum algorithm development is that we do not yet understand well enough the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, such as contextuality, which underpin behaviours useful algorithms could leverage. Therefore, understanding contextuality is essential for us to harness quantum computing’s full potential. This project leverages foundations to pave the way for the novel quantum protocols, algorithms, and technologies of the future.

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

Songs are small things: short, catchy, harmonically simple, often seen as inferior to poems or symphonies. But they are also universal, mobile, potent objects capable of uniting nations, inspiring peace or war, love or despair. Accessible to all societies and social groups, representing a common denominator of cultural consumption, they sit at the very centre of cultural, social, and political history, demonstrably central to everything from the rise of the working class, to nationalism, race relations, and the commodification of romantic love. They are also perfect for communicating those histories; ideal tools for engaging different publics in debate and knowledge dissemination. This interdisciplinary project interrogates transnational, global dimensions of 'mainstream' song, taking England as its geographical unit. The research field is confined to England but focused on transnational phenomena. It has two centres of attention: the regions, represented first by the North East and secondarily by collaborating institutions from Exeter to Leeds; and the capital, which has been the driving force of this phenomenon for much of its history. The simple song offers a transformative means of understanding the past 500 years, reframing old ideas of ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ cultures as instead that of a dynamic cultural ‘mainstream’ from which certain groups have sought to deviate. In interrogating this model, SongCult will also create the first longue durée, macro narrative of song history, from the first printed ballads of the 1520s to the global hits of streaming services, via everything from the pleasure garden to blackface minstrelsy, the revolutionary barricade to the bedrooms of disaffected teens. It takes a story that has been variously represented over the centuries as insular, patriotic, aesthetically negligible, and instead reveals its transnational mobility, its power dynamics, its cultural hegemony. In so doing, it will transform song studies; it will make major interventions in public debates; and it will enrich understandings of communal intangible cultural heritage. The research has 3 pillars: 1) Assembling a corpus of 500 songs taken from 500 years, collecting and analysing their data, transcribing them in notation and tablature. These will be curated on a state of the art website. Where copyright allows, scores/tabs/lyrics will also be uploaded/linked to RISM, IMSLP, Ultimate Guitar, etc. For unrecorded songs, SongCult will combine recordings workshopped with partners, with crowd-sourced, ‘citizen science’ performances, creating a living archive that is both a major heritage resource and a core dataset. 2) Archival research into contextual sources: quantitative (catalogues; playbills; programmes; chart/ streaming/radio data) and qualitative (life-writing, journalism, court records, letters, diaries, treatises). These will provide a 500-year history of composition, performance, reception, analysis, debate, and influence. 3) Fieldwork and workshops with community groups. I contend that 6 non-professional song cultures – lullabies, playground song, sacred music, football chants, protest song, carols – are integral to an unbroken, transhistorical mainstream, overlooked by scholars and journalists. Guiding principles include collaboration, visibility, impact-first, career development, and interdisciplinarity. A core scholarly mission is to bring Popular Music Studies together with the traditional humanities and create a shared conversation around song, via hosted events, conference panels, and a global network. Significant funding is required to mobilise this on a world-leading scale. A core public mission is to intervene in cultural and national debates in collaboration with leading media organisations, offering new ways of thinking about the UK’s story, heritage, and cultural sector.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

This Fellowship supports a research project that explores the tensions between decolonial feminism and the enduring legacies of colonialism in Argentina. It builds on my doctoral work examining the Green Tide (GT), Argentina’s mass feminist movement known for its successful campaign to legalise abortion. Although celebrated internationally as a progressive, decolonial force, my research shows how the GT reproduces the same racial and gender categories used historically to marginalise Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations. The Fellowship allows me to deepen and expand this critical analysis through academic publications, public engagement, and future research development. One major goal of the Fellowship is to publish my research in accessible and high-impact formats. I will develop my PhD into a book, The Witch Against Man?, and write two academic journal articles. The first article explores how the GT draws on Indigenous ideas like “body-territory” to strengthen its political message, but often does so without fully addressing Indigenous struggles. The second article connects ideas of racial and sexual democracy to show how Argentina’s progressive image masks deep structural inequalities rooted in colonial history. The second core element of the Fellowship is social engagement. I will organise three workshops in Argentina with Indigenous and Afro-descendant organisations. These sessions will focus on how social movements can build stronger, more inclusive alliances. Drawing from my research, we will co-produce toolkits and a public-facing report aimed at strengthening intersectional organising in the face of increasing political hostility and backlash. Finally, the Fellowship will help me develop the next stage of my academic career by preparing a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship proposal. This future project will expand the research beyond Argentina to include Brazil, examining how feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant movements negotiate colonial legacies in different national and transnational contexts. More broadly, this work addresses a central paradox in today’s global politics: how social movements committed to decolonisation can, unintentionally, replicate the very structures they seek to undo. By focusing on how knowledge is produced and politicised—within activist networks, public debate, and academia—I aim to show that even the most radical politics must confront the histories and power dynamics they carry. The Fellowship will allow me to contribute not only to academic debates but also to public conversations about feminism, race, and decolonisation. Overall, this project seeks to make a meaningful impact within and beyond the university. Through writing, public engagement, and collaboration, I aim to support more reflexive and equitable approaches to political organising and knowledge-making. In doing so, I hope to contribute to broader efforts, academic and activist alike, to understand and challenge the ongoing effects of colonialism in our societies.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

AHLAN is a multidisciplinary landscape research project focused on understanding how and why people living along the Nile River near modern-day Dongola, Sudan have developed responsive land use and food security strategies since the African Humid Period. Prior research indicates that this landscape infrastructure development occurred around former river channels over the last 5000 years, when agricultural, pastoral, and water management systems shifted in style and position as climate and social change necessitated innovative strategies for sustainability. However, the material traces of these have yet to be explored in detail. AHLAN will investigate these traces using data from new remote sensing technologies, environmental information, novel open-source spatial-analytical approaches, and community partnerships to generate a new level of detail regarding human and environmental development in the region. Together with archival data and information from prior archaeological research, this new information about the spatial development of the landscape will help us to better model the growth and decline of local and regional settlement networks over time. The current war in Sudan has propelled people and heritage resources already at risk into an even greater state of uncertainty. Through its proposed research programme, AHLAN can also help document and monitor the present landscape, and identify threats to the visible remains of past land use using web-based, collaborative, and open-source/low-cost approaches. This information will feed into Site and Monument Records and threat databases currently being developed by the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM).  A series of online workshops developed for NCAM members and other regional partners will provide training in remote sensing documentation and threat management identification procedures. As Sudan returns to stability, this information will be vital for forward heritage policy planning, continued monitoring and future planning for heritage tourism, infrastructure development, and agricultural growth. In addition to the immediate pressures of the war, food security and access to water continue to be issues in many parts of Sudan, including the Dongola Reach. In response, modern communities are rapidly developing the ancient banks of the Nile for agricultural exploitation. This includes mining water via the construction of new ad-hoc wells to tap the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS). These activities have many impacts; in the short term, food can be grown at the cost of destruction of archaeological resources. In the long term, the extensive yet finite water resources of the NSAS may be depleted, leaving past, present, and future populations and landscapes in ruin. Via developing connections with local, national, and global partners, AHLAN also seeks to mitigate this through increasing awareness of the impact of modern agricultural development on archaeological resources in the region. By jointly exploring ways communities can contribute to and benefit from a greater understanding of past land use and helping to develop sustainable approaches for future landscape stewardship, we seek to empower local communities with the tools for a sustainable eco-management of their past, present, and future Nilotic landscapes.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Vision: Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second most common cancer amongst men worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Despite advances in treatment, resistance to therapies like androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) remains a significant challenge. Our project aims to develop and validate a cutting-edge, xeno-free iPSC-derived prostate organoid model to screen and evaluate PCa treatments, ultimately reducing and replacing animal use in research. Objectives: Validation: Demonstrate the suitability of our in vitro organoid model for screening and evaluating PCa treatments, reducing reliance on animal models. Alternative Approaches: Explore alternative treatments and assess drug combinations to sensitise organoids to therapy. Ethical Considerations: Integrate the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement) principles into the training of our PhD candidate studying cancer biology. Areas of Focus: Organoid Model Development: Utilise genetically engineered iPSCs to create prostate organoids that mimic the structural complexity of in vivo prostate tissue. Drug Screening: Perform high-throughput screening of FDA-approved drugs targeting key pathways in PCa cell lines, organoids and PCa tissues. ADT Resistance: Develop ADT-resistant organoids to investigate drug responses in a more complex model. Nanoparticle Drug Delivery: Collaborate with experts to enhance drug delivery using nanoparticles targeting cancer cells. Importance: Prostate cancer research lacks models that accurately represent the disease’s complexity, particularly the transition from hormone-sensitive to hormone-resistant states. Our innovative iPSC-derived organoid model addresses this gap, providing a valuable tool for preclinical drug testing. This model is free of any animal-derived components and reduces the use of animal models, aligning with ethical research practices. Why It Will Succeed: Innovative Approach: Our model faithfully replicates prostate tissue histology and allows reconstruction of patients’ genotypes. Collaborative Effort: We are working with leading experts and institutions to ensure the success and adoption of our model. Ethical Commitment: By integrating the 3Rs principles, we are committed to ethical and responsible research practices. Global Impact: This model benefits researchers studying PCa, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), and urinary tract development, making it relevant to a large international scientific community. Our project aims to revolutionise prostate cancer research by providing a reliable, ethical, and innovative model for drug screening and evaluation. We invite you to assess our application and support our efforts to advance this critical field.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Importance: Organ fibrosis is the pathological consequence of tissue damage and inflammation and is estimated to underlie ~45% of deaths in the western world [1]. Treatment options for fibrosis are limited, highlighting an urgent need to better understand the disease biology to identify new anti-fibrotic medicines and test novel therapies. Simple cell culture systems and animal models fail to faithfully recreate human disease, therefore have limited utility to study inflammation and fibrosis biology and test novel therapies. Human precision cut tissue slices (hPCTS) retain the architecture, cellular heterogeneity, cell-cell and cell-matrix communications of an organ and represent a robust non-animal technology to model human disease and perform drug efficacy or toxicity testing [2]. However, access to human tissue for research, and the necessary infrastructure and technical expertise of hPCTS methodology is currently limited to specialist research teams. This presents a major barrier for the scientific community to adopt hPCTS, as non-animal replacement technology for translational research and drug discovery programs.  In addition, hPCTS experiments require fresh tissue, which can present logistical and capacity issues. A solution to overcome these barriers and maximise human tissue use, is to cryopreserve hPCTS and generate banks of highly characterised frozen hPCTS for “on demand” use in disease-modelling experiments and drug screens. Vision: Our team have pioneered the use of lung, kidney and liver hPCTS to model tissue inflammation & fibrosis and assess drug efficacy [3-8], and our vision is to increase the 3Rs impact of hPCTS models in our group and promote their adoption by the wider research community and Pharma. To achieve this vision the focus of this studentship proposal is to establish robust methods to cryopreserve and revive hPCTS and then validate their use to model disease and evaluate drug efficacy. Scientific objectives:  Develop methods to cryopreserve and revive human precision cut lung (hPCLuS) and kidney (hPCKS) slices for ex-vivo culture. Evaluation of cryopreserved hPCLuS and hPCKS for modelling of inflammation and fibrosis and for drug efficacy testing. Expansion of cryopreservation methods to human liver (hPCLS) and heart (hPCHS) slices. Why we will succeed: Our innovative team are passionate about delivering this research and have the technical expertise, equipment, tissue access and research environment needed to successfully deliver this clinically relevant, 3Rs impactful project. By publishing detailed methods and establishing a hPCTS bank at Newcastle for the community, we can help support the replacement of in vivo models with hPCTS.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

  Poor fertility is a worldwide problem and probably the most economically important animal health issue. The UK dairy industry alone suffers annual losses of ~500M (Dairy Board–2019). Fertility problems in cattle are escalating. First service conception rates are currently less than 40% compared to over 50% in the 1980s. A direct effect of subfertility is that many more animals are required to generate replacements. This drives down welfare (fewer resources per animal) and increases emissions (~11-19% of green-house emissions are produced by farm animals - largely by cows). To mitigate these challenges, in-vitro embryo production (IVEP) is a critical tool. Through IVEP we also have a remarkable opportunity to accelerate adaptations to increasingly widespread environmental challenges (for example prioritising heat tolerant genetics), reducing stress on animals while improving overall farm resilience. However, despite it’s potential, IVEP pregnancy success rates do not outperform natural pregnancy, ~30% of embryos are simply inherently unable to develop to term for unknown reasons. This is exacerbated by reliance on subjective grading systems to select embryos for transfer. We fail to capture critical biomarkers of competency, presenting an urgent problem for sustainable farming. Our goal is to directly address this, producing a data-driven alternative -computational tools that enable better understanding of bovine embryonic development, and predict an embryo's potential to produce a healthy pregnancy. This minimises losses with multiple, positive, knock-on impacts. To achieve this, we propose to develop an analytical framework combining two cutting edge imagine technologies -Imaging Mass Cytometry (to report protein biochemistry in cells) and 3D-Correlative Light Electron Microscopy (to report the ultrastructure of cells), along with bespoke machine learning tools. This approach will integrate multidimensional data—protein composition, ultrastructure, spatial organisation, and temporal dynamics. Applying this framework to bovine embryos will allow us to model embryonic development and predict developmental potential with unprecedented accuracy. This solution perfectly aligns with embryo biopsy techniques, where cells can be removed with no deleterious effect to the embryo. Biopsied cells are highly likely to contain information able to predict competency before embryos need to be selected for transfer. We will capture biopsied cells by our imaging methods and relate findings to an embryo outcome that indicates competency versus non-competency. However, to prove feasibility, we must develop state-of-the-art approaches to analyse these complex imaging data sets. Data is multi-dimensional and multi-modal, and while individual analytical solutions exist for certain elements of the analysis pipeline, it is the integration of these data types that presents a substantial challenge. Therefore, our immediate aims are to develop proof-of-concept machine learning approaches capable of: Mapping changes in protein content and ultrastructure across development in healthy and unhealthy embryos. Using positive and negative embryo outcome related to prior protein composition to predict competency. In mouse, we have de-risked experiments necessary to provide the data feed to develop computational tools and we have substantial team experience developing algorithms for imaging data processing. The success of these proof-of-concept approaches will position us for longer follow-on grants, delivering on each algorithm, enabling their full application.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

Challenge: Lack of a tractable model for understanding mitochondrial cristae formation. During development and upon different physiological stresses, mitochondrial cristae undergo remodelling to reprogram mitochondrial function. However, the fundamental research question of how mitochondrial cristae are formed de novo is unknown. The inner mitochondrial membrane and cristae are highly dynamic structures. They undergo continuous fusion and fission events, which are essential for maintaining mitochondrial health. Tracking these dynamic processes in live cells is technically challenging. Solution: This proposal seeks to address the challenge by introducing a practical model system that enables controlled and sequential experimentation on cristae formation. The model will be used to explore the molecular basis and temporal coordination of key factors in de novo cristae biogenesis. Employing super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and single-molecule tracking, we aim to investigate the spatiotemporal organisation and diffusion of individual mitochondrial membrane proteins within live cell cultures. Thereby, we will enhance our understanding of the molecular actors, the mechanisms, pathways, and their spatio-temporal interactions essential to building cristae and modifying membrane morphology. Relevance: The primary challenge addressed in this research proposal is the lack of a model system to understand the initial formation of mitochondrial cristae. We have solved the problem. Now we make use of this model system and state-of-the-art super-resolution microscopy to provide a comprehensive solution applying a unique experimental approach, enabling the systematic study of mitochondrial cristae formation. This aligns very well with the two main BBSRC research priorities: ‘Understanding the rules of life’ and ‘Bioscience for an integrated understanding of health’. We believe that our result may also provide fertile ground for a better understanding of similar membrane biogenesis processes in other domains of life, including plants and bacteria. Further, it has long been established that mitochondrial function plays a central role in embryonic development beyond oxidative phosphorylation. Developing model systems and interrogating fundamental aspects of how mitochondria maintain and influence cristae formation is therefore of utmost importance for understanding not only healthy cellular but also developmental and organismal homeostasis. Potential applications and benefits: Our approach holds promise for providing valuable insights into a completely unresolved aspect of mitochondrial biology by: (i) unravelling fundamental knowledge for how cristae are built; (ii) defining the spatio-temporal organisation of the process and its players; and (iii) our results may benefit research investigating aberrations in inner mitochondrial membrane structure. Variants in proteins responsible for shaping the mitochondrial inner membrane can result in a number of rare and common neurological diseases, including Leigh syndrome, dominant optic atrophy, fatal encephalopathy, and Parkinson's disease. The specific mechanisms by which disease variants cause aberrant cristae formation leading to the onset of these devastating disorders remain largely unexplored.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

The RENEW project tackles the urgent requirement to reduce carbon emissions in the UK’s heating sector, a major contributor to the nation’s overall emissions. The UK has established a legally binding target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, with heating presently accounting for a third of these emissions, mainly from natural gas usage. Decarbonising this sector is crucial for meeting climate change objectives and presents significant challenges due to its scale and integration complexities. Electrified heating systems at both communal and household levels can offer viable routes towards decarbonisation when supplied by a net-zero electricity sector, as electric heat pumps can deliver 3-5 units of heat output for each unit of electricity input. Communal systems, such as district heating networks powered by large, highly efficient heat pumps, are particularly promising, potentially offering substantial cost savings. However, increased demand on the electricity grid during extreme cold periods, which may also coincide with low renewable energy production, could strain the system, potentially leading to serious supply disruptions. To address these challenges, the RENEW project proposes a whole-system analysis approach through refining the Whole-electricity System Investment Model (WeSIM). This tool has been previously developed by the RENEW research team to identify cost-efficient investment and operational strategies for low-carbon energy systems and has a strong track record in providing evidence to policymakers and stakeholders in the UK. RENEW will build upon previous work by its research team and enhance the WeSIM tool to better accommodate electrified district heating technologies. The upgraded tool will use climate-based models to generate projections for future extreme weather conditions, which will affect electricity and heat demand but also renewable energy production. The contributions of the RENEW project are multifaceted. Firstly, it will gather extensive historical data and employ climate models to simulate future weather conditions, and in particular extreme events that could severely impact the energy system. Secondly, it will upgrade the WeSIM model to optimise the deployment of electrified heating technologies for projected future climate extremes, focusing on the optimal type, capacity, and location of technologies such as air-, ground-, and water-source heat pumps. Thirdly, the project will identify cost-effective, climate-resilient pathways for the UK’s integrated electricity and heat sectors, enhancing energy supply security against extreme conditions. The project is organised into five main work packages, led by researchers from the three collaborating universities with strong track records in energy systems and resilience studies. Work packages include: 1) managing the project, 2) generating data-driven climate scenarios, 3) upgrading the WeSIM tool as open-source, 4) applying the tool to case studies for evaluating adaptation strategies to climate extremes in energy systems, and 5) stakeholder engagement and dissemination. The RENEW project involves a team of world-leading researchers from Newcastle University, Brunel University London, and Imperial College London whose expertise spans climate change impacts, whole-energy system modelling, and decision-making under uncertainty in energy systems. In addition, close collaboration is envisaged with stakeholders at regional/national levels, including the Association for Decentralised Energy, Birmingham Energy Institute, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, Energy Demand Research Centre, Met Office, Newcastle City Council and Northern Powergrid. This broad collaboration aims to accelerate RENEW’s impact and ensure its alignment with national energy and climate policies, providing a holistic strategy for a transition to a just and prosperous net-zero future.