University of Warwick

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) account for over 20% of the total years lived with disability and are the second leading cause of disability globally. These conditions pose both physical and mental health challenges, impairing patients’ mobility and diminishing overall quality of life. Improving clinical assessment and rehabilitation is therefore essential to improving patient outcomes. In this context, motion tracking plays an important role in clinical practice by providing insights into patients’ movement patterns for effective treatment strategies. However, traditional motion tracking requires controlled laboratory environments, which can alter natural movement and fail to replicate real-life activities such as walking in park/supermarket, reaching or multi-task activities. These activities are essential for patients with MSDs, especially those with multi-joint problems. Virtual Reality (VR) offers a solution by providing immersive environments in a laboratory, that mimic real-life. VR combined with motion capture, is being explored in different fields such as manufacturing, entertainment industry and rehabilitation, but there are still substantial challenges.  The use of VR environment, headsets and wearable devices can affect patients both physically and psychologically. These can lead to inconsistent results impacting on the reliability of clinical measurement. Moreover, how movement patterns relate to mental health and sensory experiences have not been fully explored.  This project seeks to integrate eye-tracking technology and psycho-physiological monitoring to develop a more personalised understanding of a patient’s physical and mental state during clinical assessment and rehabilitation. The integration of these modalities generates substantial volumes of sensitive personal data, necessitating robust cybersecurity measures, to ensure data integrity and confidentiality. Current approaches often lack such controls, thereby risking patient privacy and public trust. The project aims to develop a cohesive and secure-cyber-physical-psychological-system, combining VR, motion capture, eye-tracking and psycho-physiological monitoring, for improved clinical assessment and personalised rehabilitation of MSDs. This integrated system will enable health professionals to assess both patients’ physical and psychological states using real-world scenarios in clinical settings, improving the overall clinical assessment and rehabilitation treatment. This needs an interdisciplinary approach, involving experts in engineering, psychology, digital technology, and healthcare. The objectives are to: Develop VR-integrated motion measurement for diagnostic scenarios using lower limb motions (e.g., walking in park/supermarket), and rehabilitation tasks for upper limb motion (e.g., reaching-out with adjustable difficulty levels). Integrate eye-tracking technology to monitor attention and mental effort. Measure psycho-physiological responses (heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and electrodermal activity, and blood pressure) and questionnaires to assess participants’ experience, emotions, stress and fatigue. Test the integrated system with healthy participants to evaluate its utility, acceptability and capability through two clinical feasibility studies: upper limb motion monitoring for rehabilitation, and lower limb motion/gait measurement for diagnostic assessment. Work closely with patients with lived experience and advisors to ensure the system is practical, patient-centred and clinically applicable. The potential project benefits and impacts are: Improved clinical assessment of MSDs enables earlier clinical assessment and holistic, personalised treatment by combining physical and psychological data to enhance both physical recovery and mental well-being. With better assessment and rehabilitation, the system has the potential to reduce healthcare cost through faster recovery, reduced waiting time with fewer sessions, resulting in accelerated return to work for wider socio-economic-environmental benefits. The research creates academic impact by developing a reliable, integrated system that enhances understanding of the physical and psychological aspects of MSDs’ assessment and rehabilitation, advancing scientific methods, technologies and interdisciplinary applications.    

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Children and young people now grow up inside highly digital environments where gambling-like design and AI-driven personalisation influence everyday play, spending, and decision-making long before legal gambling age. Features such as loot boxes, prize draws, microtransactions, reward loops, and influencer-led promotions have become common across apps, social platforms, and gaming ecosystems. Simultaneously, AI systems that curate content, personalise adverts, and optimise engagement shape what children see, click, and adopt - often opaquely, and at scale. Because children’s skills for impulse control, financial understanding and risk perception are still developing, children represent a uniquely sensitive user group within digital gambling risk pathways. Despite strong policy momentum, the current evidence base on AI, digital platform mechanics, gambling-like features, and childhood wellbeing remains fragmented across fields such as psychology, education, media studies, and human-computer interaction. Critically, no dedicated integrated synthesis exists that examines these issues specifically for children aged 0-18, or systematically connects gambling harms to AI-mediated exposure and digital design in a youth-focused way. Without this integration, platform designers, educators, regulators, and families lack a unified, credible foundation for understanding how harm is accelerated or mitigated and what kinds of early-stage interventions work best. This project is a six-month Rapid Evidence Review (RER) designed to close this gap. It approaches AI and digital platforms as key environments where harm prevention, safer design, and literacy-building can scale most effectively when informed by trusted evidence. A central challenge this project tackles is ensuring that child protection and harm-prevention frameworks evolve at the same pace as modern platform design and AI personalisation systems, while grounding responses in a credible research base instead of speculation or siloed findings. The core aims and objectives are to: Map all high-trust research on gambling-like features children encounter across digital platforms, gaming and AI-curated feeds, Trace evidence on how AI-driven recommendations, algorithmic curation, and personalised adverts affect gambling-risk pathways for children and adolescents, Identify protective and preventive strategies that can scale across platform, school, and family environments, particularly around parental safeguards, transparent, age-appropriate disclosures, resilience-building, and digital literacy, Highlight clear evidence gaps to inform future investment and research phases, and Produce outputs that are immediately actionable for policy experts, regulators and platform designers. Thereby, the project advocates better-informed innovation rooted in the science of child development and trustworthy evidence synthesis. The outputs include a full UKRI RER report, a 10-12-page policy brief with visual summaries, a cross-sector policy roundtable for practitioner insights, and an academic journal article submission. All dissemination formats - policy briefs, evidence tables, infographics, conference outputs and blog summaries – will be created for diverse, external-facing audiences including opinion-formers, policy teams, the public, and platform-design researchers.  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Glycopeptide antibiotics (GPAs), e.g. vancomycin, are key therapeutics in the fight against gram-positive pathogens. However, the emergence of vancomycin resistance demonstrates the need for innovative strategies to combat antibiotic resistance. GPAs exhibit remarkable structural diversity and biosynthetic complexity, involving non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs), oxidative cascades, and post-synthetic modifications. Recent advances in computational analysis and genomic mining have enabled a comprehensive exploration of GPA biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Our consortium aims to generate uniquely modified GPAs with enhanced and broader antibacterial activity against resistant strains in an iterative process. Key objectives include mining of actinobacterial genomes for novel GPA BGCs and modification enzymes. Production of newly identified GPA candidates, followed by molecular dynamics simulations of their interaction with the target lipid II, will reveal key sites for further GPA engineering through the activity of newly identified modification enzymes, first in vitro and then in a GPA producer strain.  For the resulting new GPA derivatives, analysis of site-specific binding to resistant lipid II will be performed with advanced NMR techniques, and bioactivity against a tester strain will be confirmed. Finally, bioactivity profiling will validate the efficacy of the engineered GPA derivatives towards a range of resistant clinical isolates. We expect this collaborative interdisciplinary effort to deliver next-generation GPAs to address antibiotic resistance.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-12

Lithium-ion batteries will a play central role in the world’s transition to green and renewable energy, revolutionising everything from transportation to power electronics. While the last 50 years have seen outstanding progress in battery technologies, to meet population and 2050 net-zero energy demands the capacity, durability and charging rate of batteries will need to significantly increase. To radically improve our battery materials, we need to also improve our understanding of the fundamental electron and ion (charge) dynamics that govern their operation and drive current performance losses. One area where we still have limited insight on battery electrode and electrolyte charge dynamics is at ultrafast (femtosecond and picosecond) timescales. This is an especially critical gap because in this time regime lie: a. the individual electronic/structural steps in the redox chain that can cause battery electrode capacity loss via electron-transfer to inactive/unstable states b. (de)solvation processes that inhibit fast charging through limitations in reactivity at electrode/electrolyte interfaces c. ionic hops where the random and sluggish nature holds back the use of many safer solid-electrolyte materials In this Fellowship, I will take the conceptual leap needed to elucidate femtosecond dynamics in batteries, by merging the fields of ultrafast spectroscopy and operando battery science. More specifically, my approach is based on optical pump-probe microscopy, a technique which allows microscale structure to be coupled with femtosecond electronic kinetics and transport in materials. By constructing a suite of new pump probe microscopes with radically enhanced depth resolution, electrochemical sensitivity and ability to address ionic charge, I will: 1. uncover optimal electronic/structural pathways for charge-transport in technologically important battery cathode materials 2. quantitatively reveal solvation mechanisms coupled to microstructure at electrode/liquid electrolyte interfaces 3. elucidate lattice vibrations that can be used to manipulate ion-hopping in battery solid-electrolytes My results will deliver blueprints for structural and chemical design of battery electrodes/electrolytes, quantitative parameters urgently needed for better informed modelling of batteries and game-changing tools for characterisation of batteries, particularly at solid-liquid interfaces and with coupling to (buried) microstructure. More generally, by enabling a new field of research where ultrafast charge dynamics can be explored in electrochemical energy materials, and other systems not primarily driven by light (e.g., bioelectronic polymers), the methods/tools developed in my Fellowship will greatly enhance our ability to study physicochemical processes far from equilibrium. The programme co-ordinates activities with several Project Partners and collaborators including theoreticians, battery R&D companies, optical instrumentation manufacturers and the Faraday Institution which manages UK battery research. In addition, significant support for this ambitious Fellowship from the European X-ray Free Electron Laser Source (EU-XFEL) will allow (in later years) the translation of methods to facility-level experiments with femtosecond X-ray probes, creating an even larger user base for the approaches developed. Hence, besides providing fundamental insights to help accelerate battery development and net-zero, the Fellowship will also grow the UK’s position and reputation in advanced optical tools, with methods that can be commercialised and the training of skilled workers/users. Finally, this Fellowship will serve as a launchpad for advocacy in the net zero area, creating a new, diverse community of researchers at the (ultrafast) optics-electrochemistry interface, as well as informing policy makers and the public.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-11

Gram-positive (monoderm) bacteria, including clinically important pathogens such as Streptococci, are characterized by a single cell membrane surrounded by a thick cell wall. This proposal will address a crucial puzzle: how do these bacteria, which maintain a massive internal pressure of 30 atmospheres, avoid having their cell membrane compressed tightly against the cell wall — a scenario that would immobilise all transmembrane proteins and thus prove fatal to the cell? To address this, the existence of a pseudo-periplasmic space between the membrane and cell wall has been proposed, in which proteins and other large molecules can move freely. This is supported by electron microscopy observations of a low density “inner-wall zone” region of the Gram-positive cell envelope in multiple species. Recently, it was hypothesised that teichoic acids, highly expressed poly-electrolyte polymers which are essential in almost all Gram-positive bacteria, may form the pseudo-periplasm by acting as gel-like spacer layer. Teichoic acids have multiple known functions in the Gram-positive cell envelope, but why they are essential remains a mystery. Demonstrating that they are responsible for formation of the pseudo-periplasm would be a major advance in our understanding of these polymers. This would ultimately support efforts to design teichoic acid-targeting antibiotics or vaccines. Aims and objectives: We will test the central hypothesis that teichoic acids are responsible for the formation of the Gram-positive pseudo-periplasm and determine the core biophysical properties of this enigmatic spacer layer. First, we will execute two parallel work packages focussed on the genetically tractable Bacillus subtilis, where we uniquely benefit from established simultaneous knockouts/depletions of all teichoic acid synthases: WP1: Computationally determine the physical and biochemical feasibility of the teichoic acids acting as a pseudo-periplasm spacer layer. Key methodologies: Coarse-grained computational modelling (Molecular Dynamics using Martini 3, and Brownian Dynamics using LAMMPS). WP2: Experimentally determine the physical properties of the pseudo-periplasm and the role of teichoic acids in pseudo-periplasm formation. Key methodologies: single molecule tracking, quantitative light microscopy, cryo-electron tomography, molecular microbiology. Second, we will apply these methodologies to investigate maintenance of the pseudo-periplasm in the clinically important pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae, whose teichoic acids lack any overall charge, unlike most other Gram-positive bacteria: WP3: Determine how uncharged teichoic acids in S. pneumoniae change the biophysical properties of the periplasmic space. Outcomes: This fundamental bioscience study will elucidate the properties of the Gram-positive  pseudo-periplasm and thus substantially improve our understanding of the cell envelope of most Gram-positive bacteria. This fits BBSRC priorities of understanding the rules of life, particularly antimicrobial resistance and engineering biology, and developing a highly-skilled bioscience workforce. Tangible benefits and potential impacts: Developing a comprehensive understanding of the pseudo-periplasm and teichoic acid function will be broadly useful for bacterial cell envelope biology topics such as osmoregulation and cell wall synthesis. As teichoic acids are essential and represent promising targets for antimicrobials and vaccines, uncovering their fundamental role in Gram-positive bacteria will pave the way for innovative approaches in the rational design of next-generation therapeutics. Understanding of the molecular basis of the pseudo-periplasm – particularly in the industrial workhorse Bacillus subtilis - may offer new biotechnology opportunities for strain optimisation in industrial fermentation and protein secretion. The new coarse-grained computational modelling framework will be adaptable to other biopolymers containing sugar molecules, such as glycans, expanding beyond the extensively studied DNA and protein polymers.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-11

Agricultural plant production is a resource-intensive process that is increasingly challenged by changing climates. Solutions for a more sustainable and resilient way of plant production are therefore urgently required. Plant roots are a habitat for highly complex microbial communities and plants benefit from intimate interactions with these microbes. In addition to mediating tolerance against climate stress, some microbes can improve plant nutrition. While it indicates the value of microbes to sustain plant production, field applications with individual beneficial microbes often do not meet their beneficial activities observed under lab conditions. In previous joint studies, we identified the nodulating bacteria S. meliloti WSM1022 as highly efficient in supplying the legume Medicago truncatula with nitrogen (N) in different soil types. Moreover, we found that WSM1022 can modulate the root microbiome to form a mini-microbiome that together with WSM1022 that we defined as the N-biome. In addition to supporting N-fixation the N-biome appears to transfer additional benefits to M. truncatula. In this project we aim to evaluate the robustness of the N-biome-M. truncatulasymbiosis under different N regimes and drought as prevalent climate stress using greenhouse settings with field soil. We will quantify the efficiency of nodulation and N-fixation, plant growth and development as well as the expression of symbiosis and drought stress marker genes to evaluate functional robustness of the N-biome-M. truncatula symbiosis. We will further apply genome-wide association studies to identify genetic traits of M. truncatula that support N-biome establishment under drought stress. All experiments are paralleled by root microbiome analyses to determine N-biome integrity or even its functional expansion by recruiting additional beneficial microbes under these changing environments. Our project thus aims to develop the N-biome as a biological entity for future field applications.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-10

Interfaces of metals and molecules are important in a wide range of technologies: There is remarkable progress in increasing the sensitivity of analytical and non-destructive medical imaging techniques by using so-called plasmonic metal nanoparticles functionalised with light-sensitive molecules to enable sensing single molecules and profiling cancerous tissues, for example. Single organic molecules can also be connected to nanostructured metallic tips to create miniaturised electronics components such as diodes and switches, study chemical reaction mechanisms and understand how light interacts with matter. For many of these applications, there is in particular a search for molecules with unique quantum properties based on how they interact with light and charges, as well as how they can be anchored to metallic surfaces. Plasmonic metal nanostructures also provide a way to utilise solar radiation to catalyse chemical reactions that can help us to move towards the sustainable production of high-value chemicals and fuels. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the fundamental physical and chemical processes behind these technologies which makes it extremely hard to establish design principles for finding good candidate molecules or increasing the efficiency of these devices and catalysts. There is an urgent need for accurate computational methods based on quantum mechanics that can model light- and charge-driven processes for molecule-metal interfaces. My aim is to combine the strengths of computational techniques used in three different fields: materials modelling, molecular modelling, and machine learning to develop new computational methods that can give us fundamental insights into the mechanisms of light- and charge-driven processes at molecule-metal interfaces. My work will widen access to a highly accurate quantum chemistry technique, Density Functional Embedding Theory, that employs molecular and materials modelling techniques in a multiscale fashion, by handling the molecular neighbourhood and the extended metallic slab separately, with different levels of approximate quantum chemistry methods. Despite its demonstrated predictive power, due to its high computational cost and complexity so far this methodology has been quite limited in the number and type of processes it can model. I will present a novel machine learning-based acceleration of this quantum embedding technique, that will enable me to study optimal reaction pathways and dynamics to study processes that are currently out of reach of the method. I will focus on modelling latest ultrafast surface spectroscopic measurements and surface catalytic reactions to understand light-matter interaction and charge transfer across molecule-metal surfaces. By predicting the selectivity and rate of surface catalysed reactions, these simulations will help us to improve current technology, for example, for carbon dioxide reduction and solar fuel production. The developed methodology will have impact well beyond molecule-metal interfaces; it will offer an alternative way to model, for example, defects in solids, spectroscopy or reactions in solution, and on non-metallic surfaces. The developed methods and the fundamental insights into light- and charge-driven processes will help me establish molecular design principles and develop machine learning-based screening and design techniques for finding molecules with optimal quantum properties for single-molecule electronics, bioimaging nanoparticles, and other optoelectronic devices. By enhancing the sensitivity and stability of such devices, this will enable improved reaction monitoring and biosensing, and open up new applications of plasmonic nanostructures.

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 PhD project will explore the role and significance of lithographs and other printed images produced in support of the war effort between 1914 and 1918. To do so, it will investigate the Bute Collection – a fascinating but under-researched collection of European fine and popular lithographs held by the Imperial War Museums (IWM). The collection was gathered by John Crichton-Stewart, the 4th Marquess of Bute, when he was a diplomat in Paris during the First World War and donated to the museum in the early 1950s. It contains around 3,600 predominantly French prints, representing all aspects of French patriotic print production of the period. It is envisaged that the PhD project will focus on this collection, as well as the museum’s collection of British lithographs of the period, mainly instigated by the government’s War Propaganda Bureau / Department of Information. The proposed investigation of the Bute collection will fill in a curiously outstanding gap in the field. Both scholars of France and art historians have paid relatively little attention to lithography. Moreover, in both Britain and France, the cultural history of the conflict has often underplayed the specificities of artistic production of wartime. This doctoral project therefore represents a genuine opportunity to make a significant contribution to the field by scrutinising the lithographs of the First World War in their own terms and helping to contextualise the Bute collection within the wider art collection at IWM. It would position them in their context of production (commission, design, printmaking) and explore their dissemination and reception at all relevant levels (domestic, local, national, transnational). The project will allow the researcher to map the extent and nuances of nationalist and imperialist war propaganda present in artists’ lithography in order to produce a transnational study of lithographs of the First World War. It will explore the lithograph as a form of artistic expression on the subject of the war and examine the artists’ circumstances, contexts, preoccupations and motivations, showing how lithographic artists worked at the juncture of politics, commerce and art. The project will help to develop a pluralistic approach to wartime propaganda by looking at the production and function of artistic lithography during the war. Such necessarily collaborative visual products challenge the notion of propaganda as an inherently top-down form of communication. The project will consider and rethink the complex varieties of patriotism and imperialism by examining the sophisticated visual language that artists employed to appeal to different audiences and agendas.  The project will also look at the process of lithography, a mode of printmaking that is fundamentally violent, involving breaking and grinding stones, etching surfaces with corrosive acid, and forcing ink through a mechanical press at great pressure. The method’s impact on the final image would be an intriguing lens with which to view lithography’s function as a tool of wartime communication. The appointed student will engage closely with IWM’s First World War team and with the museum art curators as appropriate.

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

How and where did the elements of the Universe form? How do stars live and die? What happens when two of the densest objects in the Universe crash into each other? These are some of the questions that lie at the heart of the research to be undertaken by this fellowship. The fellowship exploits the UK's premier sky survey, the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), to detect new transient objects in the Universe, and undertake innovative approaches in their studying to further our understanding of the Universe. When massive stars, more than 8 times the mass of our Sun, reach the end of their lives, they collapse due to their own gravity and produce a neutron star or black-hole. During this rapid and catastrophic collapse, large amounts of chemically-enriched material is expelled into the Universe in an extremely luminous event known as a supernova. These chemically-enriched innards are essential for life as we know it, containing carbon, oxygen and iron. Through supernova explosions, these elements form the next generation of stars and planets, seeding the building blocks of life. Our understanding of supernovae is hampered, however, due to time lags between discovery of a new supernova, and scheduling large telescopes to undertake detailed observations. This fellowship will build upon a world-leading network of telescopes to overcome this. Using the UK-led GOTO telescope system to discover new supernovae, we will automatically, with no human intervention, trigger other telescopes nearby, performing detailed observations within minutes of discovery. Opening this new timescale provides vital diagnostics on the nature of the exploding stars (such as their size and mass) and the energetics and chemical makeup of the explosion itself. These are essential for us to build a complete picture of how different stars die, and how the chemical fingerprint of our Universe was formed. After massive stars die, their journey is not quite complete - recent breakthroughs in mean we can now detect stars 'beyond the grave' as their neutron star and black hole corpses violently merge. A truly landmark moment in history occurred in 2017 when the LIGO/Virgo detectors found a completely new signal from the Universe: minute ripples in space-time. These ripples were caused by two neutron-stars merging 130 million light years away and are known as gravitational-waves - their detection was the fruition of a century-old prediction by Einstein. With the ability to detect gravitational-waves, we are now 'hearing' the Universe as well as seeing it. Just as our senses combine to give us far more information than they do alone, so too does combining light we see and gravitational-waves we hear from astrophysical transients. This new era of gravitational-wave research began with the detection in 2017 of the first event discovered in both light (photons) and gravitational-waves. Named GW170817, it is now one of the most intensely studied objects in the Universe. The findings from this event are mesmerising, but it raised further questions. To make progress we must now find other events. This is not trivial however, akin to the 'needle in the haystack' problem. We must rapidly search swathes of the night sky with systems such as GOTO to find the counterpart to the gravitational-wave signal. This fellowship is at the forefront of the international effort to realise the potential of this exciting new window on the Universe.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

The EPSRC Manufacturing Research Hub for a Sustainable Future in Engineering Plastics is a groundbreaking initiative focused on transforming the lifecycle of plastics—from manufacturing to end-of-life. It aims to overcome technical challenges and promote cross-sector collaboration to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, ensuring sustainability in the plastics industry and beyond. The UK manufacturing sector urgently needs to adopt circular economy principles, especially regarding plastic components. Plastics are essential to many industries but pose significant challenges in terms of sustainability and circularity. Legislation now mandates increased product reuse and recycling, with specific targets for recycled content in new products. Despite progress with packaging and single-use plastics, achieving a circular economy remains difficult, particularly for engineering plastics used in durable goods such as vehicles, electronics, and construction materials. These products are complex, making recycling and reuse challenging. For instance, legislation like the EU's End-of-Life Vehicles Directive underscores the need for higher recycled content, presenting both challenges and opportunities for manufacturers and recyclers. While engineering plastics are technically recyclable, converting "recyclable" into "recycled" is problematic. Mechanical recycling degrades plastic quality over time, leading to reduced molecular weight and increased impurities, which affects performance. As a result, recycled plastics often suffer from inconsistent quality and are typically downcycled into lower-value products. Additionally, polymer-based materials can be crosslinked or contain multiple components—such as blends, compounds, and composites—further complicating the recycling process. Achieving a zero-waste, circular economy for polymer products requires better methods for reuse, repair, remanufacturing, and recycling, demanding a holistic approach to the product lifecycle. The EPSRC Manufacturing Research Hub for a Sustainable Future in Engineering Plastics is designed to address these challenges through collaboration with leading academic and industrial partners. Our Hub focuses on five key Research Challenges, which will be tackled through a combination of Core Projects, Feasibility Studies, Pilot Projects, and Scale-up & Integration projects, with a particular focus on the transport, electrical & electronics (E&E), and construction sectors. This partnership ensures that the research is innovative, relevant, and impactful. The Hub fosters a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) environment, drawing on a diverse group of researchers to create cutting-edge solutions. Its work spans a broad range of studies on sustainable manufacturing processes, including the development of circular materials, digital technologies for reuse and recycling, and the optimization of circular design. It also promotes systems innovation for sustainable and circular polymer manufacturing. The outcomes will include superior products for the transport, E&E, and construction sectors, offering better environmental, cost, and performance advantages compared to those made from virgin materials. Digital tools like product passports and digital twins will enable transparent tracking of materials and processes, enhancing supply chain resilience. The innovations from this research will drive significant progress in circular product development, reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions, and create new business opportunities and highly skilled jobs in the UK. By focusing on sustainability, the Hub supports the UK’s leadership in sustainable plastics and contributes to the goals of UKRI for sustainability and manufacturing. In summary, the EPSRC Manufacturing Research Hub for a Sustainable Future in Engineering Plastics represents a landmark effort to reshape the lifecycle of polymer products. By addressing technical barriers and fostering collaboration, it aims to accelerate the shift towards a circular economy and ensure a sustainable future for the plastics industry.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Cells are the building blocks of all living organisms and need to communicate with each other and within themselves to maintain the body's proper functioning. This communication is vital for coordinating the activities of different cells and tissues, ensuring good health, and helping the body respond to changes in its surroundings. Cells send messages using molecules like proteins, and when this communication breaks down, it can cause diseases. For example, faulty signals can make cells grow uncontrollably leading to tumours, or in Alzheimer's disease, neurons lose their ability to communicate, leading to memory and cognitive issues. So, understanding how cells communicate and what goes wrong in diseases is very important for medicine. Among the many ways cells send signals, one under-studied method involves cutting specific proteins that reside within the various membrane compartments of cells. This process releases a part of the protein that then moves into the cell's nucleus, where it can turn genes on/off, triggering biological responses. Although we don’t know as much about this pathway compared to others, there's growing evidence that problems with this kind of signalling can lead to various diseases. This form of communication happens in all living organisms, but only a few examples have been found in mammals so far—though there are likely many more to discover. The starting point for this research is my recent discovery of a surprising new role for a membrane protease (a type of enzyme) called the signal peptidase complex (SPC). Until now, textbooks describe SPC as responsible for removing signal peptides from proteins as they enter the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a cell structure. Recently, it was also found that viruses like Zika and Dengue use SPC to help them reproduce. However, I discovered that SPC has an entirely unexpected role in releasing a membrane-bound transcription regulator from the ER, a process that leads to changes in gene activity. Coupled with other recent work, it is now clear that SPC has a broader function than previously thought. Preliminary evidence suggests that my earlier discovery is not unique, and that there are multiple other SPC-cleaved membrane-bound transcriptional regulators in the human genome, and its known role in viruses infection makes it even more important to study. In this proposal, I aim to find out (i) how common this new role of SPC in processing membrane-bound transcription regulators is, (ii) how SPC's cutting of membrane proteins is controlled, and (iii) how viruses take advantage of this function during infection. Overall, this research will provide a new perspective on SPC's role, expand our understanding of membrane-bound transcription regulators, and uncover new signalling pathways between the ER and the nucleus that underline important biological processes in health and disease.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-09

The rapid advancement of large pre-trained AI models such as LLMs and other foundations models has been disruptive to many sectors of our lives, and soon they will act as autonomous agents on our behalf in dealing with complex real-world problems while interacting with other agents and humans. However, it is unclear that when multiple of these large pre-trained AI agents interact with each other, how they would influence each other’s behaviour. This is especially true if they are programmed to be strategic (i.e., selfish, or malicious) on the behalf of their human owners/creators. These strategic behaviours, if not mitigated efficiently, will cause societal, financial, ethical, and safety disasters. Against this background, in this proposal I will aim to build a new research collaboration network with whom I will pursuit research questions addressing the following objectives: (i) To identify novel defence mechanisms that protect these large pre-trained AI agents from being manipulated to misbehave. (ii) To design novel learning algorithms which can help them to efficiently behave (e.g., to maximise total payoff overtime) when interacting with other agents with different strategic/selfish goals. (iii) To develop new protocols to control these agents’ collective behaviour to achieve system stability. (iv) To develop a novel framework to integrate the findings above into the training process of these large AI agents. In particular, I plan to visit the following researchers, each are renown in the respective research areas: Bo An from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Expert in designing LLM-based agents Tom Goldstein from University of Maryland, College Park, US. Expert in foundations of LLMs. Rebekka Burkholz from CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany. Expert in sparse neural networks. My aim with these visits is to foster an impactful research collaboration to explore novel and radical research directions to address the objectives mentioned above. Requested cost: Visiting Bo An 3 times :1 week/visit - Total cost: £10050 = 3 x £3350 (£1500 flight tickets + £850 per diem cost for 7 days + £1000 accommodation cost) Visiting Tom Goldstein 3 times: 1 week/visit - Total cost: £8100 = 3 x £2700 (£1000 flight tickets + £700 daily cost for 7 days + £1000 accommodation cost) Visiting Rebekka Burkholz: 3 times: 1 week/visit - Total cost: £6600 = 3 x £2200 (£500 travel cost + £700 per diem cost for 7 days + £1000 accommodation cost)   Total travel cost: £24,750.00 GBP. In addition to this, there is a cost to cover 5% of the PI's time. The total cost for this is £4537 directly allocated and £3159 indirect cost. Given this, the total full economic (FEC) cost is: £32,446.00, with the requested cost to be £25,956.80.  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

Artificial interfaces between complex oxides (heterointerfaces) have exhibited a vast range of fascinating and exotic phenomena, including metallic conductivity and superconductivity at the interface between insulators, large spin-orbit coupling, complex magnetic states and improper ferroelectricity. At the heart of this functionality are the closely intertwined charge, orbital and spin degrees of freedom that can be drastically modified through heterostructure engineering. Oxide interfaces thus became ideal candidates for the utilisation of their unique properties for the creation of devices such as spin transistors. Similarly, interfaces that occur between pieces of the same material (homointerfaces) have proven to be equally fascinating. These interfaces can be found in oxide ferroelectrics, systems that possess a switchable spontaneous polarisation. When different polarization orientations exist within the same material, boundaries called domain walls form, with dimensions of a few nanometres and properties drastically different from the bulk material, such as altered symmetry, magnetic properties, and conductivity within an otherwise insulating matrix. The unique potential of ferroelectric domain walls became apparent with the discovery of their novel functional properties, particularly their conductivity. Domain microstructures can be manipulated using bias, stress, and temperature, allowing domain walls to be created, moved, and eliminated at will. This capability gave rise to the field of 'domain wall nanoelectronics,' where these boundaries are envisioned as 'ephemeral' electronic components in devices like memristors, transistors, and binary memory bits. In such devices, the domain wall can be moved or annihilated to reconfigure the nanoscale circuit during normal operation. While most studies focused on their control and use in device geometries, research that relates to the fundamental understanding of ferroelectric domain walls is still in its infancy. Their intrinsic electronic properties have remained underexplored, and little is known about their behaviour as a function of temperature and doping. Ferroelectric domain walls could exhibit metal-to-insulator transitions akin to other complex oxides including the rare-earth nickelates and superconducting cuprates. In such systems, the complex phase diagrams spanning magnetic and superconducting phases can be explored by chemical doping, revealing unconventional signatures in electronic transport. Additionally, further reduction of the dimensionality and the proximity of the nanoscale conducting channels to a ferroelectric polarisation can further break inversion symmetry and lead to complex transport behaviour. Domain walls in ferroic materials therefore hold great potential for the exploration of such novel phenomena, as fascinating physics can occur in these two-dimensional mobile systems that would open a whole new family of possible device geometries in the field of oxide electronics. This project aims to fill the gap in the fundamental understanding of ferroelectric domain walls by determining their intrinsic electronic properties as a function of doping and temperature, through a combination of electronic transport and spectroscopic measurements. This goal will be accomplished by developing new methods that will go beyond the state of the art and will allow the detailed characterisation and fine-tuning of the properties of domain walls. With this project, we will be able to determine whether domain walls behave as two-dimensional electron gases and search for novel phenomena that arise due to the two-dimensional nature of the system, including the integer and fractional quantum Hall effect, phenomena dominated by the spin-orbit interaction, and superconductivity. This proposal will facilitate the discovery and fundamental characterisation of new two-dimensional conducting systems and allow them to be optimised for future exploitation.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

The physics of flares, ferocious explosions on the Sun and other magnetically active stars, remains an enigmatic question in plasma astrophysics. One of the intrinsic features of flares is quasi-periodic pulsations (QPP) which are observed as irregular repetitive variations in the flaring electromagnetic emission. Being not predicted by the standard flare model, QPP appear in the majority of solar flares and in far more energetic stellar flares, suggesting to use their internal timescales, such as oscillation periods and damping times, as a secret natural metronome for constraining the main physical processes governing the development of flares in time. Understanding the origin of QPP and their role in a flare model has been hindered by the lack of commonly accepted theoretical models and inherent difficulties with the detection of QPP in observations. In order to transformatively advance the ongoing international and UK efforts in space weather and exploitation of the solar-stellar analogy, the proposed research project offers a new, paradigm-changing look at the long-standing problem of solar and stellar flares through the prism of QPP. The central engine of flares, spontaneous or induced reconnection of the magnetic field, is often seen to occur in a quasi-periodic manner in numerical simulations and observations of flares. We shall study the mechanisms for repetitive reconnection, developing the models of magnetically interacting coronal plasma structures during the process of coalescence instability and identifying its manifestations in multi-wavelength observations of flares. The correlation between the power of flares, magnetic topology and other parameters of active regions, and signatures of the oscillatory coalescence, as well as its role in the flare onset, will be investigated. Observations of QPP signals in the decay phase of solar and stellar flares and their modelling in terms of slow-mode MHD oscillations shall be used for constraining the processes of coronal heating, flare energy deposition and dissipation. Apart from developing and validating new theoretical models, the project also aims at bridging the gap between the manifold of existing diverse models and measurements of QPP in solar and stellar flares. The distinct classes of QPP characterised by common observational properties and the underlying physical mechanisms will be identified. The expected results will change transformatively our understanding of impulsive energy releases in astrophysical plasmas such as solar and stellar flares, as no contemporary time-dependent model of which is acceptable unless it adequately accounts for the phenomenon of QPP.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing our world. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with a global warming potential 25 times that of CO2. In the recent Climate Change Summit COP26 in 2021, an international pledge was made to urgently cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. This project will study new microbes capable of consuming methane and generate fundamental scientific knowledge required to take the first steps towards contributing to this goal. Approximately 500-600 million tonnes of methane are emitted into the Earth's atmosphere every year. Methane can be removed by microbes known as methanotrophs. However, we have preliminary data indicating that other, previously unsuspected microbes known as ammonia oxidising archaea may also be able to consume methane in the environment. Ammonia oxidising archaea are among the most numerous living organisms on the planet and play a vital role in the nitrogen cycle. They are responsible for nitrogen loss from agricultural soils, environmental pollution and emission of nitrogen-containing climate-active gases. Ammonia oxidising archaea and methanotrophs both contain a similar enzyme, known as ammonia monooxygenase in archaea and particulate methane monooxygenase in methanotrophs. This is the key enzyme that methanotrophs use to break down methane. Our hypothesis is that archaea can use their ammonia monooxygenase enzyme to break down methane in the environment. Furthermore, we predict that methane will inhibit ammonia oxidation and thus influence nitrogen cycling in the environment. This is important because depending on the environmental conditions, different microbes will be more active than others and this has consequences for the extent of greenhouse gas emission and consumption, and cycling of nutrients. Our research will identify how different environmental conditions affect the contributions of different groups of microorganisms involved in methane removal from the biosphere. Using cutting-edge techniques, this project will link the activity and identity of the microbes responsible for methane consumption in soil. Our study will determine the mechanisms by which ammonia oxidising archaea and other microbes break down methane in soil. Overall, this will help towards predicting how soils respond to environmental changes and has considerable potential to contribute to sustainable management of soil ecosystems.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

We all recognise the excitement, joy, and comfort which accompany romantic love, but what happens when love goes wrong? What follows romantic rejection, infidelity, divorce, or the death of a beloved? The extreme grief of romantic heartbreak is one of the most powerful emotional experiences that human beings endure, one which most of us will experience at some point in our lives. It sits at the centre of the modern mental health crisis, with the breakdown of romantic relationships a key driver of people seeking help from mental health charities, and a leading cause of both homelessness and suicide. Yet for all its ubiquity, how far do we really understand what romantic heartbreak is? And what can history teach us about the most effective ways to heal? The abject misery of a broken heart is more than simply rhetorical - it is a visceral mental and physical experience with very real bodily consequences. Individuals mourning the end of a romantic relationship are liable to high blood pressure, blood clots, and a disturbed heart rhythm. People who have recently lost their partners are more likely to suffer health problems such as heart attacks, with women especially vulnerable to developing takotsubo cardiomyopathy ('broken heart syndrome'), where a surge of stress hormones causes chest pains and shortness of breath. In the weeks and months following bereavement, the 'Widowhood Effect' means that men and women are considerably more likely to die due to the suppression of their immune systems and experience of extreme stress. Yet the distinctive grief which follows the end of romantic relationships is not static or unchanging, but has evolved significantly over the modern era. During the eighteenth century, individuals suffering from a broken heart were vulnerable to low spirits, disturbed nerves, a weakened pulse, and impaired memory. Their grief was likened to cords tightening around the heart, which could be paralysed by their suffering. If their sorrow was especially violent, or continued over a long period of time, patients were thought to be liable to a host of conditions from phthisis to cancer and insanity. During the nineteenth century, the source of our emotions changed, as scientists came to prioritise the brain rather than the heart as the locus of feeling. But feelings still remained firmly corporeal in nature, with violent passions such as love and grief able to tear or stop the heart dead. Just as the experience of romantic heartbreak has changed over time, so have the ways in which we treat it, and the rituals we turn to in order to heal. The project furthers UKRI's strategic goal to improve the nation's health and wellbeing, namely through how we discuss and recover from the grief of a broken heart. This has never been more pressing, given the current mental health emergency exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will establish a new interdisciplinary research network for studying romantic heartbreak, and produce three main outputs: 1. An academic monograph, After Love: Romantic Heartbreak, Emotions and Embodiment in Britain, c. 1750-1900. 2. A group exhibition on 'Broken Hearts & Broken Bodies'. 3. A project website, featuring videos 'in conversation' with experts from the new research network, and digital version of the exhibition. The exhibition will provide the setting for the following public events: 1. An art and crafting project led by the Oxfordshire Mind Wellbeing Service. 2. A programme of talks by experts from the new research network. 3. Artist-led workshops where members of the public create 'body maps' of heartbreak. 4. A pop-up Poetry Pharmacy dispensing poetic remedies for broken hearts. The project will conclude with a cross-disciplinary symposium to provide a critical public forum in which to discuss the mental and physical reality of romantic heartbreak past and present, and the best routes to restoring our health and wellbeing.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

In this proposal, we request funds to purchase a Nikon W1-SoRa spinning disc confocal microscope with integrated photomanipulation and Ring-TIRF. This highly versatile system will enable gentle, high-speed fluorescence imaging across a broad range of temporal and spatial scales, from the sub-second movements of proteins within cells to the millimetre scale organization of the mammalian brain. To maximize its utility, we have configured this system to accommodate samples from across the kingdoms of life and with the capacity for precise and rapid temperature fluctuations and optical perturbations. The W1-SoRa will significantly extend the capacity and capabilities of our current workhorse microscope, a 10-year-old Zeiss LSM880, thereby futureproofing advanced imaging at Warwick. The University of Warwick School of Life Sciences (SLS) is home to world-class bioscience researchers who use fluorescence microscopy to study biological processes that span the BBSRC’s remit, including an integrated understanding of health, bioscience for clean growth and for sustainable agriculture and food. Specific research objectives of this application will be led by PcLs and include studies of the mechanisms of cell polarization in animal cells, neurocircuitry and gene expression patterns in the mammalian brain, the dynamics of cyanobacterial communities, the stress and pathogen responses of plants from the subcellular to the tissue-scale, phage-mediate therapy and biocontrol, and the mechanisms of genome editing during embryonic development. Therefore, this instrument will provide a critical foundation supporting a broad range of impactful studies that align with the priorities of the BBSRC. The W1-SoRa will be housed within SLS’s Bio-Analytical Shared Resource Laboratory (BioSRL) and will be the first multi-user system of its kind in the Midlands. The W1-SoRa and the technical expertise of the BioSRL will be available to users from across the higher education and public sector, and spare capacity will be made available to industry. This new microscope will enhance and complement the University of Warwick’s existing cutting-edge imaging technology facilities, including transmission electron microscopy (Advanced Bioimaging RTP), scanning electron microscopy (Electron microscopy RTP) and Warwick Medical School Computing and Advance Microscopy Development Unit (CAMDU). We are committed to providing highly accessible facilities that combine state-of-the-art technologies with technical skills and expert knowledge, thereby providing empowering innovative and impactful research (World-class places: Infrastructure). We will enable the Research Technical Professionals (RTProfs) supporting this instrument to become experts and ensure the technical expertise is sustainable by providing RTProfs with opportunities for career progression. Microscopy is a cornerstone of modern biological research because it enables visualisation of life’s dynamics from the molecular to the organismal scale. Over the last decade, substantial advancements in the speed, sensitivity and resolution of imaging instruments have revolutionized our understanding of many fields of biology and generated new frontiers of inquiry that will motivate cutting-edge studies in the decade to come. Investment in a versatile and multi-user W1-SoRa at the Warwick’s BioSRL will enhance the imaging capabilities available to the Midlands research community, thereby helping to maintain the UK’s position as an international leader in the biosciences. In addition, by providing access to trainees at all stages and by incorporating the W1-SoRa into our cross-doctoral training partnership training course, this instrument will help train the next generation of scientists to harness high spatial and temporal resolution imaging. As such, investment in a W1-SoRa for Warwick’s BioSRL will have significant impacts both regionally and nationally.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

This research project explores the relationship between foreign aid and local skills, and asks: considering all effects, does foreign aid help or hinder local skills development, and what does this mean for economic development? Education-related aid spending has steadily grown over time. Evidence suggests that aid spending on education contributes to expanding enrolment, but more could be done regarding quality of education (Riddell and Niño-Zarazúa, 2016). Riddell and Niño-Zarazúa's (2016) review and other more recent studies highlight the existing focus on enrolment and graduation, but relatively little emphasis on skills. Beyond donor funding to education and training, the presence of a development sector in aid-receiving countries is expected to impact the local skills composition as donors shape national skills policies, and donor organisations and international and local non-government organisations (NGOs) demand local workers who then develop skills to work for these organisations (Harris, 2021; 2023a). For this research, skills are defined as "acquired knowledge, expertise, and interactions needed to perform a specific task, including the mastery of required materials, tools, or technologies" (World Bank, 2021). Understanding the relationship between aid and skills is critical to international development discourse, and particularly the aid-development nexus. Economists have long contended that skills - the level, composition and quality of skills available - drive economic growth and development. Existing research posits various channels in the aid-growth/development relationship like the real exchange rate, changes in manufacturing output, institutional capacity, and governance. This project is novel in assessing the aid-skills-economic development relationship. If aid positively impacts local skills, the overall effect may be growth/development enhancing. On the other hand, if the impact is negative, this may hinder development and increase the likelihood of continued aid-dependence. The project aims to explore the aid-skills relationship in four ways. 1. Assessing existing evidence to propose a theory of the different ways in which aid can influence local skills available. 2. Mapping foreign aid targeting skills development in Africa since 1960. This will involve an examination of international development cooperation policies on aid for skills and NGO activities in this area. It will draw on key international agreements on skills (such as those under the MDGs and SDGs), as well as relevant policies by key donor like the World Bank, EU, USAID, FCDO, etc. Data from the Yearbook of International Organizations will be used to map NGO activities. 3. Exploring the relationship between foreign aid and the skills composition in aid-receiving countries using secondary quantitative panel data. Here, regression analysis will be used to identify the relationship between official development assistance and various skills metrics such as functional literacy skills, the share of graduates by discipline and the measured skills gap. Data sources include the World Bank World Development Indicators, the OECD WISE database and UNESCO Institute for Statistics. 4. Understanding the contexts/conditions under which the aid-skills relationship may be stronger/weaker. A comparative case study of Sierra Leone and Liberia will be conducted using document analysis of national policies and interviews with local stakeholders. Both countries have similar aid-receiving histories, but different skills outcomes. The findings will be positioned within existing literature on skills and economic development. The research contributes to scholarly debates on aid effectiveness and can inform development policy. It is particularly useful and timely given increasing aid funding to skills development and contemporary goals to enhance skills in development countries.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, placing a heavy economic burden on healthcare systems and deeply affecting patients and their families. Current cancer treatments often rely on platinum-based drugs such as cisplatin, oxaliplatin, and carboplatin, which are used in around 20% of cases. While these drugs can be effective, they are not specifically targeted to cancer cells, leading to harmful side effects like kidney damage, nerve toxicity, and nausea. Additionally, many cancers eventually become resistant to these treatments, underscoring the need for new drugs that can selectively target and destroy cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. In the early stages of our research, we focused on developing new cancer drugs using vanadium, a metal with potential therapeutic properties. However, vanadium compounds have faced challenges in the past due to poor solubility and instability in water, making it difficult to test their effectiveness. Despite these challenges, we have made progress in improving the design of these drugs, and using advanced techniques, we identified several vanadium-based compounds that show promise for treating cancer. These compounds were able to interact with DNA, increase reactive oxygen species (which can damage cancer cells), and induce cell death. Importantly, they work through different mechanisms than platinum-based drugs, which may help overcome the problem of drug resistance. While our initial results are promising, there are still several challenges to address. The solubility and stability are not optimal for future applications, and we do not yet fully understand how these vanadium compounds are taken up by cells or where they are locating inside the cell, posing issues in determining any specific cellular targets. With renewed funding for this fellowship, we will tackle these issues by focusing on three key objectives: Improving Solubility and Stability: We will refine the chemical properties of the vanadium compounds to ensure they are stable and dissolve effectively in water, making them easier to administer. We will also enhance the delivery of these compounds by attaching them to peptide nanocarriers. These nanocarriers will protect the drugs from premature breakdown and improve their delivery to cancer cells. The nanocarriers will also be engineered to release the drugs specifically in cancerous tissue, increasing their effectiveness while minimising side effects. Optimising Redox Chemistry: Due to differences in oxygen concentrations of cancer cells, and important redox chemistry for targeting cancers which have become resistant, we will improve the redox properties of the compounds to enhance their ability to specifically target cancer cells. Enhancing Cellular Uptake: To ensure the drugs are taken up by the cancer cells, we will incorporate fluorescent markers to track their movement within the cells. Additionally, we will design targeting groups that direct the drugs specifically to mitochondria, the cell's energy centres, where changes in redox balance contribute to drug resistance in cancer cells. This project will be supported by collaborations with experts at the University of Warwick, including those in polymer science, the School of Life Sciences, and the Warwick Medical School. By combining expertise in chemistry, biology, and medicine, we aim to establish a leadership position in the development of vanadium-based drugs for cancer treatment. This research has the potential to significantly improve cancer therapy, offering more targeted treatments that reduce side effects, lower healthcare costs, and ultimately benefit patients worldwide.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

Chronic pain, defined as continuous, frequent, or recurring pain lasting more than three months, affects up to 50% of the UK population. Such pain is often not adequately treated with available painkillers, and sufferers may end up having to take powerful drugs, such as opioids, which have undesirable and harmful side effects including nausea, constipation, tolerance, dependence and abuse potential. There is therefore a great need for new types of painkilling drugs. One painkilling system in the body that does not involve opioids is the system targeted by a naturally-occurring molecule called adenosine. Adenosine acts upon its receptors on the surface of cells to elicit various physiological responses inside those cells and hence in the tissues and organs that are made up of those cells. The activation of one of these receptors, the A1 receptor (A1R), has long been known to reduce the sensation of pain, but also to have unwanted effects on heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. For these reasons, previous attempts to develop painkilling drugs that activate the A1R have failed. We have recently discovered that a molecule called BnOCPA, which activates the A1R, is a powerful painkiller. However, it does so without causing effects on heart rate, blood pressure or respiration, and, in addition, does not cause sedation. This observation is unprecedented, and we believe that this is due to BnOCPA only activating one of the six possible proteins inside the cell through which the A1R normally acts. The fact that the protein that BnOCPA activates is not found in the heart likely explains the lack of cardiovascular effects of BnOCPA. In this proposal we wish to do three things: i) understand, at the level of spinal cord pain pathways, how BnOCPA acts to induce analgesia; ii) determine if BnOCPA is as effective in a model of chronic inflammatory pain of the type seen in arthritis, as it is in a model of neuropathic pain, which can occur after nerve injury or in certain diseases, and iii) establish whether more potent variants of the chemical structure of BnOCPA offer the same analgesic properties devoid of any effects on the cardiorespiratory system. This will give us insight into the chemical fingerprint responsible for the peculiar action of BnOCPA, and may lead to the development of more effective painkilling drugs with reduced risk of side effects. To conduct this study, experts in pain and the workings of the nervous system at Warwick University will team up with a chemist in Switzerland who makes BnOCPA and its variants, a team at the University of Cambridge who study the interaction between adenosine receptors and the proteins they activate inside cells, and colleagues at the University of Coventry who will use sophisticated computer models to interrogate at the atomic level the interactions between molecules, receptor and proteins. This comprehensive series of studies will generate great insights into the painkilling mechanism of this highly unusual molecule, identify additional types of pain in which it may be effective, and reveal new compounds capable of eliciting analgesia without effects on the cardiovascular or respiratory systems. Such studies are necessary if we are to develop new painkillers to reduce both the burden of pain for patients and the risks associated with the use of opioid analgesics.  

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

This project aims to enhance weather and climate predictions by addressing a critical gap in our understanding of cloud formation, specifically the process of ice nucleation. Ice Nucleating Particles (INPs) significantly influence cloud properties and, consequently, weather and climate systems. However, the current parameterizations controlling primary ice formation in cloud models are simplistic and detached from the molecular physics of ice nucleation, leading to less reliable predictions. This project proposes a novel, multidisciplinary approach to physically underpin ice nucleation parameterizations used in weather and climate-relevant cloud models. Currently, these models rely on simple linear fits or empirical fits based on laboratory data, which do not accurately reflect the complex nature of ice formation in clouds. This has profound implications for the structure, composition, and functioning of clouds in our atmosphere, affecting everything from weather patterns to global climate regulation. To address this, we will develop a simple 'toy model' correlated with atomistic molecular dynamics simulations and corroborated by observational data of INP concentrations in the atmosphere. Such a model will bridge the gap between large-scale atmospheric models and the molecular-level details of ice formation. By leveraging molecular simulations of supercooled water at the interface with prototypical ice nucleating materials such as polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), we will derive insights into the probability of finding an ice nucleating site of a given size on specific surfaces. This data will then be used to predict the freezing rate corresponding to ice formation in clouds, which is a pivotal factor in cloud development and behaviour. The ultimate goal is to implement a validated model, grounded in both physical theory and empirical observation, into existing cloud models. This will significantly enhance their predictive capabilities by providing a more accurate description of ice nucleation processes. By doing so, the project aims to remedy the current deficits in cloud modeling, thereby improving our ability to predict weather and climate outcomes. The expected benefits of this research are far-reaching. Improved cloud models will lead to better weather forecasting, aiding in disaster preparedness and resource management. In terms of climate science, a deeper understanding of cloud physics is crucial for accurate simulations of future climate scenarios, which are essential for policy-making and environmental management. Furthermore, this project will contribute to the broader scientific community by providing a framework for connecting molecular-level phenomena with large-scale atmospheric processes. In conclusion, this project stands to significantly advance our understanding and modeling of cloud formation, particularly the role of ice nucleation, by integrating molecular physics with atmospheric science. The outcome will be more reliable weather and climate predictions, benefiting not just the scientific community but society at large by informing policy and enhancing our ability to respond to environmental changes. This research represents a critical step forward in our quest to understand and predict the complex interplay between atmospheric processes and climate change.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

The data.table R package relies on a complex suite of C functionality that interacts with the R API to create fast and efficient tools for managing and reshaping data. It provides state-of-the-art performance for data manipulation, making it a cornerstone of high-performance R programming, particularly in data science and statistical computing. It currently supports nearly 2000 other packages and tools within the R ecosystem. This project aims to enhance and future-proof data.table by addressing three major areas of improvement and expansion: Adapting to C API Changes in Base R – data.table is an extension of base R, the software distribution that provides the R programming language and a set of R packages providing core functionality, which is maintained by the R Core Team (R Core). Base R continues to evolve, with R Core introducing modifications to its C API that impact extension packages relying on low-level functionality. Ensuring data.table remains fast and reliable requires proactively adapting to these changes, preventing performance regressions, and maintaining seamless integration with future R releases. In particular, data.table can no longer depend on several entry points into base R that have previously provided valuable tools for efficient handling of data, particularly large data. Bringing data.table into compliance with updates from R Core requires time and attention to each entry point that is now unavailable, including core parts of the growable vector idiom and fast string matching (which currently uses base R’s internal string cache). Rolling Statistics – Efficient computation of rolling (moving) statistics is essential for time series analysis, finance, epidemiology, and many other fields. This project will introduce and improve optimized rolling statistics functions directly within data.table. This includes new rolling functions: minimum, maximum, product, median, user-defined function (rewrite for efficiency, multi threading, support of adaptive index, support of rolling over list of columns rather than columns one by one); as well as new features like rolling over uneven time series (i.e. days/hours rather than records). General Maintenance and Issue Resolution – As base R updates, new issues arise that affect data.table’s performance and behaviour. This project will focus on addressing reported bugs, improving documentation, optimizing existing functionality, and ensuring compatibility with evolving R standards, safeguarding data.table as a robust and dependable tool for the R community. As a core principle of data.table, it will avoid breaking changes where possible. An important part of this process is engaging with the CRAN Team, who maintain the Comprehensive R Archive Network where data.table is published, to ensure the package remains available on that central platform as well as continuing our engagement with R Core to continue our collaborative relationship with them. The sustainability of data.table relies on the sustainability of base R, which depends on contributions from the wider community beyond R Core. Therefore this project will also contribute to maintenance of base R, participating in the R Contribution Working Group and their initiatives, such as in-person and online R Dev Days, where participants collaborate on bug fixes and improvements to base R. By tackling these critical areas, this project will reinforce data.table’s position as a leading data manipulation package in R, ensuring it remains performant, reliable, and well-maintained for users across academia, industry, and beyond.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

The TIMELY project aims to inspire and support underrepresented students, researchers, and professionals to pursue careers in environmental science. Despite ongoing efforts to promote diversity, the field remains underrepresented across ethnic, gender, and career backgrounds. A key but under-addressed barrier is the lack of accessible, relatable, and inspiring career narratives, which limits individuals’ ability to envision a future in the field. TIMELY responds to this challenge by curating and showcasing diverse career journeys using art-based methods such as curated exhibitions, creative storytelling, and visual elicitation. The project will identify role models from underrepresented groups, with non-linear career paths, and transitioning from other disciplines. Their stories will feature pivotal moments, opportunities, and achievements. These will be brought to life in the exhibition This is My Environmental Journey, presented both in person at the University of Warwick and online to ensure broad accessibility. The University of Warwick provides an ideal setting to pilot this initiative due to its vibrant interdisciplinary environmental science community, institutional commitment to inclusive research culture, and strong tradition of art-science collaboration and engagement. The project has been co-developed with three key local partners: Coventry City Council, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, and the National Mathematics and Science College. These organisations represent local government, exhibition spaces, and pre-university education, which are sectors essential to exploring opportunities for scaling up the project’s activities and impact for Opening up the Environment 2026 and beyond. The project comprises four core components aligned with its objectives: (1) Evaluation: This component includes two strands: (i) mapping and assessing Warwick’s existing diversity and inclusion practices in environmental science, and (ii) evaluating the effectiveness and impact of TIMELY’s activities. A co-developed Theory of Change and the NERC self-assessment tool will guide both strands, ensuring that insights inform institutional improvement and future planning. (2) Framework: Informed by evaluation findings, TIMELY will co-create a scalable, transferable framework for curating career journeys. Collaborative workshops with researchers, professionals, partners, artists, and people with lived experience will define criteria for selecting role models, structuring narratives, and applying creative storytelling techniques. The framework will be developed as a practical toolkit for future application across audiences and contexts, offering lasting value to enhancing diversity and inclusion in environmental science. (3) Exhibitions: A multi-format exhibition will showcase diverse environmental career stories through multimedia storytelling, personal narratives, and visualisations. It will be hosted at the Warwick Arts Centre and supported by an online platform to reach wider audiences. These exhibitions aim to challenge stereotypes, expand career imagination, and inspire greater inclusion in environmental science. (4) Partnerships: The project will build on existing collaborations and form new partnerships with academic institutions, exhibition networks, and training providers. These relationships will support knowledge exchange, extend the framework’s reach, and prepare for a follow-on proposal to Opening up the Environment 2026, enabling national scaling and long-term sustainability. This project represents a timely effort to address persistent barriers to diversity and inclusion in environmental science through creative, collaborative, and evidence-based approaches. It will further engage a broad range of stakeholders and audiences, build inclusive practices, and develop a platform for long-term change, which is aligned with institutional, regional, and national goals for improving diversity, inclusion, and interdisciplinarity in environmental science, as outlined in NERC’s strategic plans.