The Royal Society has announced 37 successful University Research Fellowship (URF) candidates for 2021. The researchers will take up their new posts at institutions across the UK and Ireland from the start of October.
Dame Linda Partridge, Biological Secretary and Vice President of the Royal Society said, “The URF scheme honours high calibre early career scientists throughout the UK and Ireland. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the research community, and so it is essential that long-term, flexible funding schemes like this are in place to continue to support the careers of researchers pursuing novel and ground-breaking research.
“The scheme is central to the Society’s commitment to fostering excellence in science by supporting early career researchers who are fundamental to the future of global science. It is gratifying to see the URF scheme expand this year to support the biomedical sciences, a discipline that was vital in the response to the pandemic. This will ensure we continue to support a wide breadth of science through the scheme.”
The newly appointed research fellows will be working on research projects spanning the physical, mathematical, chemical and biological sciences, including:
Dr Cyrielle Opitom (University of Edinburgh) – Cometary ices as probes of the formation conditions of planet building blocks
Dr Opitom will look at the composition of comets to learn about the early solar system and how it was formed. She will compare the composition of solar system comets to interstellar objects formed in very different environments. She will combine new observations of comets at large distances, re-analyse existing data and use multi-wavelength and multi-technique observations. Comets are some of the most pristine relics of planetary formation, and their nuclei preserve invaluable clues about the conditions at the time of their formation.
Dr Ludmila Carone (University of St Andrews) – RexoT: Rocky EXOplanets in Time – Linking exoplanet atmospheres to the interior to follow the water
Dr Carone will assess planet water content to understand what it really takes to make a planet habitable. By using modelling techniques, Ludmilla will estimate the ‘chemical fingerprints’ of planets much different from ours – worlds that have eternal day or night sides and orbit red temperamental stars. Understanding how rocky planets evolve outside of the Solar System will allow us to appreciate our Earth’s history and its habitability more.
Dr Tom McAllister (Newcastle University) – Massively high-throughput technologies for probing chemical glycobiology
Dr McAllister will develop new ways to understand how proteins and carbohydrates interact. Projects include determining how human glycosylating enzymes implicated in cancer recognise their protein targets, furthering our fundamental understanding and paving the way for new diagnostics or treatments and developing a novel alternative mode of treatment for the wheat pathogen, Z. tritici the causative agent of septoria leaf blotch disease, allowing the plant to ‘fight off the invader’ naturally, leading to better yield and more sustainable wheat production.
Dr Martin Balcerowicz (University of Dundee) – Control of temperature-dependent plant development through RNA thermoswitches
Dr Balcerowicz will investigate ‘thermoswitches’ – a RNA structure that enables the temperature to control rate of growth in plants. Temperature affects all aspects of plant development – in wheat and barley, each 1°C increase above optimal growth temperature reduces crop yield by 5-6%. This research will present ways to breed climate-resilient plants that can cope with the challenging temperature environment of the future.
Dr Roger Close (University of Oxford) – Unravelling the spatial fabric of Phanerozoic biodiversity
Dr Close will investigate how biodiversity is generated and maintained. He will use large datasets and computer simulations of global ‘palaeoclimates’, in an innovative framework to see how they responded to environmental changes, and how this drove large-scale trends in Earth’s biodiversity levels. This will help us understand how biodiversity is generated and maintained through deep time.
Dr Michael Gibbons (Trinity College Dublin) – Loop heat pipe for waste heat recovery in data centres
Dr Gibbons will harness data centre waste heat to produce usable energy that will reduce data centre energy requirements and carbon emissions. Data centres enable social networking, banking, and online shopping to function, but they also consume 1.1-1.5% of the world’s total energy and have one of the fastest-growing carbon footprints. This project will develop innovative waste heat transportation technology by combining numerical simulation, novel material science approaches, and previously unconnected technologies.
The complete list of 2021 appointments is as follows:
Dr Martin Balcerowicz Control of temperature-dependent plant development through RNA thermoswitches University of Dundee
Dr Aakash Basu Deciphering the mechanical code of genome and epigenome Durham University
Dr Jani Reddy Bolla Elucidating the molecular mechanisms of protein import into chloroplasts University of Oxford
Dr Amy Bonsor Planet Formation, White Dwarfs and the Composition of Rocky Planets University of Cambridge
Dr Richard Booth Testing the physics of planet formation Imperial College London
Dr Finn Box Flexible Fluidics University of Manchester
Dr Lukas Brantner Tackling p-adic problems with partition Lie algebras University of Oxford
Dr Mauro Brotons-Gisbert Semiconductors with a Twist: Engineering Programmable Quantum Materials Heriot-Watt University
Dr Michelle Browne New Catalysts for the Oxygen Evolution Reaction Trinity College Dublin
Dr Ludmila Carone RexoT: Rocky EXOplanets in Time – Linking exoplanet atmospheres to the interior to follow the water University of St Andrews
Dr Jeongmin Choi Phosphate signaling in arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis University of Cambridge
Dr Roger Close Unravelling the spatial fabric of Phanerozoic biodiversity University of Oxford
Dr Stephen Cox Elucidating structure and dynamics of complex interfaces in solution University of Cambridge
Dr Siân Culley Biology-driven image analysis for light microscopy King’s College London
Dr Bart de Nijs Extreme Plasmonics for Optically Controlled cHemistry (EPOCH) University of Cambridge
Dr Harry Desmond Fundamental Physics from Galaxies University of Oxford
Dr Jack Devlin A Penning trap axion search Imperial College London
Dr Frederic Dreyer Accelerating discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider through robust machine learning University of Oxford
Dr Dorian Gangloff Quantum Interface Engineering with Solid-State Spins and Photons University of Cambridge
Dr Michael Gibbons Loop heat pipe for waste heat recovery in data centres Trinity College Dublin
Dr Conrad Goodwin Transuranium Redox and Covalency University of Manchester
Dr Lionel London Unraveling the structure of gravitational radiation: Fundamental Physics, Signal Modeling, and Beyond GR King’s College London
Dr Tom McAllister Massively high-throughput technologies for probing chemical glycobiology Newcastle University
Dr Ailsa Mclean Symbionts as hidden players in ecological communities University of Oxford
Dr Cyrielle Opitom Cometary ices as probes of the formation conditions of planet building blocks University of Edinburgh
Dr Christiana Pantelidou Gravitational turbulence in the era of gravitational waves University College Dublin (UCD)
Dr Katherine Pattle The Role of Magnetic Fields in ISM Evolution and Star Formation University College London (UCL)
Dr Sarah Penington Branching systems with spatial interactions University of Bath
Dr Laura Maria Peralta Pereira Hyper-Aperture Ultrasound King’s College London
Dr Ján Pich Proof complexity and circuit complexity: a unified approach University of Oxford
Dr Luke Pickering Neutrinos through a PRISM Royal Holloway College
Dr Emilio Pisanty New Frontiers of Strong-Field Physics: Vortices, Catastrophes, and Quantum Electrodynamics King’s College London
Dr Jan Sbierski The strong cosmic censorship conjecture and weak null singularities University of Edinburgh
Dr Joshua Snape Deciphering the early geological evolution of the Moon University of Manchester
Dr Andreas Stergiou Advancing the Conformal Bootstrap Program in Three and Four Dimensions King’s College London
Dr Alice Thorneywork The noise is the signal: exploring physico-chemical fluctuations with multiscale experimental models University of Cambridge
Dr Stefan Vuckovic Transforming applicability of density functional theory simulations University of Bristol