Exceptional researchers awarded early career fellowships worth more than £83 million

A new cohort of exceptional researchers at have been awarded funding through the Royal Society’s early career schemes.

The University Research Fellowships (URFs), Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships (DHFs) and Newton International Fellowships (NIFs), will allocate over £83m across the cohorts, with a further €5m for URFs in the Republic of Ireland allocated through Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland.

The schemes are aimed at tackling major scientific questions, attracting talent and establishing the next generation of leading researchers in the UK and Ireland. Each of the schemes will provide the freedom and flexibility to pursue curiosity-driven research, form international collaborations and establish new research groups.

Funding for the schemes comes from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the K.C. Wong Education Foundation.

Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said:

“Early career researchers are the future of science. With the right support they can push the current boundaries of our understanding of the world. That’s why these schemes, which provide long-term funding, or attract talent from overseas, help ensure the UK is developing the next generation of word-leading scientists. It is delightful to see another cohort of outstanding researchers take on their fellowships.”

Researchers began taking up their Fellowships at institutions across the UK and Ireland from October. They will be working on research spanning the physical, mathematical, chemical, and biological sciences.

The list of current appointments is as follows:

The University Research Fellowships are awarded to scientists in the early stages of their research career who have the potential of becoming leaders in their fields. The fellowships run for eight years, and researchers are awarded up to £1.87m. This year, 39 offers have been made. The following researchers have confirmed their offers:

Dr Mosammat Salma Akter
Investigating the role of sulfiredoxin enzyme in plant oxidative stress tolerance
University of Oxford

Dr Francisco Andres Arana Herrera
Polygonal billiards: classic and quantum
University of Bristol

Dr Josef Boronski
Alkaline earth bimetallic cooperativity for C–H functionalization: From complexes to clusters and beyond
Imperial College London

Dr Frances Butcher
Unlocking Martian climate archives: The glaciological groundwork for the first ice cores from Mars
The University of Sheffield

Dr Steven Campbell
High time resolution oxidative potential quantification: An innovative approach to determine the health impacts of air pollution
Imperial College London

Dr Tian Carey
Transistors with high mobility electronic INKs (THINK)
Trinity College Dublin

Dr Peter Cossar
IDP Glue — Capturing disordered protein complexes using sticky small molecules
University of Dundee

Dr Thomas Cridge
Global precision – Standard Model parameter and parton distribution function joint determination
The University of Manchester

Dr Freya George
Slow and steady or fast and furious? Towards new understanding of reaction kinetics in Earth’s crust
University of Bristol

Dr Rory Gibb
Climate change and the eco-epidemiology of emerging viruses
University College London (UCL)

Dr Rebecca Hall
Metabolic drivers of the evolution of symbiosis
The University of Manchester

Dr Maxim Igaev
Understanding kinetochore-mediated microtubule forces in chromosome segregation
University of Dundee

Dr Evan Irving-Pease
Why do we get sick? Modelling the evolutionary origins of common and infectious diseases
University of Oxford

Dr Monireh Kabirnezhad
A holistic approach to neutrino-nucleus interaction calculations for the next generation of neutrino experiment: theory, experimental data and computational methods
Imperial College London

Dr Sungkyung Kang
Instability of exotic 4-manifolds and diffeomorphisms
University of Cambridge

Dr Laura Keating
TIMER: Tracing the Intergalactic Medium into the epoch of reionization
University of Edinburgh

Dr Graham Kerr
New-generation solar flare models: A full accounting of energy transport in solar and stellar flares
University of Glasgow

Dr James Kirk
A comprehensive understanding of close-in extrasolar planets through population analyses
Imperial College London

Dr Sophie Koudmani
A multi-scale exploration of supermassive black holes in the multi-messenger era
University of Hertfordshire

Dr Jiorgos Kourelis
From effector targets to engineered immunity — harnessing host proteins to bioengineer NLRs in solanaceous crops
Imperial College London

Dr Jennifer Lynch
Exploring novel β-catenin regulatory mechanisms in AML toward enhanced therapeutic targeting
National University of Ireland, Dublin (UCD)

Dr Lewis MacKenzie
Breaking barriers in upconversion nanoparticle research: Improving accessibility and enabling biomedical applications
University of Strathclyde

Dr David McMeekin
Enabling intermediate-phases and defect passivation for evaporated Perovskite/Silicon tandem solar cells
University of Oxford

Dr Andrea Mitridate
Probing new physics with pulsar timing arrays
University of Liverpool

Dr Cait Newport
Lost landmarks: Investigating the impacts of turbidity on visually-guided navigation behaviour of wild reef fish
University of Oxford

Dr Grace Nield
Transient rheology in glacial isostatic adjustment models: implications for current and future estimates of West Antarctic ice loss
Durham University

Dr Penelope Pickers
Targeting knowledge gaps in the carbon cycle during the transition to net zero (TRACER)
University of East Anglia

Dr Pablo Poggi
Controlling quantum chaos to exploit near-term quantum computers
University of Strathclyde

Dr Davide Spriano
New notions of curvature in group theory
University of Warwick

Dr Hannah Stewart
Dual-functionality warheads: A universal route to covalent inhibition beyond cysteine
Newcastle University

Dr Sathyawageeswar Subramanian
Quantum computing through the lens of average-case complexity
University of Oxford

Dr Jayadev Vijayan
Levitated quantum-enhanced mechanical acceleration sensors (LEVISENSE)
The University of Manchester

Dr Ian Woods
MX-REGEN: MXene-functionalized 3D-printed electroconductive scaffolds for spatially-controlled enhancement of pro-regenerative electrical stimulation for neurotrauma repair
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland

Dr Takato Yoshimura
Correlations and fluctuations in many-body quantum dynamics: from integrability to quantum chaos
King’s College London

The Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships support scientists who require a flexible working pattern due to personal circumstances. The fellowships run for eight years and researchers are awarded a maximum of £1.87 million. This year five offers have been made. The following researchers have confirmed their offers:

Dr Sacha Lapins
Elucidating the fluid pathways beneath volcanoes using deep-learning-enhanced seismic datasets and next-generation instrumentation
University of Oxford

Dr Yu-dai Tsai
The elusive universe: Dark matter in accelerator searches and astroparticle/cosmological studies
The University of Manchester

Newton International Fellowships support non-UK researchers in the early stages of their career who wish to conduct research in the UK. Researchers are awarded a maximum of £280,000 over two years. This year, 35 awards have been made. The following researchers have confirmed their offers:

Dr Saju Thomas Abraham
Early detection and characterisation of hydrogen-induced damage using ultrasonic arrays for enhanced structural integrity in the hydrogen economy
University of Bristol

Dr Christianah Aarinola Akinnawo
Green H2 manufacture in foam-type electrolyser using fresh and contaminated waters
Cardiff University

Dr Imaad Mohammed Ansari
Chemical dynamics in the non-Born–Oppenheimer regime
University of Bristol

Dr Jacob Bakermans
Neural models of compositional reasoning and representation in naturalistic behaviour
University College London (UCL)

Lennart Bastian
TopoAtlas: Topological foundation models for universal hierarchical reasoning
Imperial College London

Dr Fernando Blanco
DinoNNet: Dinosaur macroevolution modelling through neural networks
University of Oxford

Dr Carla Boix Constant
Ultra-low power multiferroic devices via vertical stacking of atomically thin materials
University of Cambridge

Dr Hannah Eckvahl
Heterodinuclear lanthanide complexes as tunable molecular spin qubit candidates
University of Oxford

Preetha Ganguly
Aptamer-functionalised cubosomes for targeted cancer therapy and point-of-care detection
University of Edinburgh

Dr Anish Ghoshal
Primordial non-Gaussianities with gravitational waves to probe fundamental interactions
University of Sussex

Dr Nastassia Grimm-Thieme
Galaxy surveys in the present and future: Testing gravity with Euclid and exploring synergies with pulsar timing arrays
University of Oxford

Dr Eleonora Grossi
Double damp and shape memory alloys for resilient timber structures
University of Bristol

Dr Yara Haridy
How to build a skeleton: evolution and origin of vertebrate tissues
University of Birmingham

Dr Huw Jarvis
Developing a gold standard measure of excitation/inhibition balance in the human brain for clinical translation
University College London (UCL)

Dr Peng-Bo Jin
Metal-metal bonding single-molecule magnets with very large coercive field (HIPER-MOLE)
The University of Manchester

Dr Johannes Keegstra
B(l)oom and bust: Investigating how cyanobacteria-heterotroph interactions affect carbon sequestration
Queen Mary University of London

Dr Rahul Kumar
Supermassive black holes: Advancing astrophysics and probing strong-field general relativity
University College London (UCL)

Dr Kara Lamantia
Global glacier health monitoring to enhance projections of glacier change
University of Bristol

Dr Cédric Leau
THz-HELIOS: Terahertz control of hopping events of lithium ions in solid-state-electrolyte
University of Warwick

Dr Wenhai Lei
Imbibition phase diagram in 3D porous media: Microfluidic experiments, theoretical modelling, and numerical upscaling
The University of Manchester

Changpeng Lin
Probe superconducting and electron fluid phases in strongly correlated materials
University of Cambridge

Zhen-Qi Liu
Bridging brain structure, function, and computation in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome
University of Cambridge

Dr Naroa Lopez Larrea
Multimodal electroactive PEDOT-based materials for local co-delivery of drug formulations for the treatment of Glioblastoma
University of Cambridge

Dr Liang-Yin Lu
Deciphering neural codes in cortex-cerebellum-VTA circuits using high-throughput, multi-colour deep tissue imaging
University College London (UCL)

Pengfei Ma
GPU-accelerated multiphysics simulation in computational cardiology
University of Glasgow

Kuppan Magesh
Protease-activated photosensitisers for the identification and photodynamic treatment of solid tumours
King’s College London

Dr Emile Okada
Singularities and functoriality in the Langlands programme
King’s College London

Dr Nikolai Prochorov
Thurston theory and classification in transcendental dynamics
The University of Manchester

Dr Rafia Siddiqui
Divalent glucose receptors for biomimetic glucose-sensitive switches
University of Bristol

Dr Mayank Singh
All-printed microelectrodes and tandem catalyst engineering for high-performance flexible on-chip Zn-S microbatteries
University College London (UCL)

Dr Ilia Sokolovskii
Charge transport in organic semiconductors under strong light-matter coupling - a multiscale simulation approach
University College London (UCL)

Dr Giovanni Strampelli
A search for Jupiter and Saturn analogues in star forming regions
University of Edinburgh

Dr Brennan Terhune-Cotter
Determining the neural mechanisms supporting reading in deaf adults: the role of fingerspelling
University College London (UCL)

Dr Zezhu Zeng
Lattice thermal conductivity of solid ice at planetary conditions
University of Oxford