The Royal Academy of Engineering is supporting ten new partnerships between academia and industry aiming to develop advanced technological solutions to relieve overstretched health services, improve the digital security of nuclear facilities and critical national infrastructures, improve the sustainability of food production and improve the energy efficiency of computing systems.
The Academy’s Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellowships scheme enhances the links between academia and businesses with each of the prestigious five-year positions co-sponsored by an industrial partner. Each awardee will establish a world-leading research group in their engineering field.
Among the other technologies being developed by the seven new Research Chairs and three Senior Research Fellows are projects on achieving carbon capture and storage at scale, reducing waste in high-value manufacturing, improving the design of future aircraft and unlocking the full potential of quantum computing.
Professor Máire O'Neill OBE FREng, Chair of the Academy’s Research Committee, said: “I am always impressed and encouraged by the ingenuity of engineers in developing and harnessing new technologies that address our many societal and global challenges and deliver public benefit. When research engineers partner with industry the solutions they deliver together can be transformative and these latest appointments illustrate this perfectly—the breadth and scale of their potential impact is truly exciting.”
The seven Research Chairs and three Senior Research Fellowships are listed below. More information on each can be found on the Academy website.
Research Chairs:
Professor Jonathan Mark Cooper FREng, University of Glasgow
Global Access Diagnostics/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Community-based Health
This research is developing new technologies for low-cost medical diagnostics by combining the accuracy and sensitivity of DNA and RNA testing technologies (such as the ‘PCR’ test) with the convenience of lateral flow technologies. This will result in highly sensitive tests that can be widely used at home or in community settings and will contribute to greater resilience not only to new outbreaks of infectious diseases but also to the many infectious diseases that are currently endemic in many parts of the world, such as schistosomiasis and malaria.
Professor David Clifton, University of Oxford
GlaxoSmithKline/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Clinical Machine Learning
This programme aims to develop the necessary technologies for predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) to use the complex non-imaging, time-varying data acquired and routinely stored over the lifetime of a patient that could result in a step change in patient care and the development of medicines and relieve the current burden on the healthcare system.
Professor Ben Glocker, Imperial College London
Kheiron Medical Technologies/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Safe Deployment of Medical Imaging AI
AI could fundamentally transform clinical workflows in image-based diagnostics and population screening, improving the early detection of disease. However, differences in patient populations and changes in the data acquisition pose challenges to today’s AI algorithms. This research will focus on developing the necessary safeguards for AI to deliver objective, accurate and effective analysis of medical images in a way that is both safe and ethical.
Professor Dimitrios Pezaros, University of Glasgow
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and Control & Instrumentation Nuclear Industry Forum (CINIF)/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Digital Resilience for Critical National Infrastructure
Critical National Infrastructure is becoming digitally enhanced and increasingly modernised to support better automation and efficiency, but at the same time elements of these vital systems could be increasingly exposed to cyberattacks and adversarial events that could manifest through the digital infrastructure. This research aims to devise a holistic approach to protecting the complex operation environments in defence and civil nuclear facilities, including technical mechanisms to measure and enrich the ability of systems to respond to challenges in their dynamic operation, and machine-learning approaches for timely diagnosis of adversarial events as they evolve.
Professor Rahul Raveendran Nair, University of Manchester
Carlsberg/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Advanced Membranes for Sustainable Separation Technology
This project aims to improve the food and beverage sector by exploring novel membrane technology including the use of graphene oxide—a chemical derivative of graphene—for the purposes of filtration and separation of sugars, alcohol and acids. The properties of these new membranes will reduce water usage and greenhouse gas emissions and support more healthy, sustainable and responsible plant-based food production.
Professor Derryck Telford Reid, Heriot-Watt University
Renishaw/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Real-Time Dual-Comb LiDAR for Manufacturing Metrology
Professor Reid aims to help high-value manufacturing measure products more accurately to improve yield and reduce waste by investigating how two-photon dual-comb LiDAR (light detection and ranging) can be used to measure absolute distances to sub-100-nm precision and provide a continuous stream of data at kHz rates, suitable for real-time machine-tool calibration and control.
Professor András Sóbester, University of Southampton
Airbus/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Design Process Digitalisation
The aerospace industry has made massive strides towards re-engineering its product development processes using 21st-century computing advances. This project proposes to drive progress further still by bringing significant efficiency gains to the highly ‘fluid’ conceptual phase of the design process. Professor Sóbester aims to automate exploration of the space of possible architectures in solving a design problem. As the industry looks towards a new generation of transport aircraft with significantly different architectures to accommodate such things as hydrogen propulsion, this project will increase the flexibility of digital modelling.
Senior Research Fellows
Dr Samuel Krevor, Imperial College London
Shell/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Subsurface Flow for Gigatonne CO2 Storage
Assessments by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that the widespread storage of carbon dioxide in deep subsurface sedimentary rocks is needed to avoid dangerous climate change. Storage rates are projected to be very large by 2050 – gigatonnes per year – similar to the rates at which oil is produced today. Dr Krevor aims to tackle two research themes key to the rapid scaleup of CO2 storage over the coming decades. The first theme concerns the challenges in the accurate modelling of the flow and trapping of CO2 injected underground. The second theme concerns the modelling of scaleup trajectories for regional and global deployment of gigatonne-scale CO2 storage.
Dr Adnan Mehonic, University College London
Intrinsic Semiconductor Technologies/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in The Future of Memristive Technologies
Most modern computing systems use separate memory and computing chips, resulting in power consumption, bandwidth, latency and overall performance challenges. We urgently need new paradigms and technologies to sustain data-centric applications, such as artificial intelligence in small, low-power devices. Current memory technology (embedded flash) cannot fulfil this expectation because it can no longer be scaled down to integrate into advanced chips. This research programme will develop new memristor technology to allow the integration of fast, cheap and very low-power memory on the same chip as advanced processors and explore emerging analogue and neuromorphic computing paradigms to enable vastly greater artificial intelligence capabilities using significantly less energy.
Dr Jonathan Pritchard, University of Strathclyde
M Squared Lasers Ltd/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Developing Fault-tolerant Neutral Atom Quantum Computers
Unlocking the full potential of quantum computing to address real-world problems across a range of industries, from material design and drug discovery to logistics and communications, will require a large number of high-quality, low noise and error-corrected qubits (two-level quantum systems on which information is encoded). This project will develop an advanced architecture for quantum computing capable of implementing robust quantum error correction protocols. Based on dual-species arrays of individually trapped neutral atoms in a cryogenic environment, they will overcome the major barriers to scaling by addressing both fundamental science and essential engineering challenges. This project’s ultimate vision is to establish a blueprint for the next generation of neutral atom quantum hardware able to achieve large-scale, fault-tolerant performance.
Commitment to improving diversity of future awards
Dr Andrew Clark, Executive Director, Programmes at the Academy said “While we are pleased to be able to announce ten new partnerships between universities and businesses, we are very disappointed that we were unable to appoint any women as Research Chairs or Senior Research Fellows this time. We have a wide range of measures in place to improve diversity at all stages of the application and selection process, which have been effective in improving diversity of participation in other schemes. In previous recent rounds of this scheme, around 20% of applications have been from women, similar to the academic population in relevant fields.”
“In this case, unfortunately only one woman applied, out of 27 applications received. It matters a great deal to the Academy that we should strive to improve outcomes for all and we will be looking thoroughly into any barriers to access and improvements we can make, starting with contacting our partners, universities and potential applicants.”
Notes for editors
Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellowships aim to strengthen the links between industry and academia by supporting exceptional academics in UK higher institutions/universities to undertake use-inspired research that meets the needs of the industrial sponsors. Awardees are expected to:
- establish or enhance a world leading engineering research group
- deliver 'use-inspired' research that meets the needs of their industrial sponsors
- disseminate the outcomes of their research for appropriate academic use
- become a self-sustaining research group by the end of the award (by securing substantial external grant income).
Diversity and inclusion is of paramount importance across all Academy programmes. We welcome any insights into barriers to application for this or any programme. Please send any feedback to Dr Andrew Clark, Executive Director, Programmes [email protected] or Dr Lucy Wheeler, Head of Research Programmes [email protected].