Professor Alistair Hetherington

"I started looking for different kinds of support that would allow me the time and space to develop a new area of research. The Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship was absolutely ideal for my needs because there were no restrictions on what one could work on, rather what was important was the quality of the ideas being investigated. 

"The fellowship almost completely removed my heavy administrative and teaching burdens. This was important because it gave me time to think and explore new areas. As a result of the Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship, I changed my research focus to investigating the evolution and origin of intracellular signalling systems and stomata and part of this involved developing new collaborations with phylogenomicists and bioinformaticists. I couldn’t have made this change without the fellowship and as a direct result the majority of my funded work is now in areas that were developed during the fellowship. The Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship has very significant long-term beneficial impact on my research career - It’s that simple."