Eight interdisciplinary projects receive cross-academy APEX awards

Eight researchers have been awarded funding for innovative, curiosity-driven, interdisciplinary research projects in the 2024 round of the APEX awards.

The awards will provide up to £100,000 for established independent researchers to collaborate with partners from different disciplines across the sciences, engineering, social sciences and humanities. The grants are jointly awarded by the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

From the next round, opening on 2 October, researchers will be able to apply for up to £200,000 to support their projects. This can include costs to contribute to research assistants and technical support as well as requests for funding for public engagement work related to the project. 

This year’s funded projects are:

Dr James Burridge
Dynamic spatial modelling and inference for language change
Lancaster University

Dr Selvino de Kort
Resounding calls: The impact of enclosure design on zoo soundscapes
Manchester Metropolitan University

Dr Bastien Dieppois
Foreseeing Management of Emerging Unprecedented Hydroclimatic Extremes to Embrace Resilience in Sub-Saharan African Communities
Coventry University

Dr Ksenija Dvurecenska
Would you trust a simulation? Communicating (un)certainty and establishing confidence in virtual testing
University of Liverpool

Professor Gabriel Egan
Shakespeare's Textual Variations: New Insights from Information Theory 
De Montfort University

Dr Joseph Martin
The Soft Side of Physics
Durham University

Professor Igor Potapov
De Novo Algorithmic Crystal Structure Prediction for Material Design 
University of Liverpool

Dr Bo Yao
Laying the Groundwork for EEG Classification of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: Multi-Objective Feature Attribution in Explainable Machine Learning for Inner Speech
Lancaster University

The APEX Awards have funded 49 interdisciplinary research projects across the UK since launching in 2017. Researchers supported through this grant have used the funding to address complex challenges where solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research.

Applications for the 2025 round will open on 2 October 2024 and close on 27 November 2024.