Outstanding researchers awarded early career fellowships worth more than £75 million

Seventy exceptional researchers have been awarded funding through the Royal Society’s flagship early career schemes.

The University Research Fellowships, Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships and Newton International Fellowships, will allocate over £75m across the cohorts, aimed at tackling major scientific questions and establishing the next generation of leading researchers in the UK.

Each of the schemes will provide the freedom and flexibility to pursue innovative, curiosity driven research, form international collaborations and establish new research groups.

Sir Adrian Smith, President of The Royal Society, said: “Long-term funding for early career researchers to pursue novel and exciting scientific questions is vital to attracting talent and ensuring the UK is developing the next generation of word-leading scientists. It is gratifying to see the Society’s schemes supporting such an array of outstanding research and researchers.”

Researchers will take up their new posts at institutions across the UK and Ireland from October. They will be working on research projects spanning the physical, mathematical, chemical, and biological sciences.

The full list of appointments is as follows:

University Research Fellowships

This year, 33 candidates have been awarded University Research Fellowships across 18 different UK and Irish universities. These grants provide early career researchers with funding of up to £1.83m over eight years. This announcement includes the appointment of two Royal Society – Research Ireland University Research Fellows funded by Research Ireland and available for outstanding researchers in the Republic of Ireland.

Dr Hee-Kyung Ahn
Revealing and exploiting mechanisms of plant intracellular immune receptors
University of Edinburgh

Dr Adrian Baez-Ortega
Mechanisms of long-term tumour evolution and chromosomal instability in marine transmissible cancers
University of Cambridge

Dr Susannah Bourne-Worster
Designing photocatalysts for the circular economy: environmental control of chromophore photochemistry
Durham University

Dr Jasmine Brewer  
Accessing the microscopic structure of the quark-gluon plasma with jets
University of Oxford

Dr Hugh Burton
Transforming excited-state electronic simulations using differential geometry and quantum algorithms
University College London

Dr Valentina Maria Martina Cairo
Tracking the evolution and future development of the Universe with Higgs boson pairs
University College London

Dr Safeer Chenattukuzhiyil
Next-generation 2D spin computing devices
University of Oxford

Dr Daniel Congrave
Solving Near-Infrared Triplet Harvesting
University of Oxford

Dr Emma Louise Davis
Verifying Elimination, Capturing Trends and Observing Resurgence through Xeno-monitoring (VECTOR-X): modelling vector-based surveillance for lymphatic filariasis and other vector-borne diseases
University of Warwick

Dr Josephine Evans
Asymptotic Behaviour of kinetic equations
University of Warwick

Dr Darya Frank
Salience-induced foresight and hindsight in human memory
University of Manchester

Dr Andrea Guerrieri
S-matrix Bootstrap: a theoretical collider for particle physics
City University

Dr Alexander Guttridge
Programmable assembly of ultracold molecules in optical lattices
Durham University

Dr Laura Hayes
FLASH: FLare Acceleration Studies with High-energy observations
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr Chao He
Vectorial optical engineering: providing new insights into biomedical imaging and vectorial optical technologies
University of Oxford

Dr Andrei Igoshev
Unravelling superconductivity in neutron stars using advanced numerical simulations and X-ray observations
Newcastle University

Dr Hariom Kirit Jani
Dynamical control of ultra-fast antiferromagnetic nano-whirls
University of Oxford

Dr Nina Kudryashova
Unlocking the power of predictive processing by reverse-engineering biological neural networks
University of Edinburgh

Dr Yang Li
Calabi-Yau metrics and special Lagrangians
University of Cambridge

Dr Ines Martins
Understanding the Complex Dynamics of Biodiversity Change
University of York

Dr Hugo Moreira
Armoured inclusions open atmospheric windows to the Earth’s evolving mantle: a paradigm shift approach to decipher plate tectonics
University of Portsmouth

Dr Chris Morgan
The spatiotemporal dynamics of meiotic crossover control
John Innes Centre

Dr Guy Paxman
Antarctica’s subglacial geology and its importance for ice sheet stability
Durham University

Dr Christopher Pulte
Systems Semantics and Verification (SSV)
University of Cambridge

Dr Anthony Redmond
Immunity in the fast lane: reconstructing the evolution of the animal immune system and prospecting for novel antimicrobials
University College Dublin (UCD)

Dr James Rowe
A puzzle of patterns: Deciphering how hormone patterns coordinate leaf stress responses
University of Sheffield

Dr Claire Senner
Sense and Nonsense: RNA Decay Pathways in Mammalian Reproduction
University of Cambridge

Dr Amy Sweeny
Wild animal microbiomes in the context of global change
University of Edinburgh

Dr Filip Szczypinski
Computer-aided supramolecular chemistry: molecular recognition in the data-rich era
Durham University

Dr Fatmanur Ünal
New frontiers in quantum geometry, topology and out-of-equilibrium dynamics
University of Birmingham

Dr Andrew Winter
The environmental origins of exoplanetary systems
Queen Mary University of London

Dr Clarence Wret
Neutrinos at the dawn of precision measurements
Imperial College London

Dr Valentina Zhelyazkova
Cold Chemistry Enabled by Rydberg Atoms
University College London

Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships

The Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships support scientists who require a flexible working pattern due to personal circumstances. This year, five scientists across five institutions will receive up to £1.83m over eight years.

Dr Emma Beasor
The connection between massive stars, supernovae, and compact remnants
Liverpool John Moores University

Dr Belen Fadrique Jimenez
Tropical Mountains as Contemporary Climate Refugia
University of Liverpool

Dr Stephen Fielden
NanoComms: Establishing Communication Between Polymer Nanoparticles
University of Birmingham

Dr Avital Hahamy
Studying Episodic Information Beyond Memory
University College London

Dr Laura Monk
Fine-scale spectral statistics of random hyperbolic surfaces
University of Bristol

Newton International Fellowships

Newton International Fellowships support non-UK researchers in the early stages of their career who wish to conduct research in the UK. Thirty-two scientists will be hosted across 17 different UK institutions. The NIFs offer up to £280,000 over two years. This announcement includes the appointment of two Royal Society K C Wong International Fellows and three awards funded by the International Science Partnerships Fund.

Dr Rashidatu Abdulazeez
What can Endogenous Viral Elements (EVEs) in Drosophilidae tell us about host-virus coevolution?
University of Edinburgh

Fernando Baile
A new mechanism for chromatin inheritance during cell replication in plants.
University of Warwick

Dr Jianguang Bao
Correlative Synchrotron X-ray Imaging and Diffraction of the Fatigue Story in LPBF Ti2AlNb Alloy
University of Manchester

Dr Akanksha Bhatnagar
Deciphering the subcellular dynamics and functions of a stress-sensing polycomb protein in plants
University of Birmingham

Dr Soumyadip Bhunia
QD-2-Entanglement: Generating Entangled Photon-pairs with Coupled Colloidal Quantum Dots
University of Warwick

Dr Jie Deng
Ecological sensitivity of the human microbiome
University of Oxford

Dr Eduardo Farinazzo Vitral
Shedding Light on Dark Matter
University of Edinburgh

Dr Silvia Georgescu
Solvable models for real world holography
King's College London

Dr Andre Guerra
Regularity and Rigidity in Geometric Variational Problems
University of Cambridge

Dr Hao Jia
Quantitative determination of macrophage phenotype mediated by dysregulated lipid biomolecules during MASLD development
University of Cambridge

Dr Cole Johnston
Revealing the anatomy of gravitational wave progenitors
University of Surrey

Dr Joshua Kestel
The influence of genomic- and pollinator-mediated barriers to geneflow in facilitating adaptive radiation of sexually deceptive petal spots
University of Cambridge

Dr Gugulethu Khumalo
Anti-inflammatory and pro-resolving profiles of Indigenous Medicinal Plants of South Africa
Queen Mary University of London

Dr Leyi Loh
Electrically driven quantum emission from defect centers in 2D materials
University of Cambridge

Dr Tingwei Li
Combining Machine Learning Potential and Multi-scale Modeling for Accelerated Next-Generation Solar Cells Discovery
Imperial College London

Dr Jing Lyu
In Situ Formed Stem Cell-Encapsulated 3D Hyperbranched Polymer Hydrogel Scaffolds for Cartilage Defect Repair and Regeneration
University College London (UCL)

Dr Ruican Ma
Exploring Black Hole X-ray Binaries: Bridging EP and Insight-HXMT through Southampton for Spectral and Timing Analysis
University of Southampton

Dr Sanjay Mehra
Ionic Liquid Microemulsions as High-Temperature Nanoreactors for Redox Flow Batteries
Queen's University Belfast

Dr Debashis Mondal
Synthetic Receptors, Transporters and Catalysts Aimed at Glucose-6-Phosphate
University of Bristol

Niyas Mundakkamattathil Abdul Salam
Chemically Activated Swarm Microrobots for Targeted Therapeutic Delivery
University of Oxford

Dr Yoel Negrín
Plasmonic chalcogenide nanohybrids for sunlight-driven photocatalysis
King's College London

Dr David Obada
Fabrication of Hydroxyapatite and Bio-glass containing Composite for Improved Load-Bearing Bone Regeneration
University of Sheffield

Dr Shijia Peng
Global distribution and conservation of palaeo- and neo-hotspots for trees under future climate change
University of Oxford

Dr Ricardo Rama-Eiroa
Antiferromagnetic all-spintronics computing based on emergent electrodynamics
University of Edinburgh

Lecheng Ren
Celestial Construction of Scattering Amplitudes
Queen Mary University of London

Dr Camilla Russo
Isonitrile Synthase Enzymes as Green Biocatalysts for the Synthesis of Isonitriles
University College London (UCL)

Dr Luise Schlotterose
Investigating cellular mechanisms underlying traumatic brain injuries using advanced-organ-on-chip technology
University of Oxford

Dr Fiorenzo Stoppa
A Modular Machine Learning Data Processing Pipeline for Astronomical Observatories
University of Oxford

Dr Nima Taghipour
Mid-infrared sensing from colloidal quantum dots coupled with extreme plasmonic nanocavities
University of Cambridge

Dr Khiêm Vu Ngoc
Data-driven Statistical Learning of generalised mechanics of textile composites (DSLgene)
Swansea University

Dr Rui Wu
Fluidic Neural Network – A General Framework to Optimise Robotic Body-Environment Interaction
University of Bristol

Dr Muhan Wang
Nano-engineering of Alkali-activated Cementitious Materials towards Carbon Neutrality
Brunel University London