The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded 13 academics new grants to undertake ‘adventurous and high-risk research.’

The EPSRC, which is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), has allocated almost £25.5 million of funding to 126 adventurous projects, 13 of which are at Imperial. The new pilot programme is designed to support adventurous, high-risk research in the mathematical and physical sciences.

The projects announced today...will no doubt stimulate breakthroughs in knowledge that will lead to longer-term innovations with societal impact. Professor Dame Lynn Gladden EPSRC Executive Chair

Each project will receive up to £200,000 over two years.

One Imperial project from Dr Yuval Elani at the Department of Chemical Engineering aims to create a molecular assembly line of compartmentalised soft-matter nanoparticles, or ‘artificial cells’. This could help to develop particles that can be programmed to respond to certain stimuli, and lead to more effective drugs and vaccines.

Another Imperial project from Dr Riccardo Sapienza at the Department of Physics will investigate controlling light at the nanoscale. His group will use these insights to develop metamaterials that change at the speed of light for quantum computing and for optical information processing.

EPSRC Executive Chair, Professor Dame Lynn Gladden, said: “New Horizons reflects our commitment to explore how we can adapt our processes to free researchers to focus on their work.

“The projects announced today illustrate the high levels of creativity and inventiveness across the mathematical and physical sciences, and will no doubt stimulate breakthroughs in knowledge that will lead to longer-term innovations with societal impact.”

The projects

Faculty of Engineering

Dr Mark Oxborrow – Department of Materials 

Tiger in a Cage: Detecting Single Photons at low GHz Frequencies without Refrigerators, Vacuum Chambers or Magnets

Dr Emilio Martinez-Paneda – Civil and Environmental Engineering         

Nanovoids for Developing New Hydrogen-resistant Materials (NanoHMAT)

Dr Yuval Elani – Department of Chemical Engineering   

Dial-a-membrane: precision engineering of sub-micron self-assembled materials

Faculty of Natural Sciences

Dr Riccardo Sapienza – Department of Physics  

Space-time meta-surfaces for light waves

Dr James McGinty – Department of Physics       

Extreme volumetric imaging using single-shot optical tomography with compressive sensing

Dr Artem Bakulin – Department of Chemistry   

Ultrafast Optoelectronic Nanoscopy of Biological and Optoelectronic Systems

Dr Nicholas Brooks – Department of Chemistry

Life at the Extremes

Dr Lorenzo Di Michele – Department of Chemistry         

A programmable, cell-agnostic DNA nano-technology platform for CRISPR gene editing

Professor Martin Heeney and Dr Florian Glöcklhofer – Department of Chemistry   

Multielectron photoredox catalysts based on charge accumulation in conjugated macrocycles

Professor Kevin Buzzard – Department of Mathematics

Digitising the Langlands Program

Professor Daniel Waldram – Department of Physics      

New geometry from string dualities

Dr David Helm – Department of Mathematics

Derived and perverse methods in the local Langlands correspondence

Professor Alexei Skorobogatov – Department of Mathematics

Local-to-global principles for random Diophantine equations

Image: Shutterstock