Imperial engineers win European grants for turbulence and computational sensing

Photo: Thomas Angus

Two Imperial engineers have won major European Research Council (ERC) grants to accelerate research that ‘deepens our understanding of the world’.

Dr Ayush Bhandari, from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Dr Konstantinos Steiros, from the Department of Aeronautics, won the European grants worth €1.5m each to study computer sensing and air turbulence respectively.  

The grants help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form teams and pursue their most promising ideas to benefit humanity. 

Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: “The European Commission is proud to support the curiosity and passion of our early-career talent under our Horizon Europe programme. The new ERC Starting Grants winners aim to deepen our understanding of the world. Their creativity is vital to finding solutions to some of the most pressing societal challenges." 

President of the European Research Council, Professor Maria Leptin, said: “Empowering researchers early on in their careers is at the heart of the mission of the ERC. I am particularly pleased to welcome UK researchers back to the ERC. They have been sorely missed over the past years. With fifty grants awarded to researchers based in the UK, this influx is good for the research community overall.”

Dr Ayush Bhandari, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Dr Bhandari’s research focuses on breaking the popularly held limits in data capture and imaging through the innovative integration of mathematical algorithms and hardware design. He is awarded an ERC grant for his project “CoSI-Fold - Making the Invisible Visible: Computational Sensing and Imaging via Folding Non-Linearities.” 

In an era increasingly driven by digital technologies, CoSI-Fold aims to revolutionise digital information capture.  

At the end of his PhD (MIT, 2018), Dr Bhandari pioneered a radically novel approach to digital acquisition known as Unlimited Sensing. Among other distinctions, this work earned him the 2023 Frontiers of Science Award, an honour he shares with five Fields Medalists. 

Early results from Unlimited Sensing have demonstrated performance breakthroughs in fields such as tomography, radar systems, and communication technologies. The CoSI-Fold program is set to drive transformative advancements, particularly in emerging areas like computational imaging. 

Dr Bhandari’s groundbreaking contributions to computational sensing and imaging have previously been recognised by the 2019 UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, the 2020 IEEE Best PhD Dissertation Award (Signal Processing Society), and the 2021 President's Medal for Outstanding Early Career Researcher at Imperial. In addition, Dr Bhandari and his co-authors have recently published an open-access, primer book on the emerging field of Computational Imaging (MIT Press, 2022). 

He said: “The ERC is well-known for supporting frontier science, and being an ERC awardee is undoubtedly a distinct honour. This support will be instrumental in advancing both the theoretical and applied frontiers of digital sensing and imaging, enabling me to achieve the tangible impact I have envisioned over the past years.”

Dr Konstantinos ‘Kostas’ Steiros, Department of Aeronautics 

Dr Steiros’ research revolves around experimental fluid dynamics, unsteady aerodynamics and turbulence. 

He won the grant for his project ‘ONSET - Beyond self-similarity in turbulence’ 

The project aims to develop and validate a theory for the prediction of the particularly challenging ‘intermediate strain’ regime of turbulence, which governs virtually all industrial applications involving turbulent flows. Despite that, understanding of that regime is very limited because the simplifying assumptions that are commonly used in turbulence modelling are invalid there. This project will investigate whether this regime can still be modelled by bridging existing conceptual tools of turbulence theory.  

Dr Steiros said: “Richard Feynman famously quoted 'turbulence is the most important unsolved problem of classical physics’. Turbulent flows can be found everywhere: from oceanic currents to the wakes of wind turbines. Understanding and modelling turbulent flow physics will unlock a vast potential for optimising many applications of the energy and transportation sectors.  

“I am thankful to be given the opportunity to work on this exciting topic under such a prestigious grant.” 

Horizon Europe at Imperial 

Open international collaboration is essential to Imperial's success: our academics work across 192 countries and European partners are critical to this: about 60% of Imperial’s research papers with a US collaborator also have a European co-author, as do 72% with Canada and 81% with Brazil. Participation in the EU research framework programmes is a springboard to productive partnerships across the world – strengthening the influence and impact of UK research. Imperial was the 8th most successful higher education institution in Horizon 2020 and the programme has funded many collaborations, supporting our researchers to work with colleagues across Europe on vital issues: ranging from new diagnostic tools for childhood disease, an AIDS vaccine and combatting wildfires to quantum, data and climate technologies. 

The UK is now fully associated to Horizon Europe and Imperial research can participate in and lead projects across the programme. Just recently, Imperial was named as part of a consortium looking to equip healthcare providers with resources to detect, diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Imperial academics have also recently kicked off other Horizon Europe projects on revolutionary optimisation tools to drastically reduce emissions in the design of aero engines, research into exposure to endocrine disruptors and the effects on human health, and helping to better understand cloud-aerosol interactions to more accurately predict extreme weather events and support planning for climate adaption and mitigation. 

To find out more about opportunities in Horizon Europe, please get in touch with the Research Office and the Enterprise Research Impact Management Office. 

This story is adapted from a press release by ERC.