Visionaries awarded £22 Million to advance emerging technologies

Intelligent and resilient ocean engineering, new kinds of batteries and more precise x-ray scans are among the disruptive innovations being developed by the Royal Academy of Engineering’s latest Chairs in Emerging Technologies announced today. The Academy has made awards totalling over £22 million in research funding through its Chairs in Emerging Technologies programme, providing long-term support to nine world-leading engineers across the UK to advance emerging technologies.

The innovations being developed by the Chairs in Emerging Technologies have the potential to considerably benefit society and the UK economy, and enable the nation to remain at the global forefront of engineering innovation. The areas of research funded reflect the UK’s wider technological priorities, with many of the projects directly aligned to the government’s Industrial Strategy and designed to tackle some of the biggest industrial and societal challenges of our time.

The ten-year support provided to the Chairs will enable them to progress their pioneering ideas from basic science through to full deployment and commercialisation.

Professor Sir Jim McDonald FREng FRSE, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said:

Dr Dame Frances Saunders DBE CB FREng, who leads the Chairs in Emerging Technologies steering group, said

The eight Chairs in Emerging Technologies are supported through the UK government’s Investment in Research Talent initiative. In recognition of the importance of engineering research to the UK, the government has provided the Royal Academy of Engineering with a significant increase in funding to attract and retain the best research talent to the UK and support their work.

The eight Chairs in Emerging Technologies and their research projects are:

 

Professor Richard Dinsdale, University of South Wales      

Bio-Electrochemical Process Engineering for Carbon Reduction and Resource Recovery

Professor Dinsdale aims to develop and commercialise microbial bioelectrochemical systems for waste treatment and resource recovery. This innovative area of biotechnology manipulates the electrochemical properties of microbial cells to make industrial processes more efficient. This could enhance wastewater treatment, improve metal recovery and help convert carbon dioxide into renewable green platform chemicals. He will work with key industrial stakeholders to facilitate these developments.

 

 

Professor Susan Gourvenec, University of Southampton    

Intelligent and Resilient Ocean Engineering

Professor Gourvenec’s research will address technology gaps at each stage of the engineered life cycle of ocean structures, from forecasting ocean and seafloor behaviour, to designing and operating novel platforms for ocean facilities. By harnessing the intelligence of sensing, robotics and autonomy, this next generation of resilient engineered systems will unlock ocean resources more efficiently and more sustainably, with less risk to life.

 

 

Professor Natalio Krasnogor, Newcastle University 

Engineering Data Structure Organoids

Professor Krasnogor will investigate innovative ways of scaling up the volume of data that can be stored in living cells by storing, searching, sorting and retrieving data encoded in the genetic materials DNA or RNA. Tremendous advances in DNA information coding, synthetic biology and nanotechnology have made it possible to develop practical and scalable in vivo data structure organoids. Professor Krasnogor, together with his team and his industrial partners, will look at the opportunities for commercialising this emerging technology and also analyse its long-term social implications.

 

 

Professor Ian Saxley Metcalfe, Newcastle University       

Engineering chemical reactor technologies for a low-carbon energy future

Professor Metcalfe will develop new chemical reactor technologies to help achieve the energy conversions needed to support a low-carbon energy future including, but not limited to, low-carbon hydrogen production. Reaction engineering lies at the heart of such chemical conversions.  Professor Metcalfe plans to exploit recent innovations in the cyclic operation (or chemical looping) of chemical reactors to deliver transformational chemical processes for the energy sector.

 

 

Professor Alessandro Olivo, University College London      

Micro-radian x-ray scattering: transformative technology for industrial and medical diagnostics

Professor Olivo’s work will change the way x-rays are used in a variety of fields, including medicine, industrial inspections and security scans. Since Roentgen’s discovery of x-rays in 1895, their use has been based on differences in attenuation, the way the intensity reduces as the beam passes through a material. Professor Olivo will develop new systems based on his observation that all x-rays emerging from a sample deviate from their original path by very small amounts, providing a wealth of untapped information about the sample they have passed through.

 

 

Professor Themis Prodromakis, University of Southampton          

Memristive Technologies for Lifelong Learning Embedded AI Hardware

Professor Prodromakis will use innovations in nanotechnology to create a new electronic fabric that merges memory with computing power while maintaining extreme power efficiency – like the human brain. His research, using memristors or memory chips based on transition metal-oxides, will focus on enabling electronic systems to sense, recognise, learn and reason, with the goal of embedding artificial intelligence.

 

 

Professor Danail Stoyanov, University College London       

Robotic Actuated Imaging Skins

Professor Stoyanov will develop robotic surface structures with embedded sensors that can adapt their shape and size using artificial intelligence algorithms to control and interpret sensory information. Using this data, Professor Stoyanov’s new systems will help to enhance imaging capabilities during minimally invasive surgery and enable safer and more precise procedures to treat diseases across different anatomical regions.

 

 

Professor Magda Titirici, Imperial College London   

Sustainable Energy Materials for Emerging Technologies

Professor Magda Titirici will develop sustainable future energy technologies, particularly new kinds of batteries to replace Lithium, clean and low-cost production of Hydrogen from biomass or plastic waste and its use in fuel cells free from precious metals. These technologies will enable more use of renewable energy in future, from grid-balancing for intermittent energy supply to producing customized compostable electronics.

 

 

The next Chairs in Emerging Technologies call will open on 7 October 2019 with a deadline of 11 February 2020. The award value is £2,780,000 over ten years.