Prestigious fellowships have been awarded to two of our researchers.
Dr Christina Vanderwel and Dr Matt Ryan will spend the next four years tackling key contemporary societal issues through their UK Research and Innovation Future Leader Fellowships (FLFs). The United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) scheme supports talented researchers to help ensure that UK research and innovation continues to be world-class.
Dr Vanderwel’s research will investigate wind patterns around buildings and how this affects air quality in cities, while Dr Ryan’s project will fuse politics with machine learning to address polarisation and disengagement with politics. Their fellowships are worth £942,000 and £1.1m respectively.
Dr Ryan, Lecturer in Governance and Public Policy, will build a dashboard combining data from traditional surveys, crowdsourcing, and social media to create an early warning system to tell governments and citizens what people are talking about and what issues they should consult on before it is too late.
Dr Vanderwel, Lecturer and Research Fellow in the Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics Research Group, will inject dye into wind and water tunnels containing scale models of cities to understand how pollution spreads.
The two fellowships are among only 78 to be awarded across the country. Earlier this year, Dr Sarah Lewthwaite won a FLF in the scheme’s first round for her research into digital accessibility education.
Throughout the preparation of their fellowship proposals, Dr Ryan and Dr Vanderwel have been assisted by various Professional Services teams, including Research and Innovation Services (RIS), the Finance Research Hub and the Library.
You can read the full article here.
