Academics awarded prestigious fellowships

Four Edinburgh academics have been announced as recipients of a UK government fellowship that supports early career researchers and innovators with outstanding potential.

Dr Charlie Lees, Dr Joe Rainger, Dr Stephen Wallace and Dr Franz Herzog are part of the second cohort of the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) Future Leaders Fellowships.

The Fellowships are a £900 million fund that is helping to establish the careers of world-class research and innovation leaders across UK business and academia.

Including the four from Edinburgh, 78 early career researchers from 38 UK universities have been recognised in this round of funding.

Research projects

Dr Charlie Lees, from the Centre for Genomic and Experimental Medicine, has been selected for his project investigating how to predict disease flare and treatment response in inflammatory bowel disease.

Dr Joe Rainger, from the Roslin Institute, is looking at novel approaches to define how tissues fuse together during human embryonic development.

Dr Stephen Wallace, from the School of Biological Sciences, will investigate how to merge techniques from synthetic organic chemistry and metabolic engineering to potentially create more sustainable ways of producing chemicals.

Dr Franz Herzog, from the School of Physics and Astronomy, plans to devise a formula to increase the accuracy of measurements taken from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Fellowship programme

Future Leaders is part of the Government’s modern industrial strategy, which aims to secure the UK as world-leading in scientific research and innovation.

UKRI announces new fellows through six competition rounds over the three years of the Future Leaders Fellowships programme, typically awarding around 200 new fellows each year.

/University of Edinburgh Public Release. View in full here.