Leading researchers at Exeter receive prestigious ERC funding awards
An adaptive light un-mixing device. Light flows in from the bottom, and is processed and rearranged so that it is unmixed by the time it exits at the top. Image credit: José C. A. Rocha.
Three leading researchers from the University of Exeter’s have received a significant funding boost from the European Research Council (ERC), it has been announced.
Dr Katherine Helliwell, Dr David Phillips and Dr Chiara Meccariello will lead separate projects that have received five-year grants from the respected research council through its Consolidator Grants funding scheme.
Dr Helliwell, a Senior Lecturer in Biosciences, received a €2,299,893 award for leading a project called DIACIDAL, which examines interactions between phytoplankton (plant-like ocean microbes) and bacteria that can kill them.
Dr Phillips, meanwhile, an Associate Professor in Exeter’s Physics and Astronomy department, received a significant award for his project, which will look to tame dynamic complex media for imaging, communications and photonic computing.
Dr Meccariello, from Exeter’s Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion and Theology, has been awarded €1,999,484 for her EduGRE: Education in Graeco-Roman Egypt – An Intercultural Approach, which is designed to highlight the dynamic interplay and the cultural exchange that shaped educational practices in Graeco-Roman Egypt.
The European Research Council (ERC) awarded its Consolidator Grants to 328 researchers overall. These grants, totalling €678 million, aim to support outstanding scientists and scholars as they establish their independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas. The funding is provided through the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.
Dr Helliwell‘s DIACIDAL project will examine the interactions between phytoplankton and bacteria. Globally, phytoplankton absorb vast quantities of carbon and support ocean life at the base of marine food chains – and this project focuses on one of the most abundant groups of phytoplankton, the diatoms.
DIACIDAL addresses crucial unknowns in our understanding of how certain bacteria can kill diatoms – and how diatoms can sense and evade attack. The project also has the potential to unlock opportunities for biotechnology, such as new antimicrobial compounds.
Dr Helliwell said: “Interactions between phytoplankton and bacteria are crucial in mediating carbon cycling in the oceans, yet because they are invisible to the naked eye, we know little about how they work and their roles in the environment. I’m thrilled and honoured to have been awarded this ERC funding for my project DIACIDAL that will use new technologies to overcome these challenges.”
Dr Phillips is leading a project is to develop the foundations of new technology that can measure how light has been mixed up, and then unmix it again.
When a bright light is shone onto an object such as a finger, some of the light is seen to emerge from the other side.
This is because light undergoes multiple scattering inside a ‘complex medium’ such as living tissue, which scrambles the image information carried by the light – meaning it resurfaces as a diffuse glow, rather than delivering undistorted images of scenes from the other side.
However, as long as the light has not been absorbed, the image information carried by this light has not been lost, but just mixed up. Although exceptionally challenging, there is no fundamental reason why this light can’t be unmixed again – which is what the project seeks to do, as rapidly as possible.
This concept has wide range of future applications, including looking deeply into the body at high resolution with harmless visible light, overcoming the effects of atmospheric turbulence for ground-to-satellite laser communications, and improving the data capacity of fibre optics for high speed internet.
The technology the team are working on represents a new low-energy computing paradigm: specific calculations can be performed by simply flowing light through an appropriately engineered complex medium. The researchers will explore the feasibility of this type of optical computing, too, which in the future may help to reduce the energy consumption of artificial neural networks.
Dr Phillips said: “Through this project my research team and I aim to realise new kinds of optical technology that can dynamically “cloak” the scattering effects of any opaque medium it is coupled to – making it possible to look through to an unobstructed view of scenes on the other side. We’re excited to get started!'”
Dr Meccariello is leading a five-year project that seeks to challenge preexisting notions that Greek and Egyptian education operated independently of one another. A specialist in manuscripts of ancient literature, Dr Meccariello and her team will visit museums and collections around the world to study specific artefacts written in Greek, Latin and Egyptian. There, they will not only analyse the text, but also use techniques such as photogrammetry to capture the physical form of the artefact – from which they will create a dedicated digital platform that will ‘host’ these artefacts, with detailed images and 3D reconstructions.
She said: “Traditionally, research in this area has been split by disciplines, with scholars of Greek or Latin material rarely engaging with Egyptian material and vice versa.EduGRE addresses this gap by studying all the evidence together to reconstruct the bigger picture of how education worked in a multicultural society, and how it evolved over time against the backdrop of societal and religious changes.”
