Rising research star secures significant funding boost

A rising star at the University of Exeter has received a significant funding boost for her research into single celled organisms, it has been announced.

Professor Kirsty Wan, of the Living Systems Institute, has received a £500,000 grant from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) – one of the first University of Exeter researchers to receive such an award.

The grant is part of the Nature Computes Better grant opportunity, led by Programme Director Suraj Bramhavar, which seeks to discover how we can redefine the way computers process information by exploiting principles found ubiquitously in nature.

Dr Wan’s project is called “Embodied cognition in single celled organisms”, and aims to unravel the basis of natural computation in single-celled organisms through an interdisciplinary approach combining bioimaging, live-cell experiments, and modelling.

The project will study how single cells compute using physical attributes of its body and the environment.

Professor Wan said: “Nature Computes Better articulated a unique vision that highlights how much there is still to explore in the realm of biological/natural intelligence, which perfectly complements efforts to develop faster and increasingly sophisticated AIs. 

“We can learn so much from how living systems compute at all scales, and there are distinct challenges of ‘being alive’ that make these systems so much more robust and flexible than non-living architectures.”

Professor Wan’s main research interests concern the motile behaviour and dynamics of microorganisms, with emphasis on exploring novel interdisciplinary approaches.

She obtained her undergraduate (mathematics) and PhD degrees (biological physics) from the University of Cambridge, UK, where she was also awarded a Nevile Research Fellowship from Magdalene College (2014-2017) for her postdoctoral work. In 2019, she was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for a major project on the evolution of complex behaviour in single-celled organisms.