The shift from hunting and gathering to an agricultural way of life was one of the most profound events in the history of our species and one which continues to impact our existence today. Understanding this process is key to understanding the origins and rise of human civilization. Despite decades of study, however, fundamental questions regarding why, where and how it occurred remain largely unanswered. Such a fundamental change in human existence could not have been possible without the domestication of selected animals and plants. The dog is crucial in this story since it was not only the first ever domestic animal, but also the only animal to be domesticated by hunter-gatherers several thousand years before the appearance of farmers. The bones and teeth of early domestic dogs and their wild wolf ancestors hold important clues to our understanding of how, where and when humans and wild animals began the relationship we still depend upon today. These remains have been recovered from as early as 15,000 years ago in numerous archaeological sites across Eurasia suggesting that dogs were either domesticated independently on several occasions across the Old World, or that dogs were domesticated just once and subsequently spreading with late Stone Age hunter gatherers across the Eurasian continent and into North America. There are also those who suggest that wolves were involved in an earlier, failed domestication experiment by Ice Age Palaeolithic hunters about 32,000 years ago. Despite the fact that we generally know the timing and locations of the domestication of all the other farmyard animals, we still know very little for certain about the origins of our most iconic domestic animal. New scientific techniques that include the combination of genetics and statistical analyses of the shapes of ancient bones and teeth are beginning to provide unique insights into the biology of the domestication process itself, as well as new ways of tracking the spread of humans and their domestic animals around the globe. By employing these techniques we will be able to observe the variation that existed in early wolf populations at different levels of biological organization, identify diagnostic signatures that pinpoint which ancestral wolf populations were involved in early dog domestication, reveal the shape (and possibly the genetic) signatures specifically linked to the domestication process and track those signatures through time and space. We have used this combined approach successfully in our previous research enabling us to definitively unravel the complex story of pig domestication in both Europe and the Far East. We have shown that pigs were domesticated multiple times and in multiple places across Eurasia, and the fine-scale resolution of the data we have generated has also allowed us to reveal the migration routes pigs took with early farmers across Europe and into the Pacific. By applying this successful research model to ancient dogs and wolves, we will gain much deeper insight into the fundamental questions that still surround the story of dog domestication.

Our proposal brings together world class expertise and cutting-edge methods to answer a key question in the history of life: how did vertebrates conquer the land? We address this question by testing four key hypotheses derived from long-standing assertions that selection acted upon the skull to drive adaptations for improved terrestrial feeding during the water to land transition. Our methods offer a means to shift away from analogy-driven assertions of evolutionary history towards rigorous testable hypotheses founded upon mechanical principles, and will set a benchmark for future studies in evolutionary biomechanics. For the first 200 million years of their history, vertebrates lived an aquatic existence. Between 385 and 350 million years ago they evolved a host of anatomical features that ultimately enabled vertebrates to conquer land. This reorganization of the vertebrate skeleton created the basic tetrapod body plan of a consolidated head with mobile neck, arms and legs with digits and air breathing lungs. This plan has persisted, subject to modification, ever since and is shared by all terrestrial vertebrates. It was proposed over 50 years ago that tetrapods modified their skull bones and jaw muscles to create a stronger and 'more efficient' structure, capable of forceful biting for feeding on land. This reorganization is seen as key to their subsequent radiations, enabling tetrapods to expand into new ecological niches by feeding on terrestrial plants, large prey and hard or tough food. It has been proposed that these modifications came at the cost of reduced hydrodynamic efficiency and a slower bite, and could only be achieved by the loss of suction feeding and the evolution of rib-based breathing, thus freeing the skull from its roles in aquatic locomotion, drawing prey into the mouth and pumping air into the lungs. These ideas have been perpetuated in textbooks for decades, yet are based on out-dated simple line drawings of skulls and jaw closing muscles, and remain to be tested. We now have a rich and informative fossil record that documents changes in skull shape across the water to land transition. However, until now, we have lacked the means to test these hypotheses in a quantitative, rigorous way. In this proposal we will determine how changes in skull form and function enabled vertebrates to feed in a terrestrial environment and document the sequence of evolutionary changes and trade-offs that lead to their conquering of land. We will integrate principles from palaeontology and biology to reconstruct skull anatomy in 14 fossil tetrapods. Mathematical and mechanical principles will then be used to test the hypothesis that changes to skull anatomy resulted in tetrapod skulls evolving from hydrodynamically streamlined broad, flat skulls that could deliver a rapid (but weak) bite to strongly built skulls that could produce a more effective, forceful bite. New evolutionary modelling methods will assess how selection for skull strength or hydrodynamic efficiency shaped the evolution of the tetrapod skull. Our project will produce methodological advances that can be applied more broadly to evolutionary transitions and radiations, and to address long standing questions linking form and function. Palaeontologists, anatomists, biomechanists, evolutionary and developmental biologists and engineers will benefit from this work, which will establish new international collaborations. Its visual aspect and focus on early tetrapods will appeal to the general public, offering engagement opportunities and generating media interest. Members of our team are leaders in developing and validating methods for reconstructing and simulating the musculoskeletal anatomy and function of fossil organisms and have been involved in developing new methods for modelling how function has shaped form in deep time. The time is therefore ripe to apply our knowledge and skills to one of the key events in the history of life and our ow

Risk is the potential of experiencing a loss when a system does not operate as expected due to uncertainties. Its assessment requires the quantification of both the system failure potential and the multi-faceted failure consequences, which affect further systems. Modern industries (including the engineering and financial sectors) require increasingly large and complex models to quantify risks that are not confined to single disciplines but cross into possibly several other areas. Disasters such as hurricane Katrina, the Fukushima nuclear incident and the global financial crisis show how failures in technical and management systems cause consequences and further failures in technological, environmental, financial, and social systems, which are all inter-related. This requires a comprehensive multi-disciplinary understanding of all aspects of uncertainty and risk and measures for risk management, reduction, control and mitigation as well as skills in applying the necessary mathematical, modelling and computational tools for risk oriented decision-making. This complexity has to be considered in very early planning stages, for example, for the realisation of green energy or nuclear power concepts and systems, where benefits and risks have to be considered from various angles. The involved parties include engineering and energy companies, banks, insurance and re-insurance companies, state and local governments, environmental agencies, the society both locally and globally, construction companies, service and maintenance industries, emergency services, etc. The CDT is focussed on training a new generation of highly-skilled graduates in this particular area of engineering, mathematics and the environmental sciences based at the Liverpool Institute for Risk and Uncertainty. New challenges will be addressed using emerging probabilistic technologies together with generalised uncertainty models, simulation techniques, algorithms and large-scale computing power. Skills required will be centred in the application of mathematics in areas of engineering, economics, financial mathematics, and psychology/social science, to reflect the complexity and inter-relationship of real world systems. The CDT addresses these needs with multi-disciplinary training and skills development on a common mathematical platform with associated computational tools tailored to user requirements. The centre reflects this concept with three major components: (1) Development and enhancement of mathematical and computational skills; (2) Customisation and implementation of models, tools and techniques according to user requirements; and (3) Industrial and overseas university placements to ensure industrial and academic impact of the research. This will develop graduates with solid mathematical skills applied on a systems level, who can translate numerical results into languages of engineering and other disciplines to influence end-users including policy makers. Existing technologies for the quantification and management of uncertainties and risks have yet to achieve their significant potential benefit for industry. Industrial implementation is presently held back because of a lack of multidisciplinary training and application. The Centre addresses this problem directly to realise a significant step forward, producing a culture change in quantification and management of risk and uncertainty technically as well as educationally through the cohort approach to PGR training.

The Fibre Optical Parametric Amplifier (FOPA) has been investigated by many research groups over the preceding thirty-five years as a potential "holy grail" of optical amplification, but has yet to evolve outside of the laboratory. The tantalising prospect of significantly increasing fibre capacity within optical systems by simply and directly employing FOPAs, each with gain bandwidth far exceeding that of the ubiquitous EDFA, has always been historically somewhat offset by a range of challenging physical barriers. Chief amongst these is the innate polarisation sensitivity of the parametric amplification process. This demands that close alignment must be maintained between the polarisation state of an incoming signal and an optical parametric pump which supplies energy to the signal via a nonlinear medium. In a DWDM system, this requirement scales extremely problematically - multiple signals of differing wavelength and in random states of polarisation (often with data carried on both orthogonal modes), must each correlate polarisation-wise with the pump or pumps to receive gain. We believe we have uncovered a ground-breaking new architecture for the FOPA which will ultimately effectively eradicate this significant hurdle, and forms the basis for this proposal's research direction. Other FOPA performance issues must also be overcome. For example, the transfer of intensity noise from the pump to the signals, and the unwanted generation of nonlinear crosstalk within the FOPA via signal-signal interactions are certainly drags on the performance ultimately achievable and will require significant investigation to minimise their effects. However, we do not consider these latter challenges to be such a considerable brick-wall against real-world operation as 'the polarisation question'. FPA-ROCS, is a focused research programme which will provide the required breakthrough to transition the FOPA from problematic laboratory experiment to an amplifier with real potential to impact across the optical communications world. This key advance will be based on our recent first experiments of an innovative FOPA design based on what we are calling the Half Pass Nonlinear Optical Loop or HPL NOL as shown in. We have recently demonstrated the world's first amplification of polarisation-multiplexed DWDM signals using this architecture , and believe it solves several of the large issues highlighted above, most notably offering polarisation independent black-box gain together with exceptional potential for significantly expanded bandwidth beyond the 20nm so far demonstrated. This potential has been outlined by separate characterisation studies undertaken by our team which demonstrated a single polarisation gain bandwidth of >110nm (i.e. 3x greater than that of the EDFA) with a gain variation across the band of only 1dB . We envisage using the HPL NOL to supply gain in regions of the fibre transmission spectrum which are currently untapped, such as at 1300nm (O-band) or 1500nm (S-band). By exploiting new bands in this way, together with considerably wider gain bandwidth per band, the capacity increase offered by FPA-ROCS will be extremely large (>500% current capability) and thus industry and, perhaps, world changing. The technology will be able to operate in parallel with existing optical communications infrastructure due to the transparency of the HPL-NOL outside its gain region (a feature not present in doped fibre amplifiers), enabling co-deployment with field-deployed EDFAs. This will enable a low-cost future upgrade path for network operators without the expensive and environmentally-unfriendly need to lay new fibre as capacity limits are approached. We envisage massively increased data throughputs from our radical redesign of the optical amplifier, allowing fibre systems to be future proofed to some degree at a UK-wide level and beyond.