Neurological diseases cause a substantial and increasing personal, social and economic burden. Although there have been exceptions, there is increasing frustration at the limitations of learning from animal models, emphasising the importance of studying human tissue. Neuropathologists work in NHS hospitals examining samples from the brain and related tissues derived from operations (biopsies) or post mortem examinations. Their job is to identify abnormalities, make a diagnosis and try to understand how the abnormalities arise. Neuropathology has existed as a specialty in the UK for 40-50 years and, as a consequence of this work, substantial archives of diagnostically verified tissue have been established nationwide. These archives contain a wealth of tissue from a great variety of neurological conditions, including common conditions such as stroke, head injury, tumours, infections, psychiatric disorders, developmental disorders and many rare conditions, and represent an underutilised resource for research. BRAIN UK (the UK BRain Archive Information Network) networks the tissue archives of neuropathology departments based in 26 regional NHS Clinical Neuroscience Centres to form a virtual brain bank, acting as a "matchmaker" linking researchers needing tissue to the appropriate samples. Through BRAIN UK researchers can gain access to >400,000 samples from a wide range of diseases affecting the brain, spinal cord, nerve, muscle and eye. BRAIN UK has ethical approval which covers the majority of projects, saving the researchers considerable time as they would otherwise have to obtain this approval independently. Over the past 4 years BRAIN UK has supported 48 research projects in many centres around the UK and overseas. In the coming 4 years we want to continue to provide tissue to researchers from existing resources and add newly obtained samples of which >16,000 are becoming available each year. We also aim to gather the results of researchers' studies performed on tissue obtained through BRAIN UK to form a central register of findings which will benefit new researchers wanting to perform new studies on these tissue samples. Finally, we will link BRAIN UK with UK Biobank, which has 500,000 intensively studied participants from the general population, in order to learn more about the origins of neurological disease. As far as we are aware, the BRAIN UK network is unique in the world and is very economical as it makes use of tissue samples already being stored in NHS archives which would otherwise be unused and unavailable to researchers.

Nuclear technology is, by definition, based around the principle of subatomic physics and the interaction of radiation particles with materials. Whilst the microscopic behaviour of such systems is well understood, the degree of inhomogeneity involved means that the ability to predict the flux of particles through complex physical environments on the macroscopic (human) scale is a significant challenge. This lies at the heart of how we design, regulate and operate some of the most important technologies for the twenty-first century. This includes building new reactors (fission and fusion), decommissioning old ones, medical radiation therapy, as well as opening the way forward into space technologies through e.g. the development of space-bound mini-reactors for off-world bases and protection for high-tech equipment exposed to high-energy radiation such as satellites and spacesuits. Accurate prediction of how radiation interacts with surrounding matter is based on modelling through the so-called Boltzmann transport equation (BTE). Many of the existing methods used in this field date back decades and rely on principles of simulated (e.g. neutron) particle counting obtained by Monte Carlo and other numerical methods. Input from the mathematical sciences community since the 1980s has been limited. In the meantime, various mathematical theories have since emerged that present the opportunity for entirely new approaches. Together with powerful modern HPC and smarter algorithms, they have the capacity to handle significantly more complex scenarios e.g. time dependence, rare-event sampling and variance reduction as well as multi-physics modelling. This five-year interdisciplinary programme of research will combine modern mathematical methods from probability theory, advanced Monte Carlo methods and inverse problems to develop novel approaches to the theory and application of radiation transport. We will pursue an interactive exploration of foundational, translational and application-driven research; developing predictive models with quantifiable accuracy and software prototypes, ready for real-world implementation in the energy, healthcare and space nuclear industries. This programme grant will unite complementary research groups from mathematics, engineering and medical physics, leading to sustained critical mass in academic knowledge and expertise. Through a diverse team of researchers, we will lead advances in radiation modelling that are disruptive to the current paradigm, ensuring that the UK is at the forefront of the 21st century nuclear industry.

Improving outcomes, minimising re-admissions, prioritising hospital resources and expanding home or community-based management are major objectives of the NHS. Patient care needs to be considered for the entire recovery process of patients and potential impact on life-long health and wellbeing. The future of surgery is therefore moving towards precision intervention, increasingly driven by focus on quality-of-life after surgery, as well as the need for taking a systems approach towards surgery. The aim of the proposed network is to establish a forum for surgical innovation with seamless integration of engineering research, clinical translation and industrial development by aligning EPSRC healthcare technologies with NIHR Healthcare Technology Co-operatives (HTCs) to accelerate the development and clinical adoption of new surgical and assistive devices that can improve the treatment, functional restoration, rehabilitation and quality-of-life for patients. The network is supported by NIHR HTCs, KTN, and a number of academic, NHS, industrial and healthcare stakeholders. The research and clinical bases to be covered by the proposed Technology Network include the following three areas: 1) Sensing for improved peri-operative care - which is a determining factor for mitigating against post-operative complications; 2) Smart surgical devices - for surgery with increased consistency and accuracy, streamlining intraoperative surgical decision making and circumventing potential post-operative complications and revisions; 3) Assistive devices and robots - to facilitate remote monitoring and managed rehabilitation in community or home care settings. The three areas share common engineering research challenges but need to be pursued under different clinical context. The planned activities of the network include 1) Network Events: Symposia and Focused Workshops; 2) Strategic Roadmap events and User Forums; 3) Support for Interdisciplinary Mobility and Industrial Secondment; 4) Proof-of-Concept Projects and Design Competitions; 5) Exhibitions and Patient/Public Engagement; and 6) Online Engagement, Web Forum and Social Media; and 7) Health Policy and High Level Engagement. The benefits for those involved in the proposed network include partnership with extensive industrial and clinical connections already established by the partnering HTCs, host institutions, clinically aligned research and development pathways addressing the future of surgery, engagement of healthcare stakeholders and policy makers, access to research expertise and young talents in this highly interdisciplinary area, early end-user involvement, and tapping into design expertise, access to user group feedback, deliver rapid results through HTCs' clinical network, match evidence to needs of NICE, strong commercial engagement.

In the Vietnam War, American evacuation helicopters transformed soldier survivability with the emergence of the 'Golden Hour'. This relied on air superiority and relative freedom of movement and has been the UK/US/NATO approach to battlefield casualty treatment since. However, recent proliferation and effectiveness of low-cost, accurate, shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles has significantly disrupted helicopter operations in Ukraine and thus, presenting a heightened risk to Casualty Evacuation (CASEVAC) operations. Moreover, frontline army doctors work in world's most harsh and hostile environments, and often risk their lives while marching out and stepping in when they are needed near fighting forces. They are often required to monitor multiple casualties at a given time and prioritise whom they should be attending first based on the severity of injuries. Thus, there is an urgent unmet need for enhancing casualty survival in a contested environment where conventional helicopter CASEVAC is slow or unavailable. Recent advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Autonomous System (RAS) provides new and future opportunities to meet this challenge. In line with this, the proposed ATRACT system is a disruptive innovation to address this unmet need in a novel way by designing, developing and field-testing a trustworthy drone-driven RAS to help frontline medics in decision-making in the first 'platinum ten minutes' following trauma. ATRACT will adopt an interdisciplinary and transformative research approach focusing on: 1) accurate search and localisation of injured soldiers using advanced manoeuvring of a drone in difficult terrains, 2) a novel platform that combines advanced multimodal sensing, beyond state-of-the-art algorithms for a robotic system to detect frontline soldiers, 3) real-time monitoring of their injury severity and vital signs for effective triage prediction/update, and 4) where medical emergency response team is available, real-time casualty information to the enroute medical team as it approaches, enabling more effective crew resource management and casualty prioritisation, thereby reducing time on the ground to maximise survivability and to minimise risk of the frontline medics being attacked. AI and RAS are the driving forces in many industries (e.g., manufacturing, agriculture, transport, healthcare, etc.) and helping to address some of the most pressing issues facing humankind. Many such technologies have a major limitation of trustworthiness (technically robust, ethically adherent and lawful) and mainly because they typically use a "black box" approach, where AI elements are often less visible and transparent in the way data is used and operationalised from multiple sources, and frequently exhibits unconscious biases resulting in lack of control in decision-making. Moreover, they do not provide contextualised services or customised interventions to changing conditions and/or environmental settings. ATRACT will address these limitations via design and development processes which comply with the latest ethical and legal MoD AI standards, and military medical practice, incorporating principles from the WHO Surgical Checklist to align medical considerations with data quality, bias avoidance and system reliability factors. We will ensure that ATRACT is transparent, consistent and interpretable so that potential bias, legal and medical compliance, and MoD ethics can be addressed systematically at every stage of design, development and testing with expert-in-the-loop. Successful results in this context will revolutionise the way frontline health services, casualty evacuation and the delivery of emergency and lifesaving medical aid is delivered, resulting in significant health, social and economic benefits.

PREMIERE will integrate challenges identified by the EPSRC Prosperity Outcomes and the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) in healthcare (Healthy Nation), energy (Resilient Nation), manufacturing and digital technologies (Resilient Nation, Productive Nation) as areas to drive economic growth. The programme will bring together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to create unprecedented impact in these sectors through the creation of a next-generation predictive framework for complex multiphase systems. Importantly, the framework methodology will span purely physics-driven, CFD-mediated solutions at one extreme, and data-centric solutions at the other where the complexity of the phenomena masks the underlying physics. The framework will advance the current state-of-the-art in uncertainty quantification, adjoint sensitivity, data-assimilation, ensemble methods, CFD, and design of experiments to 'blend' the two extremes in order to create ultra-fast multi-fidelity, predictive models, supported by cutting-edge experimental investigations. This transformative technology will be sufficiently generic so as to address a wide spectrum of challenges across the ISCF areas, and will empower the user with optimal compromises between off-line (modelling) and on-line (simulation) efforts so as to meet an a priori 'error bar' on the model outputs. The investigators' synergy, and their long-standing industrial collaborations, will ensure that PREMIERE will result in a paradigm-shift in multiphase flow research worldwide. We will demonstrate our capabilities using exemplar challenges, of central importance to their respective sectors in close collaboration with our industrial and healthcare partners. Our PREMIERE framework will provide novel and more efficient manufacturing processes, reliable design tools for the oil-and-gas industry, which remove conservatism in design, improve safety management, and reduce emissions and carbon footprint. This framework will also provide enabling technology for the design, operation, and optimisation of the next-generation nuclear reactors, and associated reprocessing, as well as patient-specific therapies for diseases such as acute compartment syndrome.