Insects are the little things that run the world (E.O. Wilson). With increasing recognition of the importance of insects as the dominant component of almost all ecosystems, there are growing concerns that insect biodiversity has declined globally, with serious consequences for the ecosystem services on which we all depend. Major gaps in knowledge limit progress in understanding the magnitude and direction of change, and hamper the design of solutions. Information about insects trends is highly fragmented, and time-series data is restricted and unrepresentative, both between different groups of insects (e.g. lepidoptera vs beetles vs flies) and between different regions. Critically, we lack primary data from the most biodiverse parts of the world. For example, insects help sustain tropical ecosystems that play a major role in regulating the global climate system and the hydrological cycle that delivers drinking water to millions of people. To date, progress in insect monitoring has been hampered by many technical challenges. Insects are estimated to comprise around 80% of all described species, making it impossible to sample their populations in a consistent way across regions and ecosystems. Automated sensors, deep learning and computer vision offer the best practical and cost-effective solution for more standardised monitoring of insects across the globe. Inter-disciplinary research teams are needed to meet this challenge. Our project is timely to help UK researchers to develop new international partnerships and networks to underpin the development of long-term and sustainable collaborations for this exciting, yet nascent, research field that spans engineering, computing and biology. There is a pressing need for new research networks and partnerships to maximize potential to revolutionise the scope and capacity for insect monitoring worldwide. We will open up this research field through four main activities: (a) interactive, online and face-to-face engagement between academic and practitioner stakeholders, including key policy-makers, via online webinars and at focused knowledge exchange and grant-writing workshops in Canada and Europe; (b) a knowledge exchange mission between the UK and North America, to share practical experience of building and deploying sensors, develop deep learning and computer vision for insects, and to build data analysis pipelines to support research applications; (c) a proof-of-concept field trial spanning the UK, Denmark, The Netherlands, Canada, USA and Panama. Testing automated sensors against traditional approaches in a range of situation; (d) dissemination of shared learning throughout this project and wider initiatives, building a new community of practice with a shared vision for automated insect monitoring technology to meet its worldwide transformational potential. Together, these activities will make a significant contribution to the broader, long-term goal of delivering the urgent need for a practical solution to monitor insects anywhere in the world, to ultimately support a more comprehensive assessment of the patterns and consequences of insect declines, and impact of interventions. By building international partnerships and research networks we will develop sustainable collaborations to address how to quantify the complexities of insect dynamics and trends in response to multiple drivers, and evaluate the ecological and human-linked causes and consequences of the changes. Crucially, this project is a vital stepping-stone to help identify solutions for addressing the global biodiversity crisis as well as research to understand the biological impacts of climate change and to design solutions for sustainable agriculture. Effective insect monitoring underpins the evaluation of future socio-economic, land-use and climate mitigation policies.

A central goal of this Overseas Travel Grant proposal is the establishment of a network of leading researchers with expertise in bone and tooth formation who share the believe that a comprehensive understanding of the nanoscale organization of both mineral and organic phase is at the heart of the development of new approaches for medical treatments. The proposed methodology is making use of the advancement of high-resolution electron imaging and spectroscopy to gain insights into the 3D structure and composition on the nanoscale. This approach is of great importance for a full understanding of the mechanisms behind structure formation and potential failure mechanisms in bones and teeth. In a recent publication (Reznikov et al., Science 2018) we were able to identify 12 levels of organisation in bone from the nano- to the macroscopic scale with a self-similar organisation pattern emerging across the different length-scales. These findings indicate the importance to understand the structure of mineralised tissue on the nanoscale. Based on this work I aim to explore the application of nanoscale imaging using advanced electron microscopy and spectroscopy to mineralised tissue such as bone cells and teeth. In both cases it is highly exciting to gain a full image of the mineral/organic assembly in healthy and disease affected tissues. The complex interplay between the mineral and the organic phases in bones and teeth appears to strongly affect the properties of the resulting biomineral with significant effects of disruptions on the nanoscale due to mineralisation affecting diseases (e.g. osteogenesis imperfecta or amelogenesis imperfecta, osteoporosis, arthritis). Hence, this work will provide a platform for future collaboration with leading life scientists and clinicians and will enable to link the high-resolution information gained by the chosen approaches with diagnostic observations. Both hosts at McGill University in Montreal and University of Connecticut in Hartford provide ideal conditions for both training and research since they have an excellent international reputation on health related materials research and provide access to an outstanding set of experimental techniques to achieve the goals of this proposal.

ESRC : Emily MacLeod : ES/P000592/1. This exchange provides me with the opportunity to develop my existing expertise within science identities research, and make links within the field of teacher education and teaching identities research. There is a critical shortage of teachers globally; an ongoing issue which has far-reaching and negative consequences for schools and their students. The teacher shortage in the UK, where I am conducting my PhD and where I myself was a teacher, is particularly acute. Government teacher recruitment targets in England have been missed for the last seven years. However, this shortage is not evenly spread, and raises significant social justice concerns. For example, it has been estimated that schools in England would need an additional 68,000 Black and minority ethnic teachers for the workforce to reflect the population it teaches. Science especially faces some of the worst teacher shortages. But incentives to attract more people into science teaching have so far failed to make a significant impact on this shortage, and have tended to be financial; based upon the assumption that science graduates can earn considerably more outside of the relatively low-paid role of teaching. Unlike the well-documented shortage of teachers in England, there is currently very little research into the scale of the teacher shortage in Canada, partly due to differences in governance and contexts across the different provinces. However, in contrast to the surplus of teachers seen in recent years, there are now signs of an increasing shortage of teachers. This summer in Québec, where I intend to complete this exchange, the government reported that there were over 250 empty teacher vacancies in the province, and there are concerns that Covid-19 is likely to make things worse. As in England, there is also a severe and growing underrepresentation of people of colour in Canada's teaching workforce. This is particularly worrying within the context of an increasingly diverse Canadian population. Also as in England, this shortage is not spread evenly. Science teachers are some of the most needed. However, unlike in England, teacher salaries across Canada are amongst the highest of the OECD community, and subject-specific incentives have yet to be used. The shortage of science teachers especially, seen in both England and Canada, is of particular concern given that there is a globally-recognised STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) skills shortage, likely to increase due to Covid-19. This growing demand for more young people studying and working in STEM will not be met without enough qualified science teachers. Yet in order to improve this situation, we need to better understand science teacher supply patterns. To date, research into teacher supply in science (and other disciplines) has been conducted by specialists in teacher education. From this we know that science teachers report becoming teachers not because they always wanted to, but after having had positive teaching-like experiences. We also know from existing science identities research from both the host and home supervisors that social and cultural influences work to influence whether and how people see different sciences roles as 'for me' or not. This exchange will help me to develop my research and communication skills whilst conducting comparative research to develop understandings of who does, and importantly who does not, want to become a science teacher in the UK and Canada, and why. I will build upon my existing expertise in science identity development amongst young people, and learn from the expertise of Dr Gonsalves and her colleagues in science teacher identities, and how teaching-like experiences can affect these identities. Combining these fields will help me to contribute to understandings of how people's identities shape how they feel about becoming science teachers.

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.

AHRC : Alberto Martin : AH/L503939/1 My work is fundamentally music-theoretically/analytically driven, and McGill University's Schulich School of Music has one of the leading Music Theory departments in North America and, indeed, the world, which will provide a unique and stimulating intellectual environment that I will take full advantage of during the proposed placement. Although my current supervisory team in the UK possesses deep knowledge on both music-analytical techniques and cultural-historical aspects, my supervisors do not have specific expertise in theories of "formal functions" developed by William Caplin (a Professor of Music Theory at McGill University). "Caplinian" formal-function theory considers the "syntactical" roles played by various parts/sections of particular musical work in relation to the whole, and the capacity of different compositional techniques to express musical temporality, all resulting in well-defined archetypical formal constructions. During this research placement, I will study the applicability of Caplin's theories of formal functions to the music of the 19th-century Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz, and thus also their potential conceptual expansion beyond their original 18th-century "classical" framework. In particular, I will focus on Albéniz's use of one of Caplin's formal types: the sentence. This work will form one of the chapters of my PhD dissertation; my larger dissertation research project seeks to elucidate the importance of 18th-century tonal and formal syntax in the music of Albéniz. I will import the knowledge acquired during this placement to the UK through, for example, the organization of workshops and lectures at the University of Southampton and in collaboration with the UK's Society for Music Analysis. While traditional music-analytical scholarship has been centered on the "Germanic canon", my investigation will contribute to diversifying our discipline by enlarging the repertoire traditionally dealt with by music theory and analysis. My project will reveal the importance of pan-European influences in Albéniz's music, revising and nuancing his traditional nationalist image. Indeed, I believe it is the right time to vindicate figures like Albéniz, a non-nationalist Catalan who fostered ties between all Spanish people by using the richness of different Spanish cultural manifestations within a European tradition to create some of the most well-loved compositions in the history of Western Music.