'Connecting Digital Histories of Fugitive Slaves' will launch a collaboration in digital scholarship between the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, the Virtual Museum of Slavery and Empire being developed by the Coalition for Racial Equality and Recognition in Glasgow, the University of Glasgow, Aston University in Birmingham, the Gilder Lehrman Centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, and the Yale Centre for British Art. Drawing on new and emerging technologies, the network will develop innovative methods to link and enhance existing datasets and digitised sources. This work will focus attention on the experiences of people seeking refuge from slavery in the UK, North America and the Caribbean while also highlighting the complex legacies of slavery and resistance in the present. The network will host three interconnected workshops featuring hackathon sessions in which historians, digital humanities specialists, museum professionals and educators will work together to create new connections and shared resources that challenge archival silences around Black histories.

In 2011, NERC began a scoping exercise to develop a research programme based around deep Earth controls on the habitable planet. The result of this exercise was for NERC to commit substantial funding to support a programme entitled "Volatiles, Geodynamics and Solid Earth Controls on the Habitable Planet". This proposal is a direct response to that call. It is widely and generally accepted that volatiles - in particular water - strongly affect the properties that control the flow of rocks and minerals (their rheological properties). Indeed, experiments on low-pressure minerals such as quartz and olivine show that even small amounts of water can weaken a mineral - allowing it to flow faster - by as much as several orders of magnitude. This effect is known as hydrolytic weakening, and has been used to explain a wide range of fundamental Earth questions - including the origin of plate tectonics and why Earth and Venus are different. The effect of water and volatiles on the properties of mantle rocks and minerals is a central component of this NERC research programme. Indeed it forms the basis for one of the three main questions posed by the UK academic community, and supported by a number of international experts during the scoping process. The question is "What are the feedbacks between volatile fluxes and mantle convection through time?" Intuitively, one expects feedbacks between volatiles and mantle convection. For instance, one might envisage a scenario whereby the more water is subducted into the lower mantle, the more the mantle should weaken, allowing faster convection, which in turn results in even more water passing into the lower mantle, and so on. Of course this is a simplification since faster convection cools the mantle, slowing convection, and also increases the amount of volatiles removed from the mantle at mid-ocean ridges. Nevertheless, one can imagine many important feedbacks, some of which have been examined via simple models. In particular these models indicate a feedback between volatiles and convection that controls the distribution of water between the oceans and the mantle, and the amount topography created by the vertical movement of the mantle (known as dynamic topography). The scientists involved in the scoping exercise recognized this as a major scientific question, and one having potentially far reaching consequences for the Earth's surface and habitability. However, as is discussed in detail in the proposal, our understanding of how mantle rocks deform as a function of water content is remarkably limited, and in fact the effect of water on the majority of mantle minerals has never been measured. The effect of water on the flow properties of most mantle minerals is simply inferred from experiments on low-pressure minerals (olivine, pyroxenes and quartz). As argued in the proposal, one cannot simply extrapolate between different minerals and rocks because different minerals may react quite differently to water. Moreover, current research is now calling into question even the experimental results on olivine, making the issue even more pressing. We propose, therefore, a comprehensive campaign to quantify the effect of water on the rheological properties of all the major mantle minerals and rocks using a combination of new experiments and multi-physics simulation. In conjunction with 3D mantle convection models, this information will allow us to understand how the feedback between volatiles and mantle convection impacts on problems of Earth habitability, such as how ocean volumes and large-scale dynamic topography vary over time. This research thus addresses the aims and ambitions of the research programme head on, and indeed, is required for the success of the entire programme.

We live in the age of data. Technology is transforming our ability to collect and store data on unprecedented scales. From the use of Oyster card data to improve London's transport network, to the Square Kilometre Array astrophysics project that has the potential to transform our understanding of the universe, Big Data can inform and enrich many aspects of our lives. Due to the widespread use of sensor-based systems in everyday life, with even smartphones having sensors that can monitor location and activity level, much of the explosion of data is in the form of data streams: data from one or more related sources that arrive over time. It has even been estimates that there will be over 30 billion devices collecting data streams by 2020. The important role of Statistics within "Big Data" and data streams has been clear for some time. However the current tendency has been to focus purely on algorithmic scalability, such as how to develop versions of existing statistical algorithms that scale better with the amount of data. Such an approach, however, ignores the fact that fundamentally new issues often arise when dealing with data sets of this magnitude, and highly innovative solutions are required. Model error is one such issue. Many statistical approaches are based on the use of mathematical models for data. These models are only approximations of the real data-generating mechanisms. In traditional applications, this model error is usually small compared with the inherent sampling variability of the data, and can be overlooked. However, there is an increasing realisation that model error can dominate in Big Data applications. Understanding the impact of model error, and developing robust methods that have excellent statistical properties even in the presence of model error, are major challenges. A second issue is that many current statistical approaches are not computationally feasible for Big Data. In practice we will often need to use less efficient statistical methods that are computationally faster, or require less computer memory. This introduces a statistical-computational trade-off that is unique to Big Data, leading to many open theoretical questions, and important practical problems. The strategic vision for this programme grant is to investigate and develop an integrated approach to tackling these and other fundamental statistical challenges. In order to do this we will focus in particular on analysing data streams. An important issue with this type of data is detecting changes in the structure of the data over time. This will be an early area of focus for the programme, as it has been identified as one of seven key problem areas for Big Data. Moreover it is an area in which our research will lead to practically important breakthroughs. Our philosophy is to tackle methodological, theoretical and computational aspects of these statistical problems together, an approach that is only possible through the programme grant scheme. Such a broad perspective is essential to achieve the substantive fundamental advances in statistics envisaged, and to ensure our new methods are sufficiently robust and efficient to be widely adopted by academics, industry and society more generally.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are complex challenges that pose significant threats to society. The triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution and impacts on biodiversity, highlighted by the UN, are likely to impact AMR emergence and transmission. It is essential to account for the social, cultural and physical environments of AMR, including the impacts of climate change. Increasing temperatures and changing patterns of rainfall will affect AMR evolution and transmission, patterns of migration, and will change food production, land use and freshwater use. Conversely, antimicrobials may impact microbial geochemical cycling, such as nitrogen cycling in soils and methane production in ruminant microbiomes. These interactions raise the intriguing possibility that a bidirectional relationship exists between climate change and AMR. The Climate AMR Network (CLIMAR) will examine the relationship between climate change and AMR via a Planetary Health framework that examines AMR in terms of planetary boundaries within which humans and ecosystems can continue to develop and thrive. Network themes will include climate change, novel chemical and biological entities (including antimicrobials and AMR bacteria), impacts on microbial biodiversity, land system changes and freshwater use, all of which have mechanistic links with AMR. This Planetary Health framing builds on the One Health approach (which interweaves the health of humans, non-human animals and environments) by adding additional layers of mechanistic understanding, urgency, social dimensions and intergenerational justice, whilst also providing a transdisciplinary framework based on five Planetary Health pillars: (1) interconnection within Nature, (2) the Anthropocene and health, (3) equity and social justice, (4) movement building and systems change, and (5) systems thinking and complexity. These five Pillars will inform our activities including white paper production and research projects by focusing on key knowledge gaps in AMR, climate change and their intersection. These objectives will be informed by an initial systems mapping exercise that will identify the relationships between climate change and AMR, facilitating calibration of network objectives and incorporating input from members joining post-award. It will be necessary to ensure that CLIMAR network activities complement, rather than replicate, planned activities in all other funded networks. We aim to integrate this consideration into this network's activities from its inception. Additionally, professional communications expertise in combination with specialisation in policy development will ensure real impact and change results from network activities. Bringing a Planetary Health perspective to AMR, with a specific focus on interactions with climate change, provides an opportunity to develop AMR narratives beyond a One Health framing. The latter recognises the linkages between "human health", "animal health" and "environmental health" but does not fully convey the fundamental contribution of planetary processes or social determinants, encapsulated by the planetary boundaries and transdisciplinary pillars, to the mental models that facilitate reasoning and decision making. If we aspire to achieve transdisciplinary solutions and interventions, and to reduce AMR infections whilst promoting drug discovery and innovation of alternatives to stay one step ahead of AMR, we need evidence to support decision making as well as compelling narratives to facilitate understanding and encourage action; recognising that solutions may be found in domains that are traditionally outside the interests of AMR researchers.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.