This proposal bids for £4.5M to both evolve and renew the Loughborough, Nottingham and Keele EPSRC CDT in Regenerative Medicine. The proposal falls within the 'Healthcare Technologies' theme and 'Regenerative Medicine' priority of the EPSRC call. This unique CDT is fully integrated across three leading UK Universities with complementary research profiles and a long track record of successful collaboration delivering fundamental and translational research. Cohorts of students will be trained in the core scientific, transferable, and translational skills needed to work in this emerging healthcare industry. Students will be engaged in strategic and high quality research programmes designed to address the major clinical and industrial challenges in the field. The CDT will deliver the necessary people and enabling technologies for the UK to continue to lead in this emerging worldwide industry.The multidisciplinary nature of Regenerative Medicine is fully captured in our proposal combining engineering, biology and healthcare thereby spanning the remits of the BBSRC and MRC, in addition to meeting EPSRC's priority area.

Epidemic models for pathogens transmitted from human to human are, naturally, concerned with the interaction between individuals that leads to transmission. This is clearly a major simplification; there are many processes at work, from the feedack loop of epidemics on behaviour and interventions, to resource constraints limiting the production of prophylaxis and availability of diagnostic tests, to the response of the immune system to the pathogen and pharmaceuticals. Epidemic models do not normally include an account of these highly influential processes. Instead, only the assumed effect of these processes is sometimes included. This strongly limits the scope of epidemic models. By contrast, in molecular biology, it is typical to consider a much larger class of possible interactions. There exist methods as well as mature software for expressing and simulating systems with many interactions. We have successfully shown that these techniques can be fruitfully applied directly to epidemics, including in a multi- scale setting incorporating immune response and, with suitable extensions, to detailed epidemic reconstruction in a complex community setting. We will build on this success in order to consolidate this capability within the infectious disease modelling community. We will improve accessibility of the tools that we used in our pioneering work, facilitating adoption of our epidemic modelling methods more widely. We will foster a community of practice by conducting a series of case studies to establish documented and standardisable approaches to bringing our advanced techniques to bear on pressing current and future questions relevant to reducing the public health burden of infectious disease.

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Epidemic models for pathogens transmitted from human to human are, naturally, concerned with the interaction between individuals that leads to transmission. This is clearly a major simplification; there are many processes at work, from the feedack loop of epidemics on behaviour and interventions, to resource constraints limiting the production of prophylaxis and availability of diagnostic tests, to the response of the immune system to the pathogen and pharmaceuticals. Epidemic models do not normally include an account of these highly influential processes. Instead, only the assumed effect of these processes is sometimes included. This strongly limits the scope of epidemic models. By contrast, in molecular biology, it is typical to consider a much larger class of possible interactions. There exist methods as well as mature software for expressing and simulating systems with many interactions. We have successfully shown that these techniques can be fruitfully applied directly to epidemics, including in a multi- scale setting incorporating immune response and, with suitable extensions, to detailed epidemic reconstruction in a complex community setting. We will build on this success in order to consolidate this capability within the infectious disease modelling community. We will improve accessibility of the tools that we used in our pioneering work, facilitating adoption of our epidemic modelling methods more widely. We will foster a community of practice by conducting a series of case studies to establish documented and standardisable approaches to bringing our advanced techniques to bear on pressing current and future questions relevant to reducing the public health burden of infectious disease.

Soft glassy materials, such as slurries, pastes, foams and emulsions, occur widespread in nature and industry. These materials have an inherently disordered microstructure, similar to the disordered atomic configuration in more traditional glasses. These soft glasses behave as solids when left to themselves, but will flow like a liquid when a sufficiently large stress is applied, as occurs for example in toothpaste. Understanding the yielding and flow of these soft materials is of crucial importance both during industrial processing as well as for applications. While there is empirical knowledge about specific materials, little is known about the generic physical principles underlying their flow properties (known as rheology ) and how to predict these from a knowledge of material composition. This collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and Emory University aims to better understand the relation between the microscopic structure of soft glasses and their macroscopic response to stress. To that end we will use fast three-dimensional imaging of well-characterized colloidal systems under controlled flow. In addition, we will image the samples micro-structure while simultaneously measuring their stress-strain state using a rheometer . These experiments will allow us to identify generic microscopic features in the flow of soft glassy materials, and therefore provide a better overall understanding of the rheology of this class of materials.