One in three people in the UK population will develop cancer during their life time. The incidence of cancer continues to increase world-wide and healthcare providers are facing increasing challenges in the management of this expanding group of patients. However, new imaging technologies allow detection of tumours at earlier stages and now more cancer patients than ever can be successfully treated by surgery. Tissue conserving surgery is an advanced surgical procedure that tries to only remove cancerous tissue and leave healthy tissue in place. In skin conserving surgery (also known as Mohs micrographic surgery), one layer after another of tissue is cut away and examined under the microscope to make sure that all the cancer is out. This process is stopped when only healthy tissue is left. Successful removal of all cancer cells is the key to achieving lower rates of the cancer returning. There is always a balance to be struck between making sure that all the cancer is removed and preserving as much healthy tissue as possible in order to reduce scarring and disfigurement. The real challenge however is to know where the cancer starts and ends when looking at it during an operation so that the surgeon knows when to stop cutting. Although Mohs surgery provides the highest cure rates for basal cell carcinoma, the most common type of cancer in humans with ~60,000 new patients each year in the UK, it takes around 1-2 hours per layer to prepare and diagnose under the microscope. The high costs and the need for highly specialized surgeons, has limited the availability of Mohs surgery in the UK and led to "post-code" treatment variability. Compared to Mohs surgery, breast conserving surgery (more than 10,000 procedures per year) is considerably more complex and for practical reasons, the traditional methods of diagnosis by preparing thin tissue specimens cannot be performed during surgery. As a consequence, in England more than 2,000 patients per year require a second operation, usually complete removal of the breast. Recently, my research group has developed a new method to diagnose cancer cells in tissue layers removed during surgery. The main advantage of this technique is that the time consuming steps of tissue fixation, staining, and sectioning are eliminated. This new diagnosis method uses a combination of two techniques called auto-fluorescence imaging and Raman scattering, that can measure the molecular composition of tissue and provide objective diagnosis of cancer. However, this breakthrough is just the beginning and further work is required to take these successes forward and improve patient care. In the short and medium term, I will focus on reducing the diagnosis time for skin cancers to only a few minutes by developing a method to measure Raman spectra from eighteen regions of the tissue simultaneously. In collaboration with cancer surgeons, we will expand this new technology to diagnosis of other cancers, such as breast and lung. This will be achieved by optimizing the auto-fluorescence imaging and Raman scattering to take into consideration the chemical make up of these tissues. In the longer term, I plan to develop novel hand-held medical devices based on multimodal spectral imaging that could be used by the surgeons to diagnose the tissues directly on the body and remove tissue only if cancerous cells are detected. These methods for tumour diagnosis can revolutionise the surgical treatment of cancers, by providing a fast and objective way for surgeons to make sure that all cancer cells have been removed whilst at the same time preserving as much healthy tissue as possible. To achieve these ambitious objectives I will work in close partnership with other scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons and industry. Such collaborations will ensure that cutting-edge science and engineering is exploited to develop leading healthcare technologies for the benefit of patients.

Queen's University Belfast (QUB) has a proud track record in using microscopy and microfabrication capabilities to both generate world-class academic research and support the needs of local and multinational industry. However, our university-level Field Emission Gun Transmission Electron Microscope (FEGTEM) and Focused Ion Beam (FIB) microscopes are now over 15 years old and rapidly approaching the end of their working lives. There is a pressing need to replace and refresh these instruments and the major part of the equipment fund sought in this application (~£1.5M) will be used for this purpose. The remaining funds (~£360k) will be used to improve our university-level microfabrication facilities, by commissioning a direct-write laser lithography and 3D printing tool with submicron feature resolution capability. Together, the equipment sought will constitute the QUB Imaging and Patterning Centre (IPC) which will run on an open access model (with access priorities and user access fees set by a new IPC management board). QUB already has relevant academic expertise, facility managers and trained technicians to support the running of these machines and advise general users on how they might best help facilitate their research. The IPC will hence be run such that even novice users will be able to apply for (and be granted) facility time and be supported through equipment use and data interpretation. The new equipment will underpin a large portfolio of ongoing world-class research across Physics, Chemistry, Electrical and Electronic, Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering. In addition, it will act as a cornerstone capability in supporting key aspects of the institutional research strategy for the next decade as it pushes forward its interdisciplinary Global Research Institutes (GRIs) and Pioneering Research Programmes (PRPs). In this context the IPC will underpin: (i) materials, catalysis and green chemistry aspects of the largest PRP ("Sustainable Energy": £5.2M of investment); (ii) devices and sensors research associated with our GRI in "Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT)"; (iii) biomaterials aspects of our PRP in "Advanced Technologies for Healthcare" and (iv) characterisation of radiation-matter interactions in our PRP "Centre for Applied and Interdisciplinary Radiation Research" (CIARR). The IPC will also help ensure that we continue to deliver cutting-edge research within relevant conventional academic disciplines defined by our School structures for at least the next decade.

In inorganic semiconductors, such as silicon, the interaction of electronic excitations with lattice vibrations is an undesirable perturbation; it limits charge carrier mobilities and mediates non-radiative recombination. In low-dimensional functional materials with non-covalent bonding the structural dynamics is not a mere perturbation, it moves centre-stage: Some vibrational modes are very soft and strongly anharmonic so that electronic processes occur in a strongly fluctuating structural landscape. The traditional view is that the resulting strong electron-vibrational coupling is also detrimental: In organic semiconductors (OSCs), for example, electronic charges and neutral electron-hole pairs (excitons) are localized by a 'cloud' of lattice deformations, which causes charge mobilities and exciton diffusion lengths to be undesirably small, thus limiting performance of optoelectronic devices. We have recently discovered systems in which this traditional paradigm does not hold, but in which the structural dynamics is highly beneficial and mediates surprisingly fast, long-range excitation transport. This runs completely against models developed for traditional semiconductors such as silicon, for which phonons limit electronic transport. The mechanism involves vibrational modes coupling localized states near the band edges to highly delocalised states within the bands that can then transport charges and energy over unprecedentedly long length scales. This unique transient delocalization regime, in which excitations are effectively able to "surf on the waves" of structural lattice distortions, is not found in silicon and was first discovered in OSCs. Our goal is to explore similar physics in other functional materials with soft structural dynamics, such as hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite (HOIP) semiconductors, 2D conjugated covalent/metal organic frameworks (COFs/MOFs) and inorganic ceramics and ion conductors. VISION AND AMBITION: In the proposed programme we aim to pursue this vibration-enhanced transport (VET) regime as a general paradigm for achieving fast and long-range electronic charge, ion and energy transport in a broad class of organic and inorganic, functional materials with soft structural dynamics. We will (i) develop new experimental/theoretical methodologies to achieve a deep fundamental understanding of the underpinning mechanisms for the vibration-enhanced transport, including identification and molecular engineering of the most effective vibrational modes mediating it, (ii) design new self-assembled functional materials in which transport length scales exceeding micrometers are achievable and (iii) exploit such long length scales to enable new device architectures and transformational device performance improvements in a broad range of (bio)electronic, optoelectronic, energy storage and photocatalytic applications.

Image processing is playing an increasingly important role in our lives whether this is the numerous sources of social provision e.g. TV, or the increased reliance on security to protect our everyday lives through the proliferation of security cameras in airports and town centres. There are also healthcare applications with increased need for 3-dimensional (3D) images such as in viewing 3D computerised tomography scans to provide much more intelligent treatment. In automotive applications, cameras are used for quality assurance in manufacture and situational awareness in use. In security applications, organisations are keen to have more intelligent views of scenes to highlight security risks and dangers. This has increased the amount of visual information that we process and store, and has placed increasing importance on the users' ability to process data where it is received, thus pushing for more intelligent image processing. Whilst a lot of innovative work has been done to derive the algorithms to provide this intelligence, there is a clear need for suitable, high performance, lower power hardware to provide the processing as in many cases, these systems may be remote e.g. security cameras with limited interconnection. We could wait for technology evolutions to provide the increased performance as before, but the warnings on process variability below 45-nm CMOS technology suggest that this might not be forthcoming and implies an increased focus on novel processor architectures is required. Whilst multi-core and application specific processors such as graphical processing units (GPUs) have been proposed, the gains have been limited. In addition, the rapid developments in the acquisition and interpretation of images together with intelligent algorithmic development, have not been matched by sound software engineering principles to develop and transform code into hardware implementations efficient in speed, memory and power. In many cases, image sensors comprise simple processing engines which communicate to some central resource for further processing. For a lot of medical and security applications, there is a need for more intelligent image acquisition, multi-view video processing (merging many views into a more useful, higher-level representation) and more context-aware acquisition devices which are aware of the existence of other cameras which can contribute to the creation of the full scene. This requires a step change in how we design and program these systems. Current FPGA technology such as the Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA, offers a huge performance capability (over 6.7 Giga Multiply-Accumulate per second and up to 30 Terabits/s of memory bandwidth) and better power efficiency than GPUs. Currently FPGA solutions are created by aggregating powerful intellectual property (IP) cores together with soft cores, but the resulting performance is limited by the overall systems architecture and programmability is severely limited. Hence, there is a clear need to derive a FPGA system architecture that best matches the algorithmic requirements but that is programmable in software for a range of algorithms in the application domain. By considering the model of computation and programming model from the outset, we propose to create a highly powerful platform for a range of image processing algorithms. The proposal combines the FPGA processor design expertise in Queen's University (Woods), with the software language and compiler research (Michaelson) and image processing expertise (Wallace) at Heriot-Watt University. A key aspect is to ensure close interaction between the processor development and software languages and representation, in order to ensure the creation of a processor architecture configuration that is programmable in software. The research looks to radically alter the design of front end image processing systems by offering the performance of FPGA solutions with the programmability of processor solution

This research proposal is targeted at addressing the challenge of real-time metrology for control of flexible and reconfigurable technological plasma systems. Plasma technologies not only underpin many high-end multi-billion pound manufacturing industries of today, but also are critical elements for the invention of new devices of the future. A new revolution is underway in plasma processing; the 'ivy-bridge' 3-dimensional atomic layer nano-structures of Intel Corp. and new carbon-based supermaterials of Element Six have only just been realised. This opens up new horizons for inventions. Envisaged applications of next-generation plasma processing include manipulation of edge-bonds of single-layer graphene, low power biologically implanted chips as sensors or neuro-motive devices, innovative chemistry applications for biofuel synthesis and realisation of micro-batteries, flexible micro-electronics, fabrication of micro-electromechanical devices, as well as directly using plasmas for medicine, surgery and pharmacy. Realisation of all these critically depends on the development of new adaptable plasma processing techniques. As the industry transforms itself this is an exciting time. One critical bottleneck is the lack of adaptable process control. We propose a novel non-invasive sensor and virtual metrology concept to monitor substrate relevant parameters to enable real-time plasma tuning. This has developed from our pioneering research on the topic and recent discoveries. Our innovative sensor - pulse induced optical emission spectroscopy (PiOES) is analogous to laser induced fluorescence spectroscopy and will instead of a laser utilise a non-intrusive low voltage rapid nanosecond electronic pulse to generate similar excitation conditions in the plasma. Electron impact excitation will create transient excited states and through the subsequent optical fluorescence, and associated temporal fingerprint, distinct atoms and molecules can be identified. The power and sensitivity of the technique originates from exploiting both the energy dynamics as well as the population dynamics in the nonlinear plasma-surface interface (sheath) region. This will allow detection down to atomic layer defects within micron locality. The aim of our research programme is to develop and demonstrate our metrology technique in three extreme working environments: low pressure anisotropic plasma etching, synthetic diamond manufacturing, and atmospheric plasmas for medicine and pharmacy. We will demonstrate this metrology technique in full fabrication reactors and environments. This project is a collaboration between world-leaders in the field: The University of York, The University of Bristol, Intel Corp., Element Six, Andor Technology, Quantemol, Smith and Nephew, Hiden Analytical and Oxford Instruments. An advisory board, including leading members from a diverse range of companies and academia, has been installed to ensure industrial relevance and uptake as the project progresses.