Sensors permeate our society, measurement underpins quantitative action and standardized accurate measurements are a foundation of all commerce. The ability to measure parameters and sense phenomena with increasing precision has always led to dramatic advances in science and in technology - for example X-ray imaging, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), interferometry and the scanning-tunneling microscope. Our rapidly growing understanding of how to engineer and control quantum systems vastly expands the limits of measurement and of sensing, opening up opportunities in radically alternative methods to the current state of the art in sensing. Through the developments proposed in this Fellowship, I aim to deliver sensors enhanced by the harnessing of unique quantum mechanical phenomena and principles inspired by insights into quantum physics to develop a series of prototypes with end-users. I plan to provide alternative approaches to the state of the art, to potentially reduce overall cost and dramatically increase capability, to reach new limits of precision measurement and to develop this technology for commercialization. Light is an excellent probe for sensing and measurement. Unique wavelength dependent absorption, and reemission of photons by atoms enable the properties of matter to be measured and the identification of constituent components. Interferometers provide ultra-sensitive measurement of optical path length changes on the nanometer-scale, translating to physical changes in distance, material expansion or sample density for example. However, for any canonical optical sensor, quantum mechanics predicts a fundamental limit of how much noise in such experiment can be suppressed - this is the so-called shot noise and is routinely observed as a noise floor when using a laser, the canonical "clean" source of radiation. By harnessing the quantum properties of light, it is possible reach precision beyond shot noise, enabling a new paradigm of precision sensors to be realized. Such quantum-enhanced sensors can use less light in the optical probe to gain the same level of precision in a conventional optical sensor. This enables, for example: the reduction of detrimental absorption in biological samples that can alter sample properties or damage it; the resolution of weak signals in trace gas detection; reduction of photon pressure in interferometry that can alter the measurement outcome; increase in precision when a limit of optical laser input is reached. Quantum-enhanced techniques are being used by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) scientific collaboration to reach sub-shot noise precision interferometry of gravitational wave detection in kilometer-scale Michelson interferometers (GEO600). However, there is otherwise a distinct lack of practical devices that prove the potential of quantum-enhanced sensing as a disruptive technology for healthcare, precision manufacture, national security and commerce. For quantum-enhanced sensors to become small-scale, portable and therefore practical for an increased range of applications outside of the specialized quantum optics laboratory, it is clear that there is an urgent need to engineer an integrated optics platform, tailored to the needs of quantum-enhanced sensing. Requirements include robustness, miniaturization inherent phase stability and greater efficiency. Lithographic fabrication of much of the platform offers repeatable and affordable manufacture. My Fellowship proposal aims to bring together revolutionary quantum-enhanced sensing capabilities and photonic chip scale architectures. This will enable capabilities beyond the limits of classical physics for: absorbance spectroscopy, lab-on-chip interferometry and process tomography (revealing an unknown quantum process with fewer measurements and fewer probe photons).

Global CO2 emissions are produced mainly by western economies in the temperate zones, however the impacts of climate change are mainly being seen at the climatic extremes of the poles and tropical zones. While the poles are scarcely populated, coral reefs play a vital role in directly supporting at least 500 million people worldwide, despite only representing 0.1% of the world's ocean area. The Coral Triangle in south-east Asia alone includes over 100 million people who are almost entirely dependent on coastal resources. Coral diseases have contributed significantly to global declines in coral reefs (some scientists put the figure at about 40% loss over the last 40 years), leaving few options for coastal peoples of developing countries. Many scientists have linked the emergence of coral diseases to climate change that affects the overall health and disease resistance of the host as well as promoting the activity of some pathogens. However, our understanding of coral diseases is driven mainly on the assumption that most are caused by bacteria. Following a general lack of success in identifying causal agents using traditional culture-based approaches, our group began using modern culture-independent methods based on analysing bacterial DNA in environmental samples over ten years ago. While this work has been successful in advancing understanding of the microbial ecology of several common coral diseases, there have been few breakthroughs in determining the causal agents of disease. More recently, working on a NERC-funded project to investigate temperature stress effects on coral susceptibility to disease, we have discovered that several of the most important types of coral disease are associated with mass infections by protist pathogens, as well as bacteria. The protists (ciliates similar to Paramecium) act as pathogens kill the coral by ingesting the tissues. Ongoing work will address the relative changes in ciliate and bacterial pathogen populations during the disease process, but there is no doubt that the ciliates are important agents in disease transmission and pathology and may be the primary pathogens. We have also shown that these diseases are highly temperature-dependent, which may explain the global increase in disease prevalence in the last 20-30 years. The proposed study therefore addresses the ciliate diseases specifically and will test whether they are acting as primary pathogens (causal agents) of the disease or secondary, opportunistic pathogens invading the tissues after another primary (possibly bacterial) pathogen. To do this we will apply traditional Koch's postulates, isolating the potential pathogens in culture and innoculating healthy corals in controlled incubations. We will also survey a number of locations worldwide to determine whether diseases with very similar signs are also associated with ciliates. Some of these diseases have caused serious ecological impacts, for example one (White Band Disease) has elimnated elkhorn coral as the dominant coral species in the whole Caribbean region. Since the diseases are highly temperature-dependent, we will conduct experiments to allow us to more accurately model the impacts of future climate change scenarios on coral mortality. The experiments will distinguish the effects of temperature on increased pathogen activity and changes in host coral susceptibility. We will further investigate the changes in susceptibility to determine the likely mechanisms by which corals resist ciliate infections under healthy conditions. Together, these studies will allow a mechanistic understanding of how temperature affects the disease process, so we can model the effects of future climate change, rather than just model past history. The final synthesis of the research will allow us to fundamentally re-evaluate the emergence of coral diseases in the last 20-30 years as well as predict future changes and propose potential management solutions.

The motivation for this proposal is that the global reliance on fossil fuels is set to increase with the rapid growth of Asian economies and major discoveries of shale gas in developed nations. The strategic vision of the IDC is to develop a world-leading Centre for Industrial Doctoral Training focussed on delivering research leaders and next-generation innovators with broad economic, societal and contextual awareness, having strong technical skills and capable of operating in multi-disciplinary teams covering a range of knowledge transfer, deployment and policy roles. They will be able to analyse the overall economic context of projects and be aware of their social and ethical implications. These skills will enable them to contribute to stimulating UK-based industry to develop next-generation technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and ultimately improve the UK's position globally through increased jobs and exports. The Centre will involve over 50 recognised academics in carbon capture & storage (CCS) and cleaner fossil energy to provide comprehensive supervisory capacity across the theme for 70 doctoral students. It will provide an innovative training programme co-created in collaboration with our industrial partners to meet their advanced skills needs. The industrial letters of support demonstrate a strong need for the proposed Centre in terms of research to be conducted and PhDs that will be produced, with 10 new companies willing to join the proposed Centre including EDF Energy, Siemens, BOC Linde and Caterpillar, together with software companies, such as ANSYS, involved with power plant and CCS simulation. We maintain strong support from our current partners that include Doosan Babcock, Alstom Power, Air Products, the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), Tata Steel, SSE, RWE npower, Johnson Matthey, E.ON, CPL Industries, Clean Coal Ltd and Innospec, together with the Biomass & Fossil Fuels Research Alliance (BF2RA), a grouping of companies across the power sector. Further, we have engaged SMEs, including CMCL Innovation, 2Co Energy, PSE and C-Capture, that have recently received Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)/Technology Strategy Board (TSB)/ETI/EC support for CCS projects. The active involvement companies have in the research projects, make an IDC the most effective form of CDT to directly contribute to the UK maintaining a strong R&D base across the fossil energy power and allied sectors and to meet the aims of the DECC CCS Roadmap in enabling industry to define projects fitting their R&D priorities. The major technical challenges over the next 10-20 years identified by our industrial partners are: (i) implementing new, more flexible and efficient fossil fuel power plant to meet peak demand as recognised by electricity market reform incentives in the Energy Bill, with efficiency improvements involving materials challenges and maximising biomass use in coal-fired plant; (ii) deploying CCS at commercial scale for near-zero emission power plant and developing cost reduction technologies which involves improving first-generation solvent-based capture processes, developing next-generation capture processes, and understanding the impact of impurities on CO2 transport and storage; (iimaximising the potential of unconventional gas, including shale gas, 'tight' gas and syngas produced from underground coal gasification; and (iii) developing technologies for vastly reduced CO2 emissions in other industrial sectors: iron and steel making, cement, refineries, domestic fuels and small-scale diesel power generatort and These challenges match closely those defined in EPSRC's Priority Area of 'CCS and cleaner fossil energy'. Further, they cover biomass firing in conventional plant defined in the Bioenergy Priority Area, where specific issues concern erosion, corrosion, slagging, fouling and overall supply chain economics.

Boundaries between digital technologies and ourselves become blurred as technology is integrated into our work, home and even our bodies. Interdisciplinary research is needed to understand how our sense of self - our psychological identity - affects and is affected by technology use. During this fellowship, I will lead an interdisciplinary team of psychologists and computer scientists to explore how our identity shapes and is shaped by technology in the fields of security and healthcare. This work will be underpinned by a programme of collaboration with industry partners, Polaris Consulting, the National Crime Agency (NCA), Dstl, Milton Keynes University Hospital (MKUH) and EDP Drugs and Alcohol Services to explore applications that support rather than replace human analysts and consultants. Sophisticated technologies are rapidly becoming part of our lives. Research on digital technology needs to urgently address concerns about privacy, trust, and ethical implications. I will extend current research in this area by considering how our different psychological identities shape what we find acceptable in different situations. For instance, a person might be less concerned about the tracking of personal information when thinking of themselves as a patient rather than as a parent. Throughout the fellowship, I will work closely with user groups (e.g., patients in the Lived Experience Group Exeter), industry partners and the general public to understand privacy concerns and privacy behaviour. I will also continue to develop the capacity to detect psychological identities from naturally occurring digital data (e.g., forum posts, blogs, e-mails). This research will allow us to understand which psychological identity (e.g., parent, addict, criminal network identity) is relevant in a particular situation. I will extend my current work to test whether it is possible to distinguish between several identities by analysing text data, whether detecting identities in text is robust to deception, and whether it is possible to tell how committed an individual is to their group from the way in which they communicate online. I will work closely with my industry partners, Polaris, NCA and Dstl, to explore how findings can enhance current machine learning capabilities and analytic approaches in defence and security. Finally, building on the identity detection work, I will examine how individuals develop new psychological identities (e.g., becoming a parent) and leave identities behind (e.g., leaving behind an addict identity during therapy), and the consequences of such transitions for mental health (e.g., post-natal depression, addiction recovery). I will work closely with industry partners MKUH and EDP to explore how these findings can be translated into diagnostic and monitoring solutions of the future that augment the work of therapists and medical consultants. The project will be integrated with research on software engineering through the EPSRC SAUSE platform grant. It will be conducted at the psychology department of the University of Exeter, which has a long and successful history of high-impact research. The project will draw on the strengths of the Social, Environmental and Organisational Psychology Research Group (SEORG), which is world-leading in research on social identity, privacy, and well-being, and the Clinical and Cognitive Research Groups, which are world-leading on depression and addiction. The University of Exeter also fosters interdisciplinary work, for instance through the co-supervision of EPSRC students across colleges, access to world-leading experts on machine learning and data science at the Alan Turing Institute and experts in healthcare at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health and the EPSRC Centre for Predicitive Modelling in Healthcare. Taken together this project will establish Exeter as a key centre for EPSRC work on psychological identity and digital technologies.

Mangrove forests are often associated with the smell of rotten eggs and swarms of mosquitos. This may be true but at the same time these forests are unique and extremely valuable. Mangrove trees grow in challenging environments surviving hot, muddy and salty conditions as they thrive at the margin of land and sea in the tropics and subtropics. Mangrove ecosystems provide essential habitats for many animal species, they help filtering pollutants and protect the coast against erosion. Moreover, mangroves play a crucial role in combating climate change as they capture and store large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. In fact, these forests store carbon faster than most land ecosystems. The trees store carbon not only in their wood and leaves, but also in those smelly muddy soils. Despite all these benefits, mangroves are heavily threatened as sea level rise may cause forest drowning and people are increasingly modifying coastal landscapes and interfering with the natural processes on which mangroves depend. The impacts of such pressures on mangrove forests are still unclear, but the consequences may be drastic mangrove loss and reductions in carbon storage. Mangrove trees flourish under very specific conditions. They grow well under regular inundation by tides, but they cannot survive prolonged flooding. Hence mangroves will need to keep raising the bed on which they grow to cope with rising sea levels. Mangroves may accomplish by trapping sediments from the land and the sea with their roots. In addition, dead roots, leaves and branches accumulate within the muddy soils. This helps mangroves to gain elevation and the build-up of dead plant material creates carbon-rich sediments. Now, essentially two possibilities emerge. If mangroves keep up with sea level rise by accumulating carbon-rich plant material in their soils, then carbon stocks can actually increase. However, if sea level rise outpaces mangrove soil buildup, then tree mortality will reduce carbon storage. Limits to the adaptability of mangrove forests to sea level rise exist and these limits are influenced by human activities. Building of river dams, for example, reduces the delivery of sediment to the coast, while this sediment is needed to help raising mangroves and enable continued carbon storage. Clearly, mangrove environments are highly complex and in order to protect these valuable environments, improved understanding and abilities to predict their future are urgently needed. In this project, we will unravel the processes that control how and how much carbon is stored in mangrove forests and develop new computer models to investigate the impacts of sea level rise and human activities on future carbon accumulation. We have selected three sites in Colombia (South America) where mangrove trees reach up to 40 meters (!) making these forests true carbon storage hotspots. First, we will obtain soil samples up to a depth of 2 meters. We will estimate their carbon content, how fast that carbon has accumulated during the past, and where the carbon is coming from. We will also use microscopic plant remains preserved in the soil to discover what mangrove species have grown there in the past and whether this has influenced carbon accumulation. Third, we will develop a model capable of simulating how entire deltas and estuaries with mangrove vegetation evolve over tens to hundreds of years. Finally, we will use this new model to investigate the fate of mangrove forests under rising sea levels and varying sediment supply, and impacts on future carbon accumulation. Colombian high-school students and teachers from will participate in fieldwork and will present their work in science fairs for the general public to increase the awareness of the values of mangrove forests. We will also work together with our project partners to use our findings to support the development of sustainable management strategies in order to safeguard mangrove environments.