Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

My proposed Fellowship will revolutionise the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) within The University of Sheffield by changing perceptions of how people utilise software and are trained and supported in writing code which scales to increasingly large computer systems. I will provide leadership by demonstrating the effectiveness of specific research software engineer roles, and by growing a team of research software engineer at The University of Sheffield in order to accommodate our expanding programme of research computing. I will achieve this by: 1) developing the FLAME and FLAME GPU software to facilitate and demonstrate the impact of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) computing on the areas of complex systems simulation; 2) vastly extending the remit of GPUComputing@Sheffield to provide advanced training and research consultancy, and to embed specific software engineering skills for high-performance data parallel computing (with GPUs and Xeon Phis) across EPSRC-remit research areas at The University of Sheffield. My first activity will enable long-term support of the extensive use of FLAME and FLAME GPU for EPSRC, industry and EU-funded research projects. The computational science and engineering projects supported will include those as diverse as computational economics, bioinformatics and transport simulation. Additionally, my software will provide a platform for more fundamental computer science research into complexity science, graphics and visualisation, programming languages and compilers, and software engineering. My second activity will champion GPU computing within The University of Sheffield (and beyond to its collaborators and industrial partners). It will demonstrate how a specific area of research software engineering can be embedded into The University of Sheffield, and act as a model for further improvement in areas such as research software and data storage. I will change the way people develop and use research software by providing training to students and researchers who can then embed GPU software engineering skills across research domains. I will also aid researchers who work on computationally demanding research by providing software engineering consultancy in areas that can benefit from GPU acceleration, such as, mobile GPU computing for robotics, deep neural network simulation for machine learning (including speech, hearing and Natural language processing) and real time signal processing. The impact of my Fellowship will vastly expand the scale and quality of research computing at The University of Sheffield, embed skills within students and researchers (with long-term and wide-reaching results) and ensure energy-efficient use of HPC. This will promote the understanding and wider use of GPU computing within research, as well as transitioning researchers to larger regional and national HPC facilities. Ultimately my research software engineer fellowship will facilitate the delivery of excellent science whilst promoting the unique and important role of the Research Software Engineer.

'Project code-named Humpty' [P c-n H] is a narrative art process, conceived by artist Kate Johnson in response to the wider goals of the 'Fragmented Heritage' [FH] project, awarded to archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford, under the umbrella of the theme: Digital Transformations. It is a project, delivered in 'chapters' bringing artist and archaeologists into a shared creative and scientific arena. A 10' high figurative sculpture has been created by the artist in clay. It will be cast in a uniquely developed material suitable for deliberate fragmentation over a precipice, with the purpose of yielding fragments which have not been influenced by an internal metal armature. Archaeologists will retrieve the fragments as if from an archaeological site and manually reconstruct the fragments, informed by innovative reconstruction and digital visualisation technologies they have developed on the FH project. When taken at face value, creating a monumental sculpture only to break it into pieces with the goal of putting the pieces back together again might seem a frivolous venture. Although the project involves some degree of risk, a frivolous undertaking it is not. P c-n H functions formally and conceptually and in its entirety, it is designed to allow for multiple layers of interpretation. It promotes reflection on our relationship with the objects we make, the nature of manual skill in a technological age as well as the nature of value and of beauty in relation to the art object. It concerns the paradoxes of human behaviour today and throughout the archaeological record. It will serve to strengthen the wider legacy of the Digital Transformations theme to the wider public as well as to heritage practitioners, curators, object handlers and excavators. P c-n H touches the core of the AHRC's ethos in supporting projects serving to enhance 'understanding of our times, our capacities and our inheritance'. In collaboration with Project Partner Bradford UNESCO City of Film, short films will be made documenting the process of the piece at each stage. The making of these films will give the artist and archaeologists opportunities for collaboration outside of academia. Engagement with the wider public will occur through the screening of the films in an open city space reaching an expected footfall of a minimum of 30,000. A live fragmentation/fragment retrieval event at Swinden Quarry accommodating a crowd of between 500 and 2000 people will incorporate crowd participation through music and the event will be filmed. P c-n H extends themes in contemporary art and importantly contributes to the growing genre of art and archaeology collaborative ventures whilst embracing wider interdisciplinary and non-academic communication.

The 21th century will be the age of Biology, tackling global challenges, including -but not limited to- understanding and curing diseases, repairing defective genes, combining natural and synthetic tissues, enhancing crops with biotechnologies, reproducing organs using stem cells, etc. [Chief Scientific Adviser to The President of the EU Commission]. Synthetic Biology (SB), referring to the design and engineering of biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world, will play a key role in addressing these challenges by providing a radical step-change in our ability to design and construct multi-scaled biological systems. Along with the advances in the wet lab and computational methods, the functionality and complexity of SB systems are steadily growing, which brings in a major issue: the likelihood that faults and flaws existent in these systems. This can result in the construction of bio-parts and components that are faulty by design. At the moment, there are no established methods in SB to find errors and verify correctness. The current practice is limited to understanding the sub-cellular molecular machinery in wet-lab environments, which is costly and extremely slow. The existing computational approaches for analysing biological processes mainly rely on simulation; but many important system properties cannot be inferred using this method. Also, simulation tells the "existence of errors, not their absence". So, it is not an efficient method to guarantee the system correctness. LIVEBIO aims to pave the way for the next generation verification of large and complex synthetic bio-systems. The novel approach proposed in this project will permit rapid verification of complex SB systems, and provide increased assurance and trust when building new synthetic biology systems. The project will deliver an authentic and systematic certification guideline, which will allow biologists to certify their genetic parts & components and reuse them in different systems. LIVEBIO will contribute towards biological studies (in particular, Synthetic Biology) by extending the existing portfolio of computational approaches with novel verification methods, techniques and tools. It will also contribute towards Computer Science by developing cutting-edge activities through an emerging and promising inter-disciplinary work. The impact will go beyond the project partners, and will reach national and international communities.

Gene therapies rely on engineered virus carriers as vehicles for the delivery of synthetic genes that allow correction of disease-altered changes in multiple organs of the human body. Viruses exploited in gene therapy approaches have been modified to remove harmful properties and carry the therapeutic gene of interest. Multiple gene therapy programmes are currently undertaken in research laboratories using relatively small-scale production of viruses which enables optimisation of the doses and administration routes as well as testing for the safety and therapeutic efficacy of interventions in animal models of disease. However, facilities required for the production of large quantities of clinical-grade viruses of consistent quality-controlled GMP grade are rare in the UK. Thus, it can easily take several years before clinical trials can be conducted. Currently, existing facilities cannot meet the escalating demand of academically-led research needs for clinical-grade virus carriers. This is significantly obstructing numerous UK-funded world-leading disease-modifying discoveries to be translated into clinical trials for human benefit. The lack of suitable GMP facilities seriously hinders the development of much-needed novel effective treatments for multiple incurable diseases which cannot be treated by conventional drug compounds. We propose to address the manufacturing shortage by creating a Gene Therapy Innovation and Manufacturing Centre (GTIMC) which includes provision of a new state-of-the-art GMP manufacturing facility to support gene therapy projects emerging from UK universities. GTIMC will also support the development of improved viral vectors, improved yield from the manufacturing process and will also provide essential regulatory and training support. Moreover, the GTIMC hub will allow new training and high-skilled employment opportunities through the ShefVec facility itself, and future start-up companies.