Our Prize Fellowship Scheme aims to identify rising research stars, nurture their research career, and get them on a fast-track to a permanent appointment at Bath. This managed scheme offers a supportive environment to pursue top-level research and help researchers reach their potential as a future academic leader.
Alexandra Voinescu researching Social and Behavioural Psychology.
Alexandra’s expertise is in cognitive and clinical psychology, virtual reality and human factors. Her key research topics are human–computer interaction and the use of virtual reality in clinical and nonclinical practice, particularly, in clinical neuropsychological assessment and rehabilitation. Throughout her career Alexandra worked with different VR platforms (e.g. HMDs, CAVE environments and immersive VR driving simulators) and with healthy or vulnerable participants (e.g. older adults with age-related physical and cognitive impairments, children with ADHD).
Sheree Bekker researching Applied Health Sciences.
Dr Sheree Bekker is an applied health scientist, with a primary focus on the prevention of injury and promotion of safety in sport settings. Her research is underpinned by social complexity theory, and informs the theorising, development, implementation, and evaluation of interventions for injury prevention and safety promotion, primarily in sport settings, including their translation into real-world practice.
Dr Bekker is a member of the Rugby Science at Bath group, and is affiliated with the international Complex System Approach in Sport and Health collaboration. She is also social media editor at BMJ Injury Prevention.
Micha Germann researching Security, Conflict and Risk.
Micha's research interests include self-determination conflicts and civil war, but also various aspects of electoral behavior and digital democracy.
Neil Howard researching International Development.
Neil's work looks at the various forms of labour targeted for elimination by SDG 8 (so-called 'modern slavery' etc.) and at the politics and practice of protection and prevention.
Hannah Leese researching Chemical Engineering.
Hannah’s research engineers nanomaterials for specific applications which have included developing a no-moving parts pump using nanoengineered membranes, nucleant materials for target protein crystallisation, nanocomposites for energy harvesters and developing high performance fibres. During her Prize Fellowship, Hannah will focus on point-of-care systems which aim to target the separation and detection of specific biomarkers by combining membrane technologies, materials chemistry and bioengineering.
Victoria Stephenson researching Architecture and Civil Engineering.
Dr Stephenson’s research focusses on ensuring resilience in the heritage built environment, especially in relation to environmental threats and climate change. Her work includes developing performance-based assessment tools, and working with stakeholders to design appropriate strategies for managing risk to historic assets.
Xinyuan Ke researching Architecture and Civil Engineering.
Dr Ke is working on designing sustainable construction materials with high performance, tailored with functional nanomaterial. Her research focuses on both microstructure analysis and macro-scale performance prediction.
James Roscow researching Mechanical Engineering.
James’ research focusses on the fabrication and properties of functional composites for energy harvesting and storage applications, which he studies using a combination of modelling and experimental techniques
Zhongze Wu researching Mechanical Engineering.
Zhongze Wu has more than 9 years research experience on electric machines and drives for electric propulsion systems, to contribute to achieve a low carbon economy and a sustainable society.
Lauren Cowley researching Biology & Biochemistry.
Lauren’s work aims to mitigate significant public health problems in infectious diseases using bioinformatics and the latest sequencing technologies. Lauren’s current work centres around improving bacterial GWAS techniques for investigating phenotypes of significance to public health and also developing machine learning techniques for classifying antibiotic and phage resistance from sequencing data.
Simon Freakley researching Chemistry.
Simon's research will focus on the development of catalytic materials that can utilise not only renewable resources but also renewable energy such as electricity and light - and remove the energy consumption typically associated with heating large scale chemical reactions. Central to this will be not only the design of the materials but also designing experiments to reveal the nature of the catalyst materials while they are in action.
Elizaveta Suturina researching Chemistry.
In Elizaveta's research she uses theoretical chemistry and spectroscopy to analyse properties of paramagnetic molecules that make contrast agents, catalysts or building blocks of functional materials. The synergy of the theory and experiment helps to find structural modification that improves the performance and serve as guidance for rational design.
Sarah Penington researching Mathematical Sciences.
Sarah works in probability theory. Much of her work is motivated by population genetics – in particular, understanding the interplay between selection, random reproduction and migration in a model of a population. She also uses probabilistic techniques to study partial differential equations.
Kristina Rusimova researching Physics.
Kristina's research aims to combine the state-of-the-art in nano photonics with atomic scale transport measurements of excited charge carriers in earth-abundant 2D materials. The goal is to pin down the ultrafast dynamics of these charge carriers in real space in order to advance our understanding of losses in solar energy harvesting and open up the possibility to deploy devices based on such 2D materials in our homes.
Matthias Ehrhardt, Institute for Mathematical Innovation
Matthias' research lies in the interface of optimization, inverse imaging problems and machine learning where he develops algorithms that are efficient enough for large-scale applications with proven convergence guarantees and robustness. His work bridges mathematical theory to various applications including medical imaging, biology and geophysics.
Four other researchers were also awarded Prize Fellowships: