̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Chemistry

Researchers deal a blow to theory that Venus once had liquid water on its surface

sc604 — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 16:01:07 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, studied the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere and inferred that its interior is too dry today for there ever to have been enough water for oceans to exist at its surface. Instead, the planet has likely been a scorching, inhospitable world for its entire history.

̽��ֱ��results, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, have implications for understanding Earth’s uniqueness, and for the search for life on planets outside our Solar System. While many exoplanets are Venus-like, the study suggests that astronomers should narrow their focus to exoplanets which are more like Earth.

From a distance, Venus and Earth look like siblings: it is almost identical in size and is a rocky planet like Earth. But up close, Venus is more like an evil twin: it is covered with thick clouds of sulfuric acid, and its surface has a mean temperature close to 500°C.

Despite these extreme conditions, for decades, astronomers have been investigating whether Venus once had liquid oceans capable of supporting life, or whether some mysterious form of ‘aerial’ life exists in its thick clouds now.

“We won’t know for sure whether Venus can or did support life until we send probes at the end of this decade,” said first author Tereza Constantinou, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “But given it likely never had oceans, it is hard to imagine Venus ever having supported Earth-like life, which requires liquid water.”

When searching for life elsewhere in our galaxy, astronomers focus on planets orbiting their host stars in the habitable zone, where temperatures are such that liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. Venus provides a powerful limit on where this habitable zone lies around a star.

“Even though it’s the closest planet to us, Venus is important for exoplanet science, because it gives us a unique opportunity to explore a planet that evolved very differently to ours, right at the edge of the habitable zone,” said Constantinou.

There are two primary theories on how conditions on Venus may have evolved since its formation 4.6 billion years ago. ̽��ֱ��first is that conditions on the surface of Venus were once temperate enough to support liquid water, but a runaway greenhouse effect caused by widespread volcanic activity caused the planet to get hotter and hotter. ̽��ֱ��second theory is that Venus was born hot, and liquid water has never been able to condense at the surface.

“Both of those theories are based on climate models, but we wanted to take a different approach based on observations of Venus’ current atmospheric chemistry,” said Constantinou. “To keep the Venusian atmosphere stable, then any chemicals being removed from the atmosphere should also be getting restored to it, since the planet’s interior and exterior are in constant chemical communication with one another.”

̽��ֱ��researchers calculated the present destruction rate of water, carbon dioxide and carbonyl sulphide molecules in Venus’ atmosphere, which must be restored by volcanic gases to keep the atmosphere stable.

Volcanism, through its supply of gases to the atmosphere, provides a window into the interior of rocky planets like Venus. As magma rises from the mantle to the surface, it releases gases from the deeper portions of the planet.

On Earth, volcanic eruptions are mostly steam, due to our planet’s water-rich interior. But, based on the composition of the volcanic gases necessary to sustain the Venusian atmosphere, the researchers found that volcanic gases on Venus are at most six percent water. These dry eruptions suggest that Venus’s interior, the source of the magma that releases volcanic gases, is also dehydrated.

At the end of this decade, NASA’s DAVINCI mission will be able to test and confirm whether Venus has always been a dry, inhospitable planet, with a series of flybys and a probe sent to the surface. ̽��ֱ��results could help astronomers narrow their focus when searching for planets that can support life in orbit around other stars in the galaxy.

“If Venus was habitable in the past, it would mean other planets we have already found might also be habitable,” said Constantinou. “Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope are best at studying the atmospheres of planets close to their host star, like Venus. But if Venus was never habitable, then it makes Venus-like planets elsewhere less likely candidates for habitable conditions or life.

“We would have loved to find that Venus was once a planet much closer to our own, so it’s kind of sad in a way to find out that it wasn’t, but ultimately it’s more useful to focus the search on planets that are mostly likely to be able to support life – at least life as we know it.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Reference:
Tereza Constantinou, Oliver Shorttle, and Paul B Rimmer. ‘A dry Venusian interior constrained by atmospheric chemistry.’ Nature Astronomy (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02414-5

A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbour was once much more like Earth than it is today.

NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech

View of surface of Venus

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Celebrating Women in STEM

plc32 — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 11:33:15 +0000

To mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science , two of our academics speak about their research careers and how they ended up using their STEM interests to tackle climate change.

Accelerating how new drugs are made with machine learning

sc604 — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 10:05:29 +0000

Predicting how molecules will react is vital for the discovery and manufacture of new pharmaceuticals, but historically this has been a trial-and-error process, and the reactions often fail. To predict how molecules will react, chemists usually simulate electrons and atoms in simplified models, a process that is computationally expensive and often inaccurate.

Now, researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have developed a data-driven approach, inspired by genomics, where automated experiments are combined with machine learning to understand chemical reactivity, greatly speeding up the process. They’ve called their approach, which was validated on a dataset of more than 39,000 pharmaceutically relevant reactions, the chemical ‘reactome’.

Their results, reported in the journal Nature Chemistry, are the product of a collaboration between Cambridge and Pfizer.

“ ̽��ֱ��reactome could change the way we think about organic chemistry,” said Dr Emma King-Smith from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the paper’s first author. “A deeper understanding of the chemistry could enable us to make pharmaceuticals and so many other useful products much faster. But more fundamentally, the understanding we hope to generate will be beneficial to anyone who works with molecules.”

̽��ֱ��reactome approach picks out relevant correlations between reactants, reagents, and performance of the reaction from the data, and points out gaps in the data itself. ̽��ֱ��data is generated from very fast, or high throughput, automated experiments.

“High throughput chemistry has been a game-changer, but we believed there was a way to uncover a deeper understanding of chemical reactions than what can be observed from the initial results of a high throughput experiment,” said King-Smith.

“Our approach uncovers the hidden relationships between reaction components and outcomes,” said Dr Alpha Lee, who led the research. “ ̽��ֱ��dataset we trained the model on is massive – it will help bring the process of chemical discovery from trial-and-error to the age of big data.”

In a related paper, published in Nature Communications, the team developed a machine learning approach that enables chemists to introduce precise transformations to pre-specified regions of a molecule, enabling faster drug design.

̽��ֱ��approach allows chemists to tweak complex molecules – like a last-minute design change – without having to make them from scratch. Making a molecule in the lab is typically a multi-step process, like building a house. If chemists want to vary the core of a molecule, the conventional way is to rebuild the molecule, like knocking the house down and rebuilding from scratch. However, core variations are important to medicine design.

A class of reactions, known as late-stage functionalisation reactions, attempts to directly introduce chemical transformations to the core, avoiding the need to start from scratch. However, it is challenging to make late-stage functionalisation selective and controlled – there are typically many regions of the molecules that can react, and it is difficult to predict the outcome.

“Late-stage functionalisations can yield unpredictable results and current methods of modelling, including our own expert intuition, isn't perfect,” said King-Smith. “A more predictive model would give us the opportunity for better screening.”

̽��ֱ��researchers developed a machine learning model that predicts where a molecule would react, and how the site of reaction vary as a function of different reaction conditions. This enables chemists to find ways to precisely tweak the core of a molecule.

“We trained the model on a large body of spectroscopic data – effectively teaching the model general chemistry – before fine-tuning it to predict these intricate transformations,” said King-Smith. This approach allowed the team to overcome the limitation of low data: there are relatively few late-stage functionalisation reactions reported in the scientific literature. ̽��ֱ��team experimentally validated the model on a diverse set of drug-like molecules and was able to accurately predict the sites of reactivity under different conditions.

“ ̽��ֱ��application of machine learning to chemistry is often throttled by the problem that the amount of data is small compared to the vastness of chemical space,” said Lee. “Our approach – designing models that learn from large datasets that are similar but not the same as the problem we are trying to solve – resolves this fundamental low-data challenge and could unlock advances beyond late-stage functionalisation.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by Pfizer and the Royal Society.

References:
Emma King-Smith et al. ‘Predictive Minisci Late Stage Functionalization with Transfer Learning.’ Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42145-1

Emma King-Smith et al. ‘Probing the Chemical "Reactome" with High Throughput Experimentation Data.’ Nature Chemistry (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41557-023-01393-w

Researchers have developed a platform that combines automated experiments with AI to predict how chemicals will react with one another, which could accelerate the design process for new drugs.

A deeper understanding of the chemistry could enable us to make pharmaceuticals and so many other useful products much faster.

Emma King-Smith

BlackJack3D via Getty Images

Digital Molecular Structure Concept

Yes

“Elegant” algae solution wins Cambridge Zero student Climate Challenge

plc32 — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 16:02:58 +0000

Team AlgaeSorb’s winning pitch persuaded a panel of innovation experts to award them the top prize of £1500 for an idea, which judge Dr Nicky Dee, Founder of climate-focused venture capital group Carbon13, described as “elegant”.

“ ̽��ֱ��Climate Challenge was an incredible opportunity to not only meet like-minded students, but learn invaluable skills on crafting and designing impact-driven projects,” said Team AlgaeSorb’s Anish Chaluvadi, a Gates-Cambridge Scholar and Nanoscience and Nanotechnology PhD student at King’s College.

̽��ֱ��team also includes Nanoscience and Nanotechnology PhD student Timothy Lambden (Girton College) and Tristan Spreng, a Natural Sciences Masters’ student (Trinity College) and President of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Energy Technology Society.

“ ̽��ֱ��Climate Challenge was one of the most exciting and well-organised events I got to attend during my four years at Cambridge," Spreng said. "From the breadth of speakers at the seminar sessions to exchanging ideas with other participants during the launch and final events, it was a truly amazing experience.”

Eight teams gathered in the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s (CISL) newly retro-fitted Entopia building to pitch ideas ranging from using machine learning to create algorithms for flood risk to crunching satellite data for locating wall-mounted solar panels.

̽��ֱ��judging panel also included serial entrepreneur Simon Hombersley, Professor Jaideep Prabhu, the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise at the Cambridge Judge Business School, Lindsay Hooper, Executive Director of CISL and Chris Gibbs from the ̽��ֱ��’s technology transfer unit Cambridge Enterprise.

Dr Dee said AlgaeSorb was a brilliant entry by a mixed team, which drew on different country experiences and expertise across chemistry, physics and materials sciences.

“As a result they developed an elegant solution to tackle methane in the Global South where other landfill solutions are not available and in a way that supports the local communities,” she said.

In between pitches, experts such as Professor Prabhu and Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh offered insights on sustainable innovation and its importance in the race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Dr Amy Munro-Faure, Cambridge Zero’s Head of Education and Student Engagement led a quick game that mixed teams for spontaneous pitches, which resulted in a wild melange of ideas that included saving dolphins and travelling through time.

̽��ֱ��eight-week Climate Challenge programme is run in partnership with CISL Canopy, Carbon13, Energy IRC, Cambridge Enterprise, the Maxwell Centre and sponsored by Moda Living. Competing teams undertake training and develop early-stage proposals for solutions to tackle climate challenges in innovative ways.

Each year there is a new theme. This year’s theme, “A Just Transition”, asked teams to consider the social impacts of their climate solutions.

Two runner-up teams were awarded a prize of £750. FireSight, formed of Jovana Knezevic and Onkar Gulati, pitched a risk assessment and consulting service to address global wildfires using remote sensing and machine learning. Carolina Pulignani and Shannon A. Bonke of Wastevalor fascinated the judges with their technology that converts waste into methanol.

Team Reckon, made up of Aparna Holenarasipura Sreedhara and Akanksha Sahay, won the Audience Choice Award for their software as a service platform entry. ̽��ֱ��software gives organisations the ability to measure the social impact of their climate transition plans.

Judges said the Climate Challenge was a powerful demonstration of how innovation and the determination to tackle climate change permeate every level of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� community.

“Helping build the entrepreneurial mindset in the ̽��ֱ�� ecosystem is critical to the innovation agenda and particularly crucial for a true net zero where over half the innovations needed for 2050 are still in the lab,” Gibbs said.

A team of student entrepreneurs who see algae as a potential business solution for reducing methane emissions from landfill and waste-water sites won the 2023 Cambridge Zero Climate Challenge after a nail-biting competition.

̽��ֱ��climate challenge was one of the most exciting and well-organised events I got to attend during my four years at Cambridge

Tristan Spreng

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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New form of ice is like a snapshot of liquid water

cr696 — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 19:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��new form of ice is amorphous. Unlike ordinary crystalline ice where the molecules arrange themselves in a regular pattern, in amorphous ice the molecules are in a disorganised form that resembles a liquid.

In their paper, published in Science, the team created a new form of amorphous ice in experiment and achieved an atomic-scale model of it in computer simulation. ̽��ֱ��experiments used a technique called ball-milling, which grinds crystalline ice into small particles using metal balls in a steel jar. Ball-milling is regularly used to make amorphous materials, but it had never been applied to ice.

̽��ֱ��team found that ball-milling created an amorphous form of ice, which unlike all other known ices, had a density similar to that of liquid water and whose state resembled water in solid form. They named the new ice medium-density amorphous ice (MDA).

To understand the process at the molecular scale the team employed computational simulation. By mimicking the ball-milling procedure via repeated random shearing of crystalline ice, the team successfully created a computational model of MDA.

“Our discovery of MDA raises many questions on the very nature of liquid water and so understanding MDA’s precise atomic structure is very important,” said co-author Dr Michael Davies, who carried out the computational modelling. “We found remarkable similarities between MDA and liquid water.”

A happy medium

Amorphous ices have been suggested to be models for liquid water. Until now, there have been two main types of amorphous ice: high-density and low-density amorphous ice.

As the names suggest, there is a large density gap between them. This density gap, combined with the fact that the density of liquid water lies in the middle, has been a cornerstone of our understanding of liquid water. It has led in part to the suggestion that water consists of two liquids: one high- and one low-density liquid.

Senior author Professor Christoph Salzmann said: “ ̽��ֱ��accepted wisdom has been that no ice exists within that density gap. Our study shows that the density of MDA is precisely within this density gap and this finding may have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of liquid water and its many anomalies.”

A high-energy geophysical material

̽��ֱ��discovery of MDA gives rise to the question: where might it exist in nature? Shear forces were discovered to be key to creating MDA in this study. ̽��ֱ��team suggests ordinary ice could undergo similar shear forces in the ice moons due to the tidal forces exerted by gas giants such as Jupiter.

Moreover, MDA displays one remarkable property that is not found in other forms of ice. Using calorimetry, they found that when MDA recrystallises to ordinary ice it releases an extraordinary amount of heat. ̽��ֱ��heat released from the recrystallization of MDA could play a role in activating tectonic motions. More broadly, this discovery shows water can be a high-energy geophysical material.

Professor Angelos Michaelides, lead author from Cambridge's Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, said: “Amorphous ice in general is said to be the most abundant form of water in the universe. ̽��ֱ��race is now on to understand how much of it is MDA and how geophysically active MDA is.”

Reference:
Alexander Rosu-Finsen et al. 'Medium-density amorphous ice.' Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.abq2105

A collaboration between scientists at Cambridge and UCL has led to the discovery of a new form of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other and may hold the key to understanding this most famous of liquids.

Our discovery of MDA raises many questions on the very nature of liquid water and so understanding MDA’s precise atomic structure is very important

Michael Davies

Christoph Salzmann

Part of the set-up for creating medium-density amorphous ice: ordinary ice and steel balls in a jar (not amorphous ice)

Yes

̽��ֱ��chemist who saved a restaurant and launched a vision for Africa

cg605 — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 10:18:32 +0000

David Izuogu’s ambition is to establish a research institute in his home country of Nigeria. But he isn’t waiting until he realises his goal to help others get ahead.

Miniature grinding mill closes in on the details of ‘green’ chemical reactions

cmm201 — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 11:14:29 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, published in Nature Communications and led by Cambridge Earth Sciences’ Dr Giulio Lampronti, observed reactions as materials were pulverised inside a miniaturised grinding mill — providing new detail on the structure and formation of crystals.

Knowledge of the structure of these newly-formed materials, which have been subjected to considerable pressures, helps scientists unravel the kinetics involved in mechanochemistry. But they are rarely able to observe it at the level of detail seen in this new work.

̽��ֱ��study also involved Dr Ana Belenguer and Professor Jeremy Sanders from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry.

Mechanochemistry is touted as a ‘green’ tool because it can make new materials without using bulk solvents that are harmful to the environment. Despite decades of research, the process behind these reactions remains poorly understood.

To learn more about mechanochemical reactions, scientists usually observe chemical transformations in real time, as ingredients are churned and ground in a mill — like mixing a cake — to create complex chemical components and materials.

Once milling has stopped, however, the material can keep morphing into something completely different, so scientists need to record the reaction with as little disturbance as possible — using an imaging technique called time-resolved in-situ analysis to essentially capture a movie of the reactions. But, until now, this method has only offered a grainy picture of the unfolding reactions.

By shrinking the mills and taking the sample size down from several hundred milligrams to less than ten milligrams, Lampronti and the team were able to more accurately capture the size and microscopic structure of crystals using a technique called X-ray diffraction.

̽��ֱ��down-scaled analysis could also allow scientists to study smaller, safer, quantities of toxic or expensive materials. “We realised that this miniaturised setup had several other important advantages, aside from better structural analysis,” said Lampronti. “ ̽��ֱ��smaller sample size also means that more challenging analyses of scarce and toxic materials becomes possible, and it’s also exciting because it opens up the study of mechanochemistry to all areas of chemistry and materials science.”

“ ̽��ֱ��combination of new miniature jars designed by Ana, and the experimental and analytical techniques introduced by Giulio, promise to transform our ability to follow and understand solid-state reactions as they happen,” said Sanders.

̽��ֱ��team observed a range of reactions with their new miniaturised setup, covering organic and inorganic materials as well as metal-organic materials — proving their technique could be applied to a wide range of industry problems. One of the materials they studied, ZIF-8, could be used for carbon capture and storage, because of its ability to capture large amounts of CO2. ̽��ֱ��new view on these materials meant they were able to uncover previously undetected structural details, including distortion of the crystal lattice in the ZIF-8 framework.

Lampronti says their new developments could not only become routine practice for the study of mechanochemistry, but also offer up completely new directions for research in this influential field, “Our method allows for much faster kinetics, and will open up doors for previously inaccessible reactions — this could really change the playing field of mechanochemistry as we know it.”

Reference:
Giulio I. Lampronti et al. ‘Changing the game of time resolved X-ray diffraction on the mechanochemistry playground by downsizing.’ Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26264-1

Scientists at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have developed a new approach for observing mechanochemical reactions — where simple ingredients are ground up to make new chemical compounds and materials that can be used in anything from the pharmaceutical to the metallurgical, cement and mineral industries.

It's exciting because it opens up the study of mechanochemistry to all areas of chemistry and materials science

Giulio Lampronti

Photo by Chokniti Khongchum from Pexels

Person in laboratory holding a flask

Yes

Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

cg605 — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 17:14:16 +0000

Three hundred and twenty-seven mid-career researchers were today awarded Consolidator Grants by the ERC, totalling €655 million. ̽��ֱ��UK has 50 grantees in this year’s funding round. ̽��ֱ��funding is part of the EU’s current research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020.

̽��ֱ��ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers of any nationality and age, with at least seven and up to 12 years of experience after PhD, and a scientific track record showing great promise.

̽��ֱ��research projects proposed by the new grantees cover a wide range of topics in physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, as well as social sciences and humanities.

From the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the following researchers were named as grantees: Professor Vasco Carvalho, Professor Tuomas Knowles, Dr Neel Krishnaswami, Professor Silvia Vignolini and Dr Kaisey Mandel.

Vasco Carvalho, Professor of Macroeconomics and Director of Cambridge-INET, Faculty of Economics

Project title: Micro Structure and Macro Outcomes.

What is your research about?

“Research under the project MICRO2MACRO takes as a starting point the organisation of production around supply chain networks and, within these networks, the increasing dominance of very large and central firms. This renders a small number of firms and technologies systemic in that they can influence aggregate economic performance.

“Within this broad agenda, MICRO2MACRO explores issues surrounding, first, market power and pro-competitive policies and, second, innovation, productivity and the diffusion of new technologies. ̽��ֱ��project also partners with one global financial institution to unlock relevant real-time, highly granular data that is necessary to study some of these questions.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I'm ecstatic. First, because it recognises the combined effort of colleagues around the world in developing a new micro-to-macro research agenda and understanding macroeconomic developments via a new lens. Second, because it provides the opportunity to inject otherwise scarce resources into early career researchers and PhD students, thereby adding to the human capital in this research area. Third, because it further highlights a decade of collective efforts at the Faculty of Economics here at Cambridge and helps ensure its continued growth as a hub for the development of new approaches to decades old questions in economics.”

Professor Tuomas Knowles, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

Project title: Digital Protein Biophysics of Aggregation.

What is your research about?

“Our work is focused on understanding the basic molecular principles that govern the activity of proteins in health and disease. In particular we are interested in how proteins come together to form machinery and compartments that underpin the functions of a living cell, and what happens when these processes fail.

“ ̽��ֱ��ERC project is focused on understanding how proteins condense together to form functional liquid organelles, and how such compartments can gel and form irreversible protein aggregates associated with disease. Such problems have been challenging to study previously due to the very high heterogeneity of the structures that are formed which make observation by conventional bulk techniques challenging. We will be developing new single molecule approaches to study this phenomenon aggregate by aggregate and cell by cell, and in this way shed light on the connection between the physical and structural properties of protein assemblies and their biological activity.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I am truly delighted by this support of my research and that of my group, which will allow us to develop fundamentally new approaches for probing a process at the core of biological function and malfunction.”

Dr Neel Krishnaswami, Computer Laboratory

Project title: Foundations of Type Inference for Modern Programming Languages.

What is your research about?

“Many modern programming languages, whether industrial or academic, are typed. Each phrase in a program is classified by its type (for example, as strings or integers), and at compile-time programs are checked for consistent usage of types, in a process called type-checking. Thus, the expression ‘3 + 4’ will be accepted, since the + operator takes two numbers as arguments, but the expression ‘3 + ‘hello’’ will be rejected, as it makes no sense to add a number and a string. Though this is a simple idea, sophisticated type systems can track properties like algorithmic complexity and program correctness.

“In general, programmers must write annotations to tell computers which types to check. In theory, it is easy to demand enough annotations to trivialize type-checking, but this can easily make the annotation larger than the program itself! So, to transfer results from formal calculi to real programming languages, we need type inference algorithms, which reconstruct missing types from partially-annotated programs.

“In TypeFoundry, we will use recent developments in proof theory and formal semantics to identify the theoretical structure underpinning type inference.”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“Naturally, I am happy to find out that my research is valued in such concrete, material terms, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to have the chance to support PhD students and postdocs working in this area. I also feel this shows off the best international character of science. I am an Indian-American researcher working in the UK, judged and funded by my European peers. Consequently, I keenly feel both the opportunity and responsibility to carry on the cosmopolitan tradition of scientific work.”

Professor Silvia Vignolini, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

Project title: Sym-Bionic Matter: developing symbiotic relationships for light-matter interaction.

What is your research about?

“With this ERC grant I aim to develop new platforms and tools to study how different organisms build symbiotic interactions for light management and ‘evolve’ new symbiotic relationships, in which one of the organisms is replaced by an artificial material to generate a novel class of hybrid which I link to call ‘sym-BIonic matTEr’ – BiTe!”

How do you feel about being named a grantee?

“I was very excited to learn that I had been awarded an ERC grant and I look forward to starting the project. It’s an amazing opportunity for my team and me!

“When you receive the evaluation response, you get an email notification that invites you to log into the EU portal to see the outcome of the evaluation. In those few minutes that it takes to open the right form on the platform, I experienced pure panic! When I finally open the letter, I had to read it three times to convince myself that I had been awarded the grant! It was a great day!”

Dr Kaisey Mandel, Institute of Astronomy, Statistical Laboratory of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Kavli Institute for Cosmology

Project title: Next-Generation Data-Driven Probabilistic Modelling of Type Ia Supernova SEDs in the Optical to Near-Infrared for Robust Cosmological Inference.

What is your research about?

“My research focuses on utilising exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae to measure cosmological distances for tracing the history of cosmic expansion.

“I lead a project to develop state-of-the-art statistical models and advanced, data-driven techniques for analysing observations of these supernovae in optical and near-infrared light to determine more precise and accurate distances.

“Applying these novel methods to supernova data from the Hubble Space Telescope, new ground-based surveys, and, in the near future, the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, we will pursue new and improved constraints on the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the nature of dark energy.”

Five researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have won consolidator grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premiere funding organisation for frontier research.

iStock.com/ BarrySheene

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