My research project analyses contemporary transgender literature's move from autobiography to fiction. Over the past decade, transgender representation has reached a 'tipping point.' The recent outburst of transgender literary production has changed how transgender existence is discussed, prompting a 'coming of age' for transgender literature. Three questions guide my research: 1. What new literary genres and styles are deployed by transgender authors and with what purpose? 2. How and why has the representation of gender in fiction changed in comparison to autobiographical accounts? 3. What other interpretative avenues, apart from gender medicalisation, have transgender authors adopted to narrate their experiences? I have selected five novels as my corpus: Jordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox (2018), Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless (2021), Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby (2021), and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018) and The Death of Vivek Oji (2020). Although autobiographical features persist, transgender authors are embracing other literary genres. Rosenberg resorts to historical fiction to exhume the lives of transgender people and to reclaim "our history - fragmented and fugitive." He revisits the story of 18th-century thief Jack Sheppard, characterising him as a transgender boy. Rumfitt adopts the Gothic novel to show how "[g]hosts are born from trauma and violence" highlighting an affinity between 1980s radical feminists and today's 'gender criticals.' The departure from mere autobiography has sparked two thematic changes. Firstly, de-binarised representations of gender. Peters challenges hegemonic gender theories. Confronted by the prospect of fatherhood after his detransition, Ames' character reflects, "I am trans, but I don't need to do trans." This statement demonstrates how the 'wrong body' trope is no longer sufficient to portray the variety of transgender experiences. Emezi intertwines transness with ogbanje spirituality, a "malignant form of reincarnation." Surgeries become "a bridge across realities", a tool not only for affirming gender, but also for transcending human/body limitations. Secondly, the adoption of new narrative elements/techniques allows transgender authors to broaden the scope of their storytelling. No longer confined to autobiography and their transition journey, transgender authors address other issues, e.g. trans rights, a queer reconfiguration of parenthood, and the intersections between race and gender. Form is thus connected to content: the plasticity of literary genres represents the transitory fluidity of gendered experience, shifting the thematic focus from transgender identity - as something fixed and prescriptive - to transgender life as a process that entails but is not limited to fixed (gender) categories. I will consider the two ways that contemporary transgender authors position themselves. On one hand, Sandy Stone's posttranssexuality urges transgender people to "speak from outside the boundaries of gender" and challenge cisheteronormativity. Conversely, Jay Prosser expresses scepticism towards a transgender future that "project[s] gender identity beyond the body", thereby refusing sexual difference. In response, my project cultivates new theorisations of gender and identity through their creative reimaginations in contemporary transgender fiction. Apart from transgender, queer and feminist studies, my project contributes to social studies, medical humanities, critical race and postcolonial studies through my engagement with LGBTQ+ politics/activism, queer spiritualities, and intersectional and transnational approaches to gender.

Domestic heating accounts for a significant amount of carbon emissions, but it has been a difficult sector to decarbonise, partially because social barriers have not been adequately addressed. This research will assess the psychological and behavioural factors that may support the rapid decarbonisation of domestic heating in the UK. I will focus on heat pump adoption and demand-side response (DSR), which is shifting energy use to off-peak times. Agent-based models (ABMs) for heat pump adoption and DSR will be developed with industry partners to simulate how small-scale behaviours at the household level can enable large-scale decarbonisation of domestic heating. This project will contribute to academic literature while having a tangible impact on UK climate targets by 1) exploring the differences between behaviours of one-time heat pump adoption and long-term DSR, and 2) developing tools to support stakeholders in designing inclusive social interventions for decarbonising domestic heating at scale.

As society moves from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy, demand for the raw materials that are critical for this energy transition is rapidly increasing. Among these, the rare earth elements (REE) are particularly important as they are essential ingredients in high-strength permanent magnets used in wind turbines and most electric vehicles. The largest and highest grade REE deposits are hosted in carbonatites (igneous rocks with >50% carbonate minerals) and alkaline rocks (igneous rocks with exceptionally high contents of sodium and potassium), which are commonly closely associated. These alkaline-carbonatite complexes are relatively rare (with 609 known carbonatites globally), compositionally diverse, and occur as plutonic, sub-volcanic and extrusive rocks. The characteristics needed to form a REE-rich carbonatite are generally recognised to be emplacement at relatively shallow crustal levels, with sufficient melt differentiation to form REE-enriched ferrocarbonatites, followed by some degree of hydrothermal alteration. However, this generalised conceptual model is based upon a relatively small number of well-studied alkaline-carbonatite complexes. The links between carbonatites and alkaline rocks remain deeply debated and the exact evolutionary path from a carbonatite magma to a REE ore deposit is not well constrained. In-part, this obscurity stems from the challenges of mapping carbonatites in the field, the multi-phase complexity of alkaline-carbonatite complexes, and the (probable) formation of alkaline carbonate minerals, which are poorly preserved in the rock record owing to different degrees of hydrothermal overprinting and the propensity for carbonatites to weather in the surface environment. This project focusses on the Monte Muambe carbonatite and the surrounding Lupata volcanics, Mozambique, both of which are the southern-most expression of the Chilwa Alkaline Province (a highly prospective area of carbonatites and alkaline igneous rocks in Malawi and Mozambique). Monte Muambe is an exceptionally large carbonatite complex comprising REE-rich and REE-poor carbonatites intruded into Karroo-age sandstones. Preliminary field studies indicate that Monte Muambe occupies a conceptual knowledge gap between shallow-sub volcanic carbonatites, which are more likely to be mineralised in REE, and extrusive rocks. Existing studies on genetically similar complexes have been carried out elsewhere in the Chilwa Alkaline Province to the north, but occur at deeper emplacement depths, while extrusive (relatively unmineralized) carbonatites of a similar age occur to the west in Zambia. Despite occupying this interesting knowledge gap, the complex is poorly studied, with work limited to a small number of exploration reports. Through the CASE partnership with Altona Rare Earths, this project presents the first opportunity to study these localities in detail since they were discovered in the 1920s. This PhD project builds on existing and ongoing research at Camborne School of Mines on the architecture and genesis of carbonatite-hosted REE deposits. Monte Muambe offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate the relationships between intrusive and extrusive alkaline silicate rocks, carbonatites, and REE mineralisation at a previously little-studied structural level. The locality is only partially mapped, and the project will build heavily on initial field observations to categorise different intrusive events, and their stratigraphic relationships. Follow-on work will be flexible depending on the interests of the student, but will involve some degree of whole-rock geochemistry, mineralogy, and isotope geochemistry and/or geochronology. The supervisory team has already visited Monte Muambe and has an understanding of the logistical requirements of work in the area.

Ensuring global food security for the ever-growing global population is a major concern. Fungal pathogens destroy a substantial amount of all food and feed crops each year (~15%). Take-all (TA) is the most important threat to wheat root system health. This disease is caused by the fungus Gaeumannomyces tritici, which infects the roots and damages the vasculature tissue of the plants, thereby adversely affecting water and nutrient uptake. In high disease years, TA causes over 50% yield loss in the field and causes nitrate leaching from the soil into neighbouring watercourses as a result of the crop's reduced capacity to uptake soil nitrogen. Growers have few effective TA management strategies and there are no characterised sources of genetic resistance, so there is an urgent need to identify and deploy reliable, environmentally-friendly and durable sources of TA resistance. The best way forward is to find and exploit genetic sources of resistance to protect UK, European and global wheat crops from TA disease without compromising plant health and yield. The student will use multiple bioinformatics approaches to predict and develop a high priority candidate gene list for the genomic regions associated with TA resistance identified from selected Watkins wheat lines from a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) analysis and the lines selected from a biparental mapping population analysis. Functional validation of these candidate genes will be done in the laboratory using transient virus induced gene silencing method (VIGS) and/or virus over-expression (VOX) in roots combined with root imaging and quantitative disease assessments. This new knowledge will permit the student and the advisory team to devise new TA control strategies. This collaborative project is multidisciplinary with strong functional genomics, computational biology and bioimaging components. The student will spend time at Rothamsted Research (RRes) a world leading Agricultural Research Institute and the University of Exeter, a major international research-intensive university with one of the largest bioscience departments in the country. The student will have access to world class research facilities and will receive outstanding interdisciplinary training from their advisory team. The student will also receive training in how to give oral/poster presentations at laboratory meetings, workshops, attend national/international conferences, write scientific paper(s) for peer review and will take part in suitable public outreach events, for example The British Festival of Science and Cereals UK.

The open ocean ecosystems which dominate the surface of our planet are all dependent on the generation of new organic matter by single celled organisms which are collectively termed phytoplankton. These organisms use light, nutrients and carbon dioxide to grow through a process termed primary production. In addition to forming the base of the marine food web, the collective primary production by these organisms is ultimately responsible for ocean biology keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide levels around 30-40% lower than they would otherwise be, thus exerting a significant impact on global climate. Understanding how primary production may vary in the future is thus important for predicting the ongoing response of both ocean ecosystems and carbon cycling to climate change. The abundance and activity of phytoplankton in the upper ocean is always a balance between growth rates (determined by the availability of resources) and loss rates including through grazing by organisms collectively termed zooplankton and mortality due to viruses and direct sinking. However, the factors determining both growth and loss dynamically vary both across the different regions of the ocean and throughout the annual cycle in complex and interacting ways. We currently try and capture the knowledge necessary to predict future changes in primary production using numerical models of these interacting processes. However, our current state-of-the-art models differ substantially in their predictions of future change due to the differing ways they represent a variety of these key processes. Focusing on an important region of the ocean for biological carbon storage, the mid-high latitude North Atlantic, our proposal aims to make exciting new year-round observations of primary production and the controlling factors using a combination of satellite, ship-based and novel robotic platforms. We will augment these observations with detailed experimental work undertaken at sea, alongside targeted numerical modelling, in order to generate an improved understanding of the balance between controls on growth and loss and, crucially, establish how this varies over the dynamic seasonal cycle. Data from our observations and experiments will allow us to establish key drivers of the magnitude and seasonal changes in primary production and link these to the overall controls on the efficiency of ocean carbon storage across a broad region of the North Atlantic Ocean. In addition to providing new understanding, our research will generate improved data sets of rates of growth and loss, providing more rigorous constraints for numerical models and hence pointing the way towards more confident predictions of future primary production and carbon cycle responses to climate change.