This proposal is for a new EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Wind and Marine Energy Systems and Structures (CDT-WAMSS) which joins together two successful EPSRC CDTs, their industrial partners and strong track records of training more than 130 researchers to date in offshore renewable energy (ORE). The new CDT will create a comprehensive, world-leading centre covering all aspects of wind and marine renewable energy, both above and below the water. It will produce highly skilled industry-ready engineers with multidisciplinary expertise, deep specialist knowledge and a broad understanding of pertinent whole-energy systems. Our graduates will be future leaders in industry and academia world-wide, driving development of the ORE sector, helping to deliver the Government's carbon reduction targets for 2050 and ensuring that the UK remains at the forefront of this vitally important sector. In order to prepare students for the sector in which they will work, CDT-WAMSS will look to the future and focus on areas that will be relevant from 2023 onwards, which are not necessarily the issues of the past and present. For this reason, the scope of CDT-WAMSS will, in addition to in-stilling a solid understanding of wind and marine energy technologies and engineering, have a particular emphasis on: safety and safe systems, emerging advanced power and control technologies, floating substructures, novel foundation and anchoring systems, materials and structural integrity, remote monitoring and inspection including autonomous intervention, all within a cost competitive and environmentally sensitive context. The proposed new EPSRC CDT in Wind and Marine Energy Systems and Structures will provide an unrivalled Offshore Renewable Energy training environment supporting 70 students over five cohorts on a four-year doctorate, with a critical mass of over 100 academic supervisors of internationally recognised research excellence in ORE. The distinct and flexible cohort approach to training, with professional engineering peer-to-peer learning both within and across cohorts, will provide students with opportunities to benefit from such support throughout their doctorate, not just in the first year. An exceptionally strong industrial participation through funding a large number of studentships and provision of advice and contributions to the training programme will ensure that the training and research is relevant and will have a direct impact on the delivery of the UK's carbon reduction targets, allowing the country to retain its world-leading position in this enormously exciting and important sector.

The rapid growth rate of India's urban areas is a clear sign of its recent economic progress. One third of India's 1.1 billion people live in Indian towns and cities which are growing in varying and complex ways. The rapid demographic growth in and around India's urban areas is changing the physical dimensions of the city, such as its size, shape, density, land uses, layout and building types: a complex mixture of numerous characteristics including infrastructure and transportation. Increased urban development is putting intense pressure on existing urban infrastructure to support residents' quality of life. Rapid urban growth can take the form of high-density urban forms which are associated with poor living conditions, high levels of pollution and high incidence of crime. Urban growth and associated changes in urban form are clearly unsustainable, further exacerbated by (and contributing to) problems including regional displacement of rural populations into urban areas and localized social inequality.While there is growing awareness of these issues in India, gaps exist in urban policies and there is a lack of clarity in mechanisms for implementing development and planning policies at the local level. The main contributory factor of such gaps in policy is the dearth of knowledge and understanding of how the urban environment affects social sustainability, i.e. residents' wellbeing, quality of life and everyday life, in India's cities. There is therefore an urgent need in India for empirical evidence examining socially sustainable urban form to develop evidence-based government strategies and urban development policies. CityForm-India is a proactive research network aimed at addressing this need now. CityForm-India is a network of academics, policy makers and key stakeholders in the field of urban sustainability. The aim of the network is to create and sustain an exchange of international knowledge and expertise on aspects of culture, society, economics, environment, infrastructure, drivers of urban growth and urban policies which are relevant to the provision of socially sustainable living environments for India's urban residents. This research network is led by the multidisciplinary Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD: Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE)) and aims to facilitate the sharing of experience, expertise and knowledge of network members to identify the arising research challenges and opportunities within the context of India's rapidly growing cities. Network members have extensive collective research expertise and experience from a range of disciplines including urban economics, housing policy, urban design, infrastructure, transport, health and wellbeing. Through a series of networking events, knowledge exchange and dissemination activities held in India and the UK, the network will be the foundation of long-term research collaboration between academic and non-academic UK, Indian and international members. Throughout the network, a website will be developed as an important means of communication and dissemination. This will include public access to a discussion forum, webcasts and presentations from events as well as regular emails to network members, newsletters and the provision of secure online space for the sharing of working papers. Through these and other knowledge sharing and dissemination activities, the network members will make a significant contribution to knowledge in the field of socially sustainable urban form culminating in the generation of grant proposals for future empirical research.

Superhydrophobic surfaces (SH surfaces, or SHS) are a special breed of surfaces, arising in natural settings or increasingly in man-made synthetic situations, which are unusually slippery. In nature, superhydrophobicity manifests itself as the so-called "lotus-leaf effect": water beads up on a lotus leaf and readily slips off. This slippery feature can be supremely useful in a rich panoply of engineering applications, including direct attempts to emulate this effect in man-made superhydrophobic coatings, or using the effect to promote easier passage of fluids in driven flows (drag reduction). It has been proposed recently, however, that these attractive drag reduction properties in driven flows can quickly be compromised by the presence of surfactants, or impurities in the fluids that quickly aggregate at the fluid surfaces, even in trace amounts. This means that their presence is virtually unavoidable. It is therefore critical to assess the extent of this impediment, whether it can be mitigated, and even whether the deliberate addition of surfactants can be leveraged to attain desired objectives, such as enhanced drag reduction, flow stabilisation, or even mass transport. This is the topic of our proposal. The main goals of this proposal are to (a) quantitatively assess the extent to which the slip properties of a surface are compromised by the presence of surfactants for internal channel flows in the laminar flow regime; (b) study whether a possible "remobilisation" of interfaces already studied in the context of surfactant-laden bubbles can play a useful role in drag reduction involving superhydrophobic surfaces; (c) explore, both theoretically and experimentally, how a special class of surfactants deliberately added to the fluid, and controllable (or "tunable") by external light stimuli, can affect the slip properties of superhydrophobic surfaces; (d) explore how the stability of laminar flows over SHS is affected by the presence of surfactant, both soluble and insoluble, and whether incipient instabilities can be controlled by light actuation; (e) examine, both theoretically and experimentally, mass/particle transport using Marangoni stresses associated with light-actuated surfactants as a propulsion mechanism. While light-actuated surfactants have been studied before, the novelty of our proposal lies in their deployment in the setting of superhydrophobic surfaces and their use as a control mechanism both for sustained drag reduction, elimination of instability, and as a mechanism for strategic mass transfer. The fundamental insights from our proposed work packages will have broad implications for a variety of applications of SHS ranging from drag reduction and self-cleaning surfaces to controllable drug delivery in emerging healthcare technologies.

Advancing our understanding of the soil ecosystem, especially the dynamics of nitrogen species, is critical for improving soil fertility, increasing crop productivity, managing greenhouse gas fluxes, and protecting environmental quality. This project presents convergent research to develop the next generation, integrated sensing system for large area, in situ, high resolution spatio-temporal monitoring of dynamic nitrogen species, specifically ammonium and nitrate, as well as soil moisture, potassium and salinity. The wireless Distributed Real Time Soil (DiRTS) monitoring network is comprised of (1) soil-penetrable sensor motes with advanced microfluidics mimicking plant root-like water intake, (2) robust electrochemical sensors for ammonium, nitrate, potassium and salinity utilizing ultra-low power circuit architectures for readout and digitization, (3) long range wireless data communication using emerging standards, and (4) advanced algorithms for geospatial mapping of soil mineral nitrogen, potassium, salinity and moisture. The platform will address fundamental weaknesses in our understanding and control of nitrogen species in both unmanaged (e.g. forest) and managed (e.g. agriculture) soils. Beyond the technical impact, the proposed research effort will offer educational and training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students through innovative curriculum and for farmers and other soil management practitioners through publicly available training modules on design and deployment of the wireless Distributed Real Time Soil (DiRTS) monitoring platform. The DiRTS platform will make several notable scientific contributions: (1) Continuous capillary-driven sampling of the target soil nutrients mimicking the natural water intake by roots and transpiration through aboveground plant parts; (2) Ion sensitive electrodes utilizing embedded desalination to improve selectivity, and utilizing redundancy and Bayesian calibration to improve sensitivity; (3) Circuits for readout and digitization operating below 0.5V power supply and nanowatt level power dissipation; (4) Event-driven sampling and wireless communication using probabilistic sensor scheduling based on available power and data importance; and (5) State of the art statistical machine learning based approaches for generating high resolution spatio-temporal chemical maps from irregularly sampled data. All technology will be validated using actual, in-situ measurements of the target variable using the sensing mote and DET/DGT sensors in an experimental forest-BIFoR-FACE of the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research. Following validation, the sensing mote will then be fitted inside greenhouse gas auto-chambers in the FACE facility for concomittant sensing of dynamic nitrogen species and N2O fluxes to be monitored using a PICARO greenhouse gas analyzer and mapped using DiRTS sensor network. This proposal brings together experts in engineering, biogeosciences and chemistry from the US and UK, with strong backgrounds and expertise in relevant areas of sensing, electronics, microfluidics, biogeochemistry, soil science, signal processing and sensor networks, for successful execution of this project.

Education is essential for economic and social development. Yet over 775 million adults worldwide are unable to read and write in any language (UNESCO 2012). These indicators are particularly low in the landlocked countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where literacy rates are less than 40 percent. In Niger, the subject of our study, fewer than 30 percent of the population is literate, with large discrepancies between men and women. Despite the immediate private and social returns to adult education, adult education programs are a highly neglected entry point for development interventions. This is often attributed to low enrollment, high drop-out and rapid skills depreciation (Romain and Armstrong 1987, Abadzi 1994, Oxenham et al 2002, Ortega and Rodriguez 2008), possibly due to the limited relevance of such skills in daily life or limited opportunities to practice in one's native language. The widespread growth of mobile phone coverage in many developing countries, including Niger, has the potential to increase the incentives for and facilitate the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills by illiterate adults. By teaching students how to use mobile phones, adult learners may be able to practice their literacy skills outside of class by sending and receiving short message services (SMS), making phone calls and using mobile money (m-money) applications, all of which require basic fluency with the numbers, symbols and letters on mobile phone keypads. Mobile phone technology could also affect returns to education by allowing households to use the technology for other purposes, such as obtaining price and labor market information and facilitating informal private transfers (Aker and Mbiti 2010). Our research team ran a successful randomized evaluation in Niger in 2009-2011 (Project ABC) and showed that a mobile phone-enhanced adult education program improved literacy and math skills of adult education participants by 19-25 s.d., equivalent to an additional year of education (Aker et al 2012). This difference remains significant over time, even as learning depreciates. Building upon the successful pilot program, this research will provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of adult education programs on educational and socio-economic outcomes in Niger. Yet more importantly, this research will assess the extent to which information technology - in particular, mobile phones -- can affect learning outcomes and households' asset ownership, ability to deal with shocks and farm and off-farm earnings. This will be achieved by including two variations of the basic education intervention. The first variation will teach students in the basic adult education course how to use mobile phones, similar to a previous pilot program in Niger. The second intervention will also provide educational content to adult learners via short message service (SMS), thereby allowing us to measure the extent to which information technology can be used as a distance-learning tool. In addition to its impacts on adult learning, this research will also investigate the extent to which adult education influences parents' investments in children's educational outcomes and which education affects intra-household and intra-village decision-making. And finally, since the research will be conducted in an expanded study population (250 villages, as compared with 117 in the pilot), we will be able to assess the scalability of the approach, thus allowing us to directly address the first overarching research question set out in this call for proposal ("What approaches are most effective in enabling the poorest to exit and stay out of poverty, and under what conditions can such approaches be replicated elsewhere and at scale?") This research will be achieved through a unique collaboration between Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and researchers at Tufts University, the University of Ottawa, the London School of Economics and the University of Abdoul Moumouni.