Despite its place as a global leader in agriculture, each year the Brazilian agricultural economy loses approximately $15 billion to insect crop pest outbreaks. Indeed, insects consume 10-20% of all global crops while growing or in storage. Current agricultural practices in Brazil rely heavily on widespread pesticide application, which has led to the evolution of pesticide resistance in several significant insect pests. Such practices undermine the sustainability of important crop pest control technologies, reduce associated economic returns, and exacerbate the risks to economic production and food security in Brazil. We propose a revolutionary approach to pest management that will enhance the sustainability and long-term resilience of crop production, providing the benefit of managing insect pests more predictably. Our solution comes from evolutionary science and the particular features of host-pathogen interactions. Insecticide resistance evolution occurs when a single control agent is applied over a broad area, then consistent evolutionary pressures drive rare resistance genes to spread rapidly through the pest population. To prevent these sweeps of resistant alleles, we are investigating how multiple fungal pathogen strains can be used in a spatial matrix across agricultural landscapes, so that selection for resistance varies in different locations, preventing a uniform evolutionary response. On their own, multiple pathogen strains may not be sufficient because of cross resistance: genes making pests resistant to one fungal strain could also confer resistance to others. However, in host-pathogen systems, the optimum genotype to defend against one pathogen is often highly sensitive to the organism's environment. Simultaneous manipulation of an environmental landscape variable (the type of crop grown by farmers) will substantially decrease the consistency of selection: we predict this will prevent resistance evolution. In order to achieve real-world effectiveness of this pest control system, an integrated team of Brazilian and UK researchers will work together to establish the long-term prospects of our new solution. The aims are to: 1. Examine whether genetic variation for insect susceptibility to multiple fungal biopesticides under heterogeneous agricultural landscapes is stable, and assess how it responds to selection in the long-term. This will allow us to anticipate and avoid selection for resistance to multiple strains, and ensure the long-term sustainability of our pesticide resistance management system. 2. Investigate the suitability of fungal biopesticides for industrial scale production and field application in Brazil, which will facilitate product development for future industrial investment. We will also provide farmers and the crop protection industry with solutions for crop protection technology deployment, including improved delivery systems, higher pest control consistency and enhanced performance under field conditions. 3. Identify the barriers to uptake of our new pest control technologies and research methods to encourage farmer behavioural change. This research will provide economic and social science data to underpin advice for policy recommendations regarding incentive schemes, publicity campaigns and marketing strategies, thereby promoting uptake of these sustainable pest management practices.

A few grams of any material contain a bewildering number of individual particles. Interactions between these particles give rise to a vast array of emergent phenomena which cannot be understood from looking at any of the particles in isolation. An important example of this is superconductivity, which enables materials to conduct electricity without resistance. Novel emergent states also occur out of equilibrium, due to the presence of large external forces or the occurrence of extreme events. Examples include turbulence in fluids and plasmas, the spreading of epidemics and diseases, and shocks in the stock market. The above examples illustrate the breadth of this nationally and internationally recognised "Grand Challenge" in Emergence and Physics Far From Equilibrium. Addressing this Grand Challenge requires a coordinated approach, spanning different areas of physics and related disciplines. The Network will facilitate cross-cutting workshops and advanced working groups to enable UK researchers to plan and carry out targeted research programmes. Pump-prime initiatives and interaction with industry will stimulate collaborative research, ensuring UK competitiveness in this far-reaching field.

Soft Matter is ubiquitous, in the form of polymers, colloids, gels, foams, emulsions, pastes, or liquid crystals; of synthetic or biological origin; as bulk materials or as thin films at interfaces. Soft Matter impinges on almost every aspect of human activity: what we eat, what we wear, the cars we drive, the medicines we take, what we use to keep clean and healthy, in sport and leisure. Soft Matter plays a role in many industrial processes including new frontiers such as digital manufacturing, regenerative medicine and personalised products. Soft Matter is complex chemically and physically with structure and properties that depend on length and time scales. Too often the formulation of soft materials has been heuristic, without the fundamental understanding that underpins predictive design, which hampers innovation and leads to problems in scale up and reformulation in response to changing regulation or customer preferences. Durham, Edinburgh and Leeds Universities set up the SOFI CDT in 2014 in response to the challenge from manufacturers across the personal care, coatings, plastics and food sectors to provide future employees with the skills to transform the design and manufacture of soft materials from an art into a science. The dialogue continues with industrial partners, both old and new, which has resulted in this bid for a refreshed CDT in Soft Matter - SOFI2 - that reflects the evolving scientific, technological and industrial landscape. We have a new partnership with the National Formulation Centre, who will lead a training case study and contribute to the wider training programme, and with many new partners from SMEs to multinationals. We will seek to involve more small and medium-sized companies in SOFI2 by providing opportunities for them to engage in training and project supervision. SOFI2 will have increased training in biological soft matter, which has been identified as a growth area by the EPSRC and our partners, and in scale-up and manufacturing, so that our students can understand better the challenges of taking ideas from the laboratory to the customer. Social responsibility in research and innovation will be embedded throughout the training program and we will trial new ideas in participatory research where the public is involved in the creation of research projects. Each cohort of 16 students will spend their first six months on a common training programme in science and engineering, built around case studies co-delivered with industry partners. They then select their PhD projects and join their research groups in Durham, Leeds or Edinburgh. Generic and transferable skills training continues throughout the four years, bringing the cohorts together for both academic-led and student-led activities. We aim to produce SOFI2 graduates who are business-aware and who are good citizens as well as good scientists. The importance of Soft Matter to the UK economy cannot be understated. Industry sectors relying on Soft Matter include paints and coatings; adhesives, sealants and construction products; rubber, plastics and composite materials; pharmaceuticals and healthcare; cosmetics and personal care; household and professional care; agrochemicals; food and beverages; inks and dyes; lubricants and fuel additives; and process chemicals. A 2018 InnovateUK report estimate the formulated products sector (most of which involves Soft Matter) contributed £149 billion annually to the UK economy. The formulated products sector is undergoing a rapid transformation in response to a shift to sustainable feedstocks, environmental and regulatory pressures and personalised products. It will also be shaped in unpredictable ways by data analytics and artificial intelligence. SOFI2 will equip students with the knowledge and skills to thrive in this business environment.

An aerosol consists of solid particles or liquid droplets dispersed in a gas phase with sizes spanning from clusters of molecules (nanometres) to rain droplets (millimetres). Aerosol science is a term used to describe our understanding of the collective underlying physical science governing the properties and transformation of aerosols in a broad range of contexts, extending from drug delivery to the lungs to disease transmission, combustion and energy generation, materials processing, environmental science, and the delivery of agricultural and consumer products. Despite the commonality in the physical science core to all of these sectors, doctoral training in aerosol science has been focussed in specific contexts such as inhalation, the environment and materials. Representatives from these diverse sectors have reported that over 90% of their organisations experience difficulty in recruiting to research and technical roles requiring core expertise in aerosol science. Many of these will act as CDT partners and have co-created this bid. We will establish a CDT in Aerosol Science that, for the first time on a global stage, will provide foundational and comprehensive training for doctoral scientists in the core physical science. Not only will this bring coherence to training in aerosol science in the UK, but it will catalyse new collaborations between researchers in different disciplines. Inverting the existing training paradigm will ensure that practitioners of the future have the technical agility and confidence to move between different application contexts, leading to exciting and innovative approaches to address the technological, societal and health challenges in aerosol science. We will assemble a multidisciplinary team of supervisors from the Universities of Bristol, Bath, Cambridge, Hertfordshire, Imperial, Leeds and Manchester, with expertise spanning chemistry, physics, biological sciences, chemical and mechanical engineering, life and medical sciences, pharmacy and pharmacology, and earth and environmental sciences. Such breadth is crucial to provide the broad perspective on aerosol science central to developing researchers able to address the challenges that fall at the boundaries between these disciplines. We will engage with partners from across the industrial, governmental and public sectors, and with the Aerosol Society of the UK and Ireland, to deliver a legacy of training packages and an online training portal for future practitioners. With partners, we have defined the key research competencies in aerosol science necessary for their employees. Partners will provide support through skills-training placements, co-sponsored studentships, and contribution to taught elements. 5 cohorts of 16 doctoral students will follow a period of intensive training in the core concepts of aerosol science with training placements in complementary application areas and with partners. In subsequent years we will continue to build the activity of the cohort through summer schools, workshops and conferences hosted by the Aerosol Society, virtual training and enhanced training activities, and student-led initiatives. The students will acquire a perspective of aerosol science that stretches beyond the artificial boundaries of traditional disciplines, seeing the commonalities in core physical science. A cohort-based approach will provide a national focal point for training, acting as a catalyst to assemble a multi-disciplinary team with the breadth of research activity to provide opportunities for students to undertake research in complementary areas of aerosol science, and a mechanism for delivering the broad academic ingredients necessary for core training in aerosol science. A network of highly-skilled doctoral practitioners in aerosol science will result, capable of addressing the biggest problems and ethical dilemmas of our age, such as healthy ageing, sustainable and safe consumer products, and climate geoengineering.