My vision for the EPSRC UKRI Innovation Fellowship is to create a new generation of cutting-edge medical devices for minimally-invasive surgeries, using Materials Chemistry innovations. The devices I will develop will provide improved imaging for guidance and diagnosis during surgeries, as well as precise device locations for example, in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided interventions. These devices will improve the safety and efficiency of minimally-invasive procedures, and help to reduce the risk of associated complications. One of my key objectives is to translate this healthcare technologies research from academia to pre-clinical validation, providing patient benefits through improved healthcare diagnostics and treatments. Through clinical and industrial collaboration, I will take the healthcare technologies developed during this Fellowship from the benchtop to pre-clinical validation, and establish the most appropriate pathways for commercialisation. Over the course of the Fellowship I will work towards developing a portfolio of medical devices. The two key devices that I will focus on are: 1) A fibre-optic magnetic field sensor: This miniature sensor will be incorporated into medical devices to facilitate their tracking via magnetic sensing. 2) A fibre-optic ultrasound transmitter with photoacoustic (PA) imaging functionality: This miniature ultrasound transmitter and a fibre-optic ultrasound receiver will be integrated into medical devices to help guide minimally-invasive surgical procedures through ultrasound imaging, providing visualisation of clinically-relevant tissue structures with structural and molecular contrast. The fibre-optic magnetic sensors will be fabricated by creating elastomeric membranes that are highly deformable in the presence of a magnetic field. These will be developed by incorporating nanoscale magnetic particles into elastomers, and using a range of coating techniques to create micron-scale, freestanding membranes. These membranes will be fabricated into fibre-optic sensors that can be integrated into needles and catheters used for minimally-invasive surgeries. When placed within an MRI-scanner, these devices will respond to changes in the magnetic field in the presence of different gradients, enabling precise device tracking. This technology will open up new avenues for MRI-guided interventions. The fibre-optic ultrasound transmitter with PA imaging functionality will be created using specially engineered coatings deposited onto optical fibres. These coatings will be designed to strongly absorb visible light within specific wavelength regions for ultrasound generation, and demonstrate transparency to light of other wavelengths for PA imaging. Combined with a fibre-optic ultrasound receiver designed at UCL, this miniature imaging system will be integrated into medical devices used to perform minimally-invasive surgical interventions, for example, cardiovascular procedures. The fibre-optic imaging system will provide unparalleled image guidance from within the needle used to perform the surgery, reducing the risk of complications. The combined ultrasound and PA imaging will provide clinicians with information on tissue structure, as well as molecular information i.e. where lipid rich (fatty) regions are. The latter, can be important for diagnosis and monitoring of atherosclerotic plaques, which are a key cause of cardiovascular disease. Next-generation devices will incorporate both magnetic sensing and ultrasound imaging capabilities, to enable ultrasound-guided interventions, with precise device tracking. The materials technologies developed will also be translated onto centimetre-scale ultrasound sensors to create a handheld, wide-field all-optical imaging system that can provide three-dimensional combined ultrasound and PA imaging. Potential applications of this system include the detection of head-and-neck cancers, as well as peripheral vascular disease.

Healthcare systems world-wide are struggling to cope with the demands of ever-increasing populations in the 21st-century, where the effects of increased life expectancy and the demands of modern lifestyles have created an unsustainable social and financial burden. However, healthcare is also entering a new, exciting phase that promises the change required to meet these challenges: ever-increasing quantities of complex data concerning all aspects of healthcare are being stored, throughout the life of a patient. These include electronic health records (EHRs) now active in many hospitals, and large volumes of data being collected by patient-worn sensors. The resulting rapid growth in the amount of data that is stored far outpaces the capability of clinical experts to cope. There is huge potential for using advances in computer science to use these huge datasets. This promises to improve healthcare outcomes significantly by allowing the development of new technologies for healthcare using the data - this is an area that promises to develop into a major new field in medicine. Making sense of the complex data is one of the key challenges for exploiting these massive datasets. This programme aims to establish a new centre focussed on developing the next generation of predictive healthcare technologies, exploiting the EHR using new methods in computer science. We describe a number of healthcare themes which demonstrate the potential to improve patient outcomes. This will be achieved in collaboration with a consortium of leading clinicians and healthcare companies. The primary aim is to develop the "Intelligent EHR", which will have applications in creating "early warning systems" to predict patient problems (such as heart failure), and to help doctors know which drug or treatment would best be used for each individual patient - by interpreting the vast quantities of data available in the EHR.

Across the UK political spectrum there is a consensus that communities need to play a greater role in local government, both in the decisions made that affect people's everyday lives, and in the design and delivery of services provided by local government to communities. With the enormous public uptake of digital technologies including broadband internet, mobile phones, laptop and tablet computers, there are opportunities to create more representative and sustainable forms of local democracy and service provision. Digital Civics is the endeavour of developing theories, technologies, design approaches and evaluation methods for digital technologies that support local communities, local service provision, and local democracy. However, this area poses new challenges for researchers across a range of disciplines. It requires researchers that are not only experts in local government and the services they provide (such as education, public health and social care), but also researchers that can: (i) understand the limitations of existing technologies and approaches to design and use; (ii) innovate in the design, delivery and evaluation of services; (iii) produce underpinning technologies that meet the real-world requirements of local service provision and local democracy. The primary goal of our Centre for Doctoral Training is therefore to train the next generation of researchers that can meet these challenges. The Centre has three distinctive features. Firstly, it brings together academics from 5 internationally leading centres of excellence already extensively engaged in Digital Civics research at Newcastle University: (i) experts in human-computer interaction and participatory media from Culture Lab; (ii) experts in security, privacy & trust from the Centre for Cyber Crime and Security; (iii) experts in public health and social care from the Institute of Health & Society; (iv) experts in education from the Centre for Learning and Teaching; and (iv) experts on planning and politics from the Global Urban Research Unit. Working together in a Centre for Digital Civics these academics will lead the training and supervision through a 1-year taught program in Digital Civics, and a carefully coordinated collection of 60 PhD 3-year research projects over the funded lifetime of the centre. Secondly, the research will be conducted in the context of real-world service provision and communities, through the engagement of three local councils (Newcastle, Gateshead & Northumberland) who will act a host partners to the research. The centre also has a significant number of deeply committed commercial, public sector and third sector partners who will actively engage in the design and delivery of the research training. These include many of the leading national and international organisations with a direct interest in building research capacity in Digital Civics. These include Philips Research, Microsoft Research, eBay Research Labs, Orange Labs, IBM Research, BBC R&D, Tunstall, BT Labs, Promethean and SMART Technologies. In addition to these partners, we also have a partnership of local and national social and commercial enterprises, and a network of international academics who will support academic exchanges placements which will provide an international profile to our students' portfolio. Only those collaborating partners who have demonstrated a real and substantial commitment to engage have been included in this proposal. The research training provided to students will be cross-disciplinary in nature and focused upon 3 challenging application domains for digital civics research. These are: local democracy, education, and public health & social care. There will also be 2 underpinning technology training programmes: human-computer interaction and security, privacy & trust. These 5 topics span the research expertise of our 5 international centres of excellence at Newcastle University.

This Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) is in the field of Polymers, Soft Matter and Colloids. This area of science deals with long-chain molecules, gels, particles, pastes and complex fluids. It is of fundamental importance for many commercial sectors, including paints & coatings, home & personal care products, agrochemicals, engine oils & lubrication, enhanced oil recovery, biomedical devices & drug delivery. Thus substantial EPSRC investment in this industrially-relevant field will directly support the UK economy and enhance its competitiveness over the longer term, as well as contributing to our scientific capacity to address important technical challenges and major societal problems such as sustainability and energy security. Sheffield Polymer Centre academics have a wealth of research experience in the areas of polymer chemistry, polymer physics, colloid science, soft matter physics and polymer engineering. This breadth of expertise is unique and is certainly unrivalled anywhere in the UK. Between us, we offer a superb range of research facilities and state-of-the-art instrumentation that provide excellent postgraduate training opportunities. We have also run a popular annual industrial training course and three relevant taught MSc courses for many years. Thus the logistical experience of our current administrative staff and existing teaching infrastructure will provide invaluable support in running this new CDT. Moreover, this prior activity underlines our institution's deep commitment to this important interdisciplinary field. Our vision is to engage closely with a wide range of companies, e.g. AkzoNobel, Lubrizol, P & G, Cytec, Synthomer, Scott Bader, GEO, Wellstream, LBFoster, Philips, Ossila, Syngenta, DSM, Ashland, BP and Unilever, in order to provide the next generation of highly skilled PhD scientists with high-level technical skills, intellectual rigour, excellent communication skills, flexibility and business acumen. This is essential if we are to produce the creative problem-solvers that will be required to tackle the many formidable technical and societal challenges now facing mankind. Our ambition is to secure at least £2.0 million from our industrial partners in order to support fifty CASE PhD projects over five years. Six PhD studentships p.a. (i.e. thirty in total) are requested from EPSRC, which will be supplemented by a substantial institutional contribution of three studentships p.a. (i.e. fifteen in total). This institutional commitment is in recognition of the continuing strategic importance of this research area to the University of Sheffield. An additional studentship p.a. (i.e. five in total) will be funded by top-slicing the enhanced CASE contributions from our industrial partners to make up the annual cohort of ten students. EPSRC investment in this CDT is warranted given our substantial institutional portfolio of many active EPSRC grants (including Programme and Platform grants), plus a £2.0 M ERC grant. Our CDT training programme will include the following highly distinctive features: (i) our unrivalled breadth of academic knowledge and experience; (ii) a choice of research projects for our PhD students prior to their enrolment; (iii) an initial two-week training course on the basic principles of polymer science and engineering; (iv) a monthly seminar programme led by industrial scientists to expose our students to a wide range of commercially-relevant topics; (v) a six-month secondment with the industrial partner in the latter part of the research programme, which will provide our students with invaluable experience of the workplace and hence prepare them for their industrial and/or managerial careers; (vi) a 'business enterprise' course led by an external consultant (Jo Haigh) and one of our industrial partners (Synthomer) to develop and encourage entrepreneurial flair in each PhD cohort; (vii) a visit to an overseas academic laboratory to facilitate international collaboration.

Technologies, and our economy in general, usually advance either by incremental steps (e.g. scaling the size and number of transistors on a chip) or by quantum leaps (transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductor technologies). Disruptive technologies behind such revolutions are usually characterised by universal, versatile applications, which change many aspects of our life simultaneously, penetrating every corner of our existence. To become disruptive, a new technology needs to offer not incremental, but dramatic, orders of magnitude improvements. Moreover, the more universal the technology, the better chances it has for broad base success. This can be summarized by the "Lemma of New Technology", proposed by Herbert Kroemer: "The principal applications of any sufficiently new and innovative technology always have been - and will continue to be - applications created by that technology". Graphene is the first of a new class of materials with huge potential for applications, including tens of other two-dimensional crystals, hetero-structures based on these crystals, and their hybrids with metallic and semiconducting quantum dots and other nanomaterials. A key step to advance the commercial viability of graphene is to harness the emerging capability in graphene technology - including novel applications and production technologies. Graphene has many record properties. It is transparent like (or better than) plastic, but conducts heat and electricity better than any metal, it is an elastic thin film, behaves as an impermeable membrane, and it is chemically inert and stable. Thus, it is ideal for the production of next generation transparent conductors. Thin and flexible graphene-based electronic components may be obtained and modularly integrated, and thin portable devices may be easily assembled and distributed. Graphene can withstand dramatic mechanical deformation, for instance it can be folded without breaking. Foldable devices can be imagined, together with a wealth of new form factors, with innovative concepts of integration and distribution. By enabling flexible (opto)electronics, graphene will allow the exploitation of the existing knowledge base and infrastructure of companies working on organic electronics (organic LEDs, conductive polymers, printable electronics), and a unique synergistic framework for collecting and underpinning many distributed technical competences. At present, the realisation of an electronic device (such as, e.g., a mobile phone) requires the assembly of a variety of components obtained by many technologies. Graphene, by including different properties within the same material, may offer the opportunity to build a comprehensive technological platform for the realisation of almost any device component, including transistors, batteries, optoelectronic components, photovoltaic cells, (photo)detectors, ultrafast lasers, bio- and physico-chemical sensors, etc. UK will have the chance to re-acquire a prominent position within the global industry, by exploiting the synergy of excellent researchers and manufacturers. Skilled people are the most important ingredient for the successful implementation of this vision. The proposed CDT will strengthen the essential cross-disciplinary collaborations, develop new research activities and increase impact. The large investments that public and private bodies in UK, EU and worldwide are devoting to graphene technologies call for trained and qualified people. The huge demand requires a specific programme to train PhD students in technology of graphene and related materials, with a strong focus on the cutting-edge engineering and industrial applications. Our CDT will be an important step to meet this demand, providing a set of transferable skills and wide know-how, not limited to the material, but spanning the state of the art in flexible and wearable electronics, photonics, energy storage, RF systems, etc.