Congratulations to Dr Tiffany Wood and Dr Vincent Martinez who received the IBioIC EDGE award at the Scottish EDGE competition for their work as part of biotech business Dyneval Ltd.
Scottish EDGE is the UK’s largest funding competition aimed at identifying and supporting Scotland’s innovative entrepreneurial talent. From a total of 305 participants, 45 shortlisted entrepreneurs were narrowed down to 19 finalists, who pitched their businesses to a panel of 16 judges. The winners will receive a share of the £1 million prize funds to support their business.
Tiffany and Vincent established Dyneval in April 2020, to offer innovative technology for the precise measurement of semen quality in order to improve the profitability and sustainability of farming. The average UK dairy farmer loses £37K each year due to poor conception rates, and at present, there is no quality control standard accessible for vets, farmers and AI technicians to check semen quality before reproduction. Dyneval’s technology provides an easy-to-use, automated and portable instrument for semen analysis.
The original version of the core-technology was validated for bull semen by veterinary experts at RAFT solutions in 2019 and is an adaptation of the techniques developed by Dr Vincent Martinez, Dr Jochen Arlt and Professor Wilson Poon to study the biophysics of motile bacteria. The relationship between RAFT solutions followed a chance meeting at a food-related knowledge-exchange event held in Edinburgh in 2014 and attended by RAFT Solutions and Tiffany Wood during her time as the first Industrial Research Liaison at the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership. Later this summer, RAFT Solutions will be deploying Dyneval technology to vets in Canada as part of their SemenRate service through the UK Research and Innovation funding for Transforming Food Production programme.
Speaking about the EDGE17 funding award Dr Tiffany Wood, Founder and CEO, said:
The team at Dyneval is absolutely delighted to have won the Scottish EDGE award. This will accelerate our market readiness and growth and ability to have a significant and positive impact on the profitability and sustainability of dairy and beef farming.
Co-Founder and CTO, Vincent Martinez, added:
I am very happy and honoured to win an award from such a prestigious competition.
Scientists have started to harness the properties of DNA to craft ‘topologically tunable’ complex fluids and soft materials, with potential applications in drug delivery and tissue regeneration.
DNA is a highly sophisticated polymer, and beyond the fact that it can store information, further fascinating aspects are its geometric and topological properties, such as knotting and supercoiling, very much like a twisted telephone cord. Through an international collaboration, scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh, San Diego and Vienna have started to harness these properties to craft ‘topologically tunable’ DNA-based complex fluids and soft materials.
The double helical shape of DNA has implications on its behaviour. A linear DNA molecule, that is a DNA molecule with two ends, can freely twist and turn. By contrast, joining the two ends to form a DNA circle entails that any over or under twisting of the double-helix remains ‘topologically locked’ i.e. the extra twist cannot be removed without cutting the molecule. Over or under twists have consequences for how DNA molecules arrange in space — in particular, they coil and buckle onto themselves very much like an old telephone cord into so called “supercoiled” conformations. The buckling of DNA relieves stress from the twisting, and thereby decreases the overall size of the molecule. For this reason it is thought that supercoiling is a natural mechanism employed by cells to package their genome into tiny spaces. While the smaller size naturally leads to faster movement of DNA molecules because of the lower drag, this behaviour does not occur when many DNA molecules are packed and entangled like spaghetti in a bowl.
The team of scientists performed large-scale computer simulations of dense and entangled solutions of DNA molecules with different degrees of supercoiling and found several surprising results. First, they discovered that the more supercoiled the DNA rings, the larger their size. Since the molecules needed to avoid each other, their shapes adopted strongly asymmetric and branched conformations that occupied more volume than their non-supercoiled counterparts. Intriguingly, the larger DNA molecules still displayed faster movement, which meant that the fluid of supercoiled DNA molecules had lower viscosity.
Supercoiled DNA molecules occurring naturally in bacteria are known as plasmids. In vivo, cells have special proteins called topoisomerase that can reduce the amount of supercoiling in plasmids. The team were able to use these proteins to control the extent of supercoiling in entangled DNA plasmids and studied their dynamics using fluorescent dyes. They discovered that DNA plasmids that were treated with topoisomerase, and hence with low supercoiling, were slower than their highly supercoiled counterparts.
To explain their findings, the team ran months-long simulations on powerful supercomputers which would have taken 228 years to run on a normal laptop and quantified how entangled the molecules in solutions were. While it is known that a ring-shaped polymer (similar to a circular DNA plasmid treated with topoisomerase) can be threaded by another ring, it was not known how this type of entanglement impacts the motion of supercoiled DNA. They found that a high degree of supercoiling decreases the penetrable area of each molecule resulting, in turn, in fewer threadings between the plasmids and ultimately yielding a fluid with lower viscosity. Nevertheless, the plasmids could still wrap around one another and constrain each others’ motion without threading. Yet, the supercoiling stiffens the conformations and thereby making them less prone to bend and entwine tightly, which reduces this type of entanglement too.
Davide Michieletto, one of the scientists involved in the project, who is based in the School's Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, concludes:
Not only did we find these novel effects in simulations, but we also demonstrated these trends experimentally and developed a theory describing them quantitatively. By changing the supercoiling we can tune the viscosity of these complex fluids at will. We now understand much better the connection between the adaptive geometry of the molecules and the resulting material properties. This is not only exciting from the fundamental perspective, but also promises useful applications. Using dedicated enzymes, such as the topoisomerase, one can design switchable DNA-based soft materials with tunable properties.
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Congratulations to Dr Rob Currie and Dr Ben Wynne who have received RAMP Early Career Investigator Awards from the Royal Society.
Researchers Dr Rob Currie and Dr Ben Wynne from the School’s Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics have been working as part of the Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic initiative.
Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic
The Rapid Assistance in Modelling the Pandemic (RAMP) initiative was established to bring together modelling expertise from a diverse range of disciplines to support the pandemic modelling community already working on Coronavirus (COVID-19).
RAMP is designed to:
- provide support for existing research groups;
- create new models or insights that can be used to inform the work of the Government’s scientific advisors, through data science-based approaches;
- apply knowledge from related epidemiology domains;
- triage incoming literature to ensure effective information flows.
The goal of RAMP is to enhance modelling capacity to create a clearer understanding of different exit strategies from the current lockdown.
Royal Society RAMP Early Career Investigator Awards
These Royal Society RAMP Early Career Investigator Awards (RECIA) recognize early career researchers who have made exceptional contributions to the initiative.
We're very pleased to have this opportunity to help towards understanding the current pandemic. As physicists, it's not obvious how we can contribute in an area which is naturally associated with medicine and biology, but we all have a shared need for the computer modelling of complex systems. Whether we're simulating particle collisions at CERN, or investigating how lockdown measures slow the spread of a virus, we need to be able to analyse the results of our simulation to make useful predictions.
Edinburgh is part of an international collaboration using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to create a 3D map of the universe and learn about the nature of dark energy.
A five-year quest to map the Universe and unravel the mysteries of dark energy has officially begun. By gathering light from some 30 million galaxies, DESI will create a 3D map of the universe with unprecedented detail. Seeing how structure in the Universe has evolved with time will help understand the repulsive force associated with dark energy that drives the acceleration of the expansion of the universe across vast cosmic distances.
DESI is an international science collaboration located at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, and managed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) with primary funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science.
The formal start of DESI’s five-year survey follows a four-month trial run of its custom instrumentation that captured spectra from four million galaxies - more than the combined output of all previous spectroscopic surveys.
How does DESI work?
The DESI instrument includes 5,000 robotically controlled optical fibres to gather spectroscopic data from an equal number of objects in the telescope’s three-degree field of view. On any given night, the optical fibres align to collect light from galaxies as this is focused by the telescope mirror. From there, the light is fed into a bank of spectrographs and cameras for further processing and study.
Spectra collected by DESI are the components of light corresponding to the colors of the rainbow. Their characteristics, including wavelength, reveal information such as the chemical composition of objects being observed as well as information about their relative distance and velocity. As the Universe expands, galaxies move away from each other, and their light is shifted to longer, redder wavelengths. The more distant the galaxy, the greater its ‘redshift’. By measuring galaxy redshifts, DESI researchers will create a 3D map of the Universe.
Dark energy – and more
The map detailing the distribution of galaxies is expected to yield new insights on the influence and nature of dark energy, which makes up around 70% of the energy in the universe today. Researchers also hope to learn about the degree to which gravity follows the laws of general relativity that form the basis of our understanding of the cosmos.
The universe is expanding at a rate determined by its total energy contents. The DESI instrument will be able to take snapshots of any set time - today, yesterday, 1 billion-years-ago, 2 billion-years-ago - to enable scientists to figure out the energy content in these snapshots and see how it is evolving.
But at the same time, the instrument is so powerful that other cosmological experiments can be carried out in parallel, allocating some fibres to take spectra from faint stars in nearby dwarf galaxies, measuring their orbital velocities and hence learning about the distribution of dark matter in these galaxies.
International collaboration
An international team, including colleagues from the School’s Institute for Astronomy have collaborated on this project for more than a decade. Edinburgh’s expertise stems from the Institute’s work on the influential Two-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) for which the School of Physics & Astronomy's Professor John Peacock was jointly awarded the Shaw Prize for Astronomy in 2014. More recently, a significant expansion of the Institute for Astronomy has brought two new faculty members with a strong interest in DESI: Florian Beutler, who is an expert in statistics of galaxy clustering, and Sergey Koposov, who is an expert in using local dwarf galaxies to understand galaxy formation.
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Congratulations to Professor Judy Hardy and Dr Jean-Christophe Denis for their success in the 2021 EUSA Teaching Awards.
Professor Hardy won the award for Personal Tutor of the Year. Personal Tutors provide academic guidance and support to students. Comments in support of Judy’s nomination include: “[She is] extremely generous with her time, she always made her students feel valued. She is the epitome of what a good personal tutor should be: kind, caring and committed to helping her students.”
Dr Denis received the award for Support Staff of the Year. Jean-Christophe (or JC as he is known by students and staff) works as Outreach Officer and runs a Physics Outreach Team of students. Feedback in support of JC’s nomination include: “His support from the start and especially throughout this very challenging year has been invaluable to me and thanks to this I feel like I have grown a lot both as a science communicator and personally.”
Professor Hardy commented:
I was incredibly touched to be nominated, and then when I heard that I’d been shortlisted, it was actually quite difficult to take in. So I’d like to thank EUSA for this recognition. Without question, it’s a real boost. Being a Personal Tutor is part of a team effort, so I’d also like to thank my colleagues, including our outstanding Student Support Team. But especially I’d like to thank the students who nominated me. It really does mean a great deal to know that what we do makes a difference.
Dr Denis reported:
I would like to sincerely thank all of the students who nominated me and wrote such heart-warming statements. Working with students is a favourite part of my job, but in a world impacted by COVID, my work has been radically changed and the way I work with students has been challenged. I’m still not sure I have been able to provide the same level of quality interactions as usual, but these nominations and this victory reassures me in thinking that I positively impacted the lives of some students at least.
EUSA Teaching Awards
Staff play a pivotal role in the student experience at Edinburgh, from lecturers and tutors to supervisors, Personal Tutors and professional services staff. The annual Teaching Awards provide students with an opportunity to thank staff for their hard work and celebrate the very best of teaching and support at the University. Over 1300 staff received over 2800 nominations, all of which were reviewed by a student shortlisting panel. Many congratulations on the winners, nominees, and all those who have continued to provide an excellent standard of teaching and student support during a time of challenging personal and professional circumstances.
University collaborative TestEd project seeks to establish methods to detect SARS-CoV-2 in asymptomatic carriers in the University's staff and student populations.
When Professor Neil Turok accepted the Higgs Chair at the University of Edinburgh, he did not expect to be working in microbiology. However, the urgency of tackling COVID-19 has sparked many unusual collaborations.
When he arrived in Edinburgh in September 2020, Professor Turok collaborated with biologists at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer (IGC) to formulate TestEd: a high-accuracy, low-cost, user-friendly system for detecting COVID-19.
What is TestEd?
One of the reasons that the pandemic has been difficult to control is that up to 50% of cases of COVID-19 infection are asymptomatic, and that a similar proportion of COVID-19 transmissions can derive from asymptomatic carriers. Current testing for COVID-19 is aimed primarily at symptomatic individuals, so asymptomatic cases are not detected and pre-symptomatic cases cannot be detected until symptoms have developed.
Large-scale screening of at risk populations for carriage of SARS-CoV-2, the causative COVID-19 virus, can, in theory, identify pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers, enabling control measures to prevent or minimise the risk of transmission from such carriers. However, in practice, current methods are either too labour intensive or too costly for large-scale testing.
The TestEd project seeks to develop and establish accurate and cost-effective methods to test for and detect SARS-CoV-2 in the saliva of asymptomatic carriers of the virus in the University's staff and student populations.
Funding
Supported with seed funding from the University, TestEd has now been awarded a £1.8mUK Research Innovation (UKRI) grant to expand and rigorously prove its system by making twice weekly testing available to all students and staff at Edinburgh.
The overall aim is to minimise infection and transmission of infection within the University's staff and student population.
Hypercube algorithm
This is not the first project relating to COVID-19 which Professor Turok has been involved with. During the first UK lockdown, Neil helped to develop an algorithm for pooled testing based on higher-dimensional hypercubes.
Astrophysicists in the School of Physics & Astronomy have secured a spectacular series of observational programmes on the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope will be the largest, most powerful and complex space telescope ever built and launched into space.
It is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope, with longer wavelength coverage and greatly improved sensitivity.
The longer wavelengths will enable the JWST to look much closer to the beginning of time and to hunt for the as yet unobserved formation of the first galaxies, as well as to look inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today.
Observation programmes
Following proposal submission in November 2020, and competitive anonymous peer review, the time allocations for the first year (Cycle 1) of observing on JWST were announced at the end of March 2021.
Professor Jim Dunlop (Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy) has secured the largest programme in the “Galaxies” science category (and one of the three largest JWST proposals overall), with 190 hours awarded for the PRIMER survey to explore galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe. Professor Philip Best (Head of the Institute for Astronomy) has been awarded 40 hours for the first `blind’ H-alpha study of star formation within the first billion years of cosmic time. Dr Adam Carnall (Leverhulme Fellow) has been awarded 8 hours to undertake a detailed infrared spectroscopic investigation of the oldest known galaxy in the young Universe. These three new Edinburgh-led Cycle-1 General Observer programmes add to the Early Release Science (ERS) observing time already secured on JWST by Professor Beth Biller (as co- Principal Investigator (PI)) for the study of exoplanets.
Together, these awards account for ~40% of all the JWST time awarded to UK PIs in Cycle 1. This success is testimony to the research strengths of the School of Physics & Astronomy in cosmology and galaxy evolution. It also reaffirms the continued value of the deep and long-standing relationship between the University’s Institute for Astronomy (IfA) and STFC’s UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UKATC) at the Royal Observatory, with Prof Gillian Wright (UKATC Director) having co-led the development (as European PI) of the mid-infrared instrument, MIRI, on JWST (which will be used extensively in Professor Dunlop’s PRIMER infrared imaging survey).
Altering our understanding of the universe
Given the huge technical advances offered by the JWST (in size, low temperature, and instrumentation), these complementary programmes should revolutionise our understanding of cosmic history, and in particular our understanding of how and when the very first stars and galaxies formed in the wake of the Big Bang.
JWST has a planned launch in October 2021. Launch will be followed by around 6 months of deployment and testing (including unfolding of the huge gold-plated telescope mirror and unfurling of the even larger sunshield) as the telescope journeys to its observing location at L2 (the second Lagrangian point), in deep cold space, around 1 million miles from earth. Observing is therefore expected to commence in Spring 2022, approximately one year from now.
JWST Cycle 1 observers programme
Further details of the observing programmes allocated to School of Physics and Astronomy colleagues are as follows:
- PRIMER survey to explore galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe
Principal Investigator: Professor Jim Dunlop
Title: PRIMER: Public Release IMaging for Extragalactic Research
Programme: 1837
- The first `blind’ H-alpha study of star formation within the first billion years of cosmic time
Principal Investigator: Professor Philip Best
Title: The first blind H-alpha narrow-band survey of star-formation at z>6
Programme: 2321
- Infrared spectroscopic investigation of the oldest known galaxy in the young Universe
Principal Investigator: Dr Adam Carnall
Title: A massive quiescent galaxy at redshift 4.657
Programme: 2285
Full information on the above programmes, including abstracts and technical details on the observing allocations, as well as the full list of JWST Cycle-1 observing time allocations is available online:
Full list of JWST Cycle-1 observing time allocations
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An international team of astronomers has published the most sensitive images of the Universe ever taken at low radio frequencies, using the International Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). By observing the same regions of sky over and over again and combining the data to make a single very-long exposure image, the team has detected the faint radio glow of stars exploding as supernovae, in tens of thousands of galaxies out to the most distant parts of the Universe. A special issue of the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics is dedicated to fourteen research papers describing these images and the first scientific results.
Cosmic star formation
Philip Best, Professor of Extragalactic Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, who led the deep survey, explained:
When we look at the sky with a radio telescope, the brightest objects we see are produced by massive black holes at the centre of galaxies. However, our images are so deep that most of the objects in it are galaxies like our own Milky Way, which emit faint radio waves that trace their on-going star-formation. The combination of the high sensitivity of LOFAR and the wide area of sky covered by our survey – about 300 times the size of the full moon – has enabled us to detect tens of thousands of galaxies like the Milky Way, far out into the distant Universe. The light from these galaxies has been travelling for billions of years to reach the Earth; this means that we see the galaxies as they were billions of years ago, back when they were forming most of their stars.
Isabella Prandoni, from INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) Bologna, added:
Star formation is usually enshrouded in dust, which obscures our view when we look with optical telescopes. But radio waves penetrate the dust, so with LOFAR we obtain a complete picture of their star-formation.
The deep LOFAR images have led to a new relation between a galaxy’s radio emission and the rate at which it is forming stars, and a more accurate measurement of the number of new stars being formed in the young Universe.
Exotic objects
The remarkable dataset has enabled a wide range of additional scientific studies, ranging from the nature of the spectacular jets of radio emission produced by massive black holes, to that arising from collisions of huge clusters of galaxies. It has also thrown up unexpected results. For example, by comparing the repeated observations, the researchers searched for objects that change in radio brightness. This resulted in the detection of the red dwarf star CR Draconis. Joe Callingham of Leiden University noted that:
CR Draconis shows bursts of radio emission that strongly resemble those from Jupiter, and may be driven by the interaction of the star with a previously unknown planet.
Huge computational challenge
LOFAR does not directly produce maps of the sky; instead the signals from more than 70,000 antennas must be combined. To produce these deep pictures, more than 4 petabytes of raw data - equivalent to about a million DVDs – were taken and processed.
Cyril Tasse, Paris Observatory commented:
The deep radio images of our Universe are diffusely hidden, deep inside the vast amount of data that LOFAR has observed. Recent mathematical advances made it possible to extract these, using large clusters of computers.
Multi-wavelength data
Just as important in extracting the science has been a comparison of these radio images with data obtained at other wavelengths. Professor Best explained:
The parts of the sky we chose are the best-studied in the Northern sky.
This has allowed the team to assemble optical, near-infrared, far-infrared and sub-millimetre data for the LOFAR-detected galaxies, which has been crucial in interpreting the LOFAR results.
LOFAR
LOFAR is the world’s leading telescope of its type. It is operated by ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and coordinated by a partnership of 9 European countries: France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the UK. In its ‘high-band’ configuration, LOFAR observes at frequencies of around 150 MHz – between the FM and DAB radio bands.
Huub Röttgering, Leiden University, who is leading the overall suite of LOFAR surveys, said:
LOFAR is unique in its ability to make high-quality images of the sky at metre-wavelengths. These deep field images are a testament to its capabilities and a treasure trove for future discoveries.
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Congratulations to Davide Michieletto who has received an award from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group.
The Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group currently offers this Early Career Award biennially to an exceptional scientist working in the broadly defined area of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.
Davide’s award is for 'outstanding contributions to the field of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and topologically active materials inspired by DNA and genomes of living cells'.
In his short time as a researcher, Davide has built an international reputation in understanding how the topology of biological and synthetic polymers affect the macroscopic properties of complex fluids and soft materials, and has an impressive publication record. He has developed groundbreaking computer simulations of DNA-inspired material science, chromosomes and epigenetics, as well as making theoretical advances in polymer science.
Davide’s infectious passion for science and his highly interdisciplinary research projects are attracting numerous and strong students (from BSc to PhD) keen to work in this new exhilarating field at the interface of soft matter and molecular biology.
Davide holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and is based in the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine.
Congratulations to Professors Ross McLure and Alex Murphy of the School of Physics and Astronomy, who today were among the 87 distinguished individuals elected to become Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Scotland’s national academy, has revealed its newly selected 2021 Fellows. These new Fellows will join the RSE’s current roll of around 1,600 leading thinkers and practitioners from Scotland and beyond, whose work has a significant impact on our nation.
Newly selected Fellows
Ross is Professor of Extragalactic Astrophysics and is based in the School’s Institute for Astronomy. His research is focused on determining the physical properties of the first galaxies to form in the early history of the Universe. The goal of this research is to improve our understanding of the earliest phases of galaxy evolution and to unveil the sources responsible for the re-ionization of the Universe some 13 billion years ago.
On his election Ross said:
I am honoured to be joining the Fellowship of the RSE. I am looking forward to working alongside the many remarkable Fellows to promote the wide-ranging objectives of the Society.
Alex is Professor of Nuclear & Particle Astrophysics, and is based in the School’s Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics. His research is on direct detection of dark matter, and nuclear astrophysics, especially explosive scenarios.
On his election Alex commented:
I feel humbled to be selected in such good company with existing RSE Fellows. I am delighted to be able to have the opportunity to support the RSE’s valuable work.
Commenting on the new fellows, Professor Dame Anne Glover, President of The Royal Society of Edinburgh said:
As Scotland’s national academy we recognise excellence across a diverse range of expertise and experience, and its effect on Scottish society. This impact is particularly clear this year in the latest cohort of new Fellows which includes scientists who are pioneering the way we approach the coronavirus; those from the arts who have provided the rich cultural experience we have all been missing, and some who have demonstrated strong leadership in guiding their organisations and communities through this extraordinary time. Through uniting these great minds from different walks of life, we can discover creative solutions to some of the most complex issues that Scotland faces. A warm welcome is extended to all of our new Fellows.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy, is an educational charity established in 1783. Unlike similar organisations in the rest of the UK, the RSE’s strength lies in the breadth of disciplines represented by its Fellowship. Its membership includes Fellows from across the entire academic spectrum – science and technology, arts, humanities, social sciences, business, and public service. New Fellows are elected to the RSE each year through a rigorous five-stage nomination process. This range of expertise enables the RSE to take part in a host of activities such as: providing independent and expert advice to Government and Parliament; supporting aspiring entrepreneurs through mentorship; facilitating education programmes for young people, and engaging the general public through educational events.