Dr James Aird and Dr Maxwell T. Hansen awarded Future Leaders Fellowships

Congratulations to Dr James Aird and Dr Maxwell T. Hansen who have been awarded UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowships.

The UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships have been instigated to ensure the strong supply of talented individuals needed for a vibrant environment for research and innovation in the UK.  In this third round of the Fellowships, we are pleased that two successful candidates have chosen the School of Physics and Astronomy as their new home.

Galaxy evolution, and challenging the Standard Model

Dr James Aird will be joining the Institute for Astronomy.  He will use his Future Leaders Fellowship to probe the lifecycles of supermassive black holes on timescales of millions to billions of years, and thus determine their impact on the growth and evolution of the galaxies they lie in. To achieve this, he will develop new statistical tools to combine data from a range of new, large astronomical surveys spanning X-ray, optical and radio wavelengths.

Dr Max Hansen, who will be joining the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, is a theorist seeking evidence for phenomena that go beyond the current paradigm of particle physics, the Standard Model. Specifically, he is focused on understanding the role of the strong force in uncovering new physics signatures. He will use his Future Leaders Fellowship to combine cutting-edge high-performance computing with an advanced theoretical framework to inform experiments challenging the Standard Model, such as those being performed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

These Fellowships follow Anna Lisa Varri and Franz Herzog who were successful in the first two rounds of the award.

UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship

The scheme will help the next generation of researchers, tech entrepreneurs, business leaders and innovators across different sectors and disciplines to get the support they need to develop their careers. Awardees will each receive between £400,000 and £1.5 million over an initial four years, supporting novel projects, equipment and personal development.