Congratulations to Dr Rosa Santomartino who has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. This Fellowship is intended to assist those who are at a relatively early stage of their academic career to undertake a significant piece of publishable work.
Space microbiology
Dr Santomartino is based in the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems. Her research in space microbiology focuses on the molecular mechanisms that drive microbial interaction with natural and artificial environments in space, to perform space biomanufacturing, recycling and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), and to promote an efficient and sustainable impact of space exploration and its terrestrial applications.
She performed two microbiology experiments onboard the International Space Station, BioRock and BioAsteroid, launched in space in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Her work provided the first demonstrations of biomining on a space station, and raised considerable scientific interest, growing her reputation as an expert in the field. She is an invited scientific advisor in microbiology for the Italian Space Agency, and collaborates with international scientists for the creation of the NASA Decadel Survay on microbiology.
Fellowship
The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship will provide her the opportunity to establish a new interdisciplinary research direction in Edinburgh and worldwide, and to create a strong collaboration with the School of Biological Sciences.
The School welcomes applications from both external and internal scientists interested in applying for personal fellowships. In particular we have an internal deadline on 15 July 2021 for STFC Ernest Rutherford, Royal Society and EPSRC Fellowships.
We are keen to attract outstanding researchers from Edinburgh and across the world to join us as Postdoctoral Fellows. We offer a high quality research environment and support for you in your fellowship application process.
Fellowship opportunities
The School operates an internal review process for the following fellowship opportunities which have a deadline of Thursday 15 July 2021:
- STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowships
- Royal Society University Research Fellowships
- EPSRC Open and Postdoctoral Fellowships
We also welcome applicants for other fellowships, the full list of which can be found on the weblink below.
Application information
Candidates are expected to have a PhD in Physics, Astronomy or a related discipline, and in most cases a few years research experience, as well as the ability to present clear evidence of their potential to undertake leading research.
The School of Physics and Astronomy is committed to advancing equality and diversity, welcoming applications from everyone irrespective of gender, ethnic group or nationality.
How to apply
Candidates must submit information including a research statement, CV and list of publications. Full application information can be found on the weblink below.
Astronomers have spotted a giant ‘blinking’ star, 100 times the size of the sun, towards the centre of the Milky Way.
Scientists observed that the enormous star, which lies 25,000 light years away, almost disappeared from the sky before slowly returning to its former brightness. Many stars in the Galaxy change in brightness because they pulsate or they are eclipsed by another orbiting star. However, it’s exceptionally rare for a star to become fainter over a period of several months and then brighten again, experts say.
Twinkle twinkle
Researchers believe the star, known as VVV-WIT-08, might belong to a new class of ‘blinking giant’ star system, where a huge star is eclipsed once every few decades by an as-yet unseen orbital companion.
The partner, which may be another star or planet, is surrounded by an opaque disc that covers the giant star, causing it to disappear and reappear in the sky.
As the blinking star is located in a dense region of the Milky Way, scientists considered whether an unknown dark object could have simply drifted in front of the giant star by chance. However, simulations showed that there would have to be an implausibly large number of dark bodies floating around the galaxy for this scenario to be likely.
Researchers from the University’s School of Astronomy and Physics collaborated on the discovery with experts from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the study, the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Warsaw in Poland and Universidad Andres Bello in Chile.
VISTA telescope
VVV-WIT-08 was found by the Via Lactea survey (VVV) – a project using the British-built VISTA telescope in Chile and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ESO has been observing the same one billion stars for nearly a decade to search for those with varying brightness.
While VVV-WIT-08 was discovered using VVV data, the dimming of the star was observed by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, a long-running observation campaign run by the University of Warsaw.
Shining brightly
Edinburgh’s astronomers worked on the scientific modelling of the changes in the brightness of the star. Specifically they tried to understand the shape, opacity and velocity of the giant star’s orbital companion, through their analysis of the variations in VVV-WIT-08’s brightness. Scientists hope that future observations of VVV-WIT-08 in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum may shed some light on the nature of this mysterious companion.
Dr Sergey Koposov, Co-author and Reader in Observational Astronomy, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh said:
The discovery of this rare star is very exciting, not only because the object itself is a bit of a mystery, but also because it tells us what discoveries can be made when we can access not only one single image of the sky, but when we’re able to observe its evolution with time. Essentially we are able to look at the movies of the sky as opposed to single photographs and this opens up a lot of opportunities for new discoveries.
Professor Philip Lucas, project co-leader, University of Hertfordshire reported:
Occasionally we find variable stars that don’t fit into any established category, which we call ‘what-is-this?’, or ‘WIT’ objects. We really don’t know how these blinking giants came to be. It’s exciting to see such discoveries from VVV after so many years planning and gathering the data.
Dr Leigh Smith, Project lead, University of Cambridge, Institute of Astronomy commented:
There now appear to be around half a dozen potential known star systems of this type, containing giant stars and large opaque discs. There are certainly more to be found, but the challenge now is in figuring out what the hidden companions are, and how they came to be surrounded by discs, despite orbiting so far from the giant star. In doing so, we might learn something new about how these kinds of systems evolve.
The study is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
An extraordinarily precise measurement made by UK researchers using the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN has provided the first evidence that charm mesons can change into their antiparticle and back again.
For more than 10 years, scientists knew that charm (D0, ‘D-zero’) mesons, subatomic particles that contain a quark and an antiquark, can travel as a mixture of their particle and antiparticle states, a phenomenon called mixing. However, this new result shows for the first time that they can oscillate between the two states.
In the strange world of quantum physics, the D0 meson can be itself and its antiparticle at once. This state, known as quantum superposition, results in two particles each with their own mass – a heavier and lighter version of the D0 particle. This superposition allows the D0 to oscillate into its antiparticle and back again.
The research, published today in Physical Review Letters, received funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and involved colleagues from the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Warwick.
Dr Mark Williams at the School of Physics and Astronomy’s Particle Physics Experiment research group, who convened the LHCb Charm Physics Group within which the research was performed, said:
Tiny measurements like this can tell you big things about the Universe that you didn’t expect.
Prof Franz Muheim from the School of Physics and Astronomy’s Particle Physics Experiment research group, who is chair of the LHCb Editorial Board and was internal reviewer of the paper said:
This observation of the mixing between neutral charmed meson is a further milestone in trying to elucidate the difference between the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe.
Using data collected during the second run of the Large Hadron Collider, the researchers measured a difference in mass between the two particles of 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 grams – or in scientific notation 1x10-38g. This small mass difference leads to a very slow rate of oscillation: the time taken for one transition from particle to antiparticle and back is over 1000 times longer than the typical particle lifetime, making this a very rare process. It took all of the data collected by the LHCb experiment from 2015-2018 to make this discovery, along with a novel method to reduce experimental uncertainties.
There are only four types of particle in the Standard Model, the theory that explains particle physics, that can turn into their antiparticle. The mixing phenomenon was first observed in Strange (K0) mesons in the 1960s and in beauty (B) mesons in the 1980s. Until now, the only other particle that has been seen to oscillate is the strange-beauty (BS) meson, a measurement made in 2006.
This discovery of charm meson oscillation opens up a new and exciting phase of physics exploration; researchers now want to understand the oscillation process itself, potentially a major step forward in solving the mystery of matter-antimatter asymmetry. A key area to explore is whether the rate of particle-antiparticle transitions is the same as that of antiparticle-particle transitions, and specifically whether the transitions are influenced/caused by unknown particles not predicted by the Standard Model.
The result, 1x10-38g, crosses the ‘five sigma’ level of statistical significance that is required to claim a discovery in particle physics.
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Professor Catherine Heymans, a world-leading expert on the physics of the so-called dark universe, has been awarded the prestigious title, which dates back almost 200 years.
Heymans was recommended to the Queen for the role by an international panel, convened by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing at Ruhr-University Bochum.
Her research seeks to shed light on the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter – elusive entities that together account for more than 95 per cent of the Universe.
Created in 1834, the position of Astronomer Royal for Scotland was originally held by the director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Since 1995, however, it has been awarded as an honorary title. The previous holder, Professor John C Brown, passed away in 2019.
As the eleventh Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor Heymans’ main focus will be on sharing her passion for astronomy with Scots from all walks of life. One of her first targets is to install telescopes at all of Scotland’s remote outdoor learning centres, which are visited by most of the country’s school pupils.
Professor Catherine Heymans, of the School of Physics and Astronomy, said:
I don’t think anyone forgets the first time they saw the rings of Saturn through a telescope, but too many people never have the chance. As Astronomer Royal for Scotland, I want to change that. My hope is that once that spark and connection with the Universe is made, children will carry that excitement home with them and develop a life-long passion for astronomy or, even better, science as a whole.
I am absolutely delighted to be named Astronomer Royal for Scotland and, as an advocate for equality and diversity, it is also a great honour to be the first woman appointed to the role. I will enthusiastically use this high-profile platform to advance amateur and professional astronomy within Scotland, and to promote Scotland internationally as a world-leading centre for science.
Professor Lord Martin Rees, the current UK Astronomer Royal, said:
It's excellent news that Professor Heymans has been appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland. She is a distinguished successor to her predecessors in this role and I wish her a long and successful tenure.
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, President (interim) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, said:
The Astronomer Royal for Scotland has always been a distinguished and respected astronomer, and Professor Heymans is exactly that. She will also always be distinguished as the first female to hold the position.
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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.