One of the most important searches for exoplanets in the next decade will be the Terra Hunting Experiment, since it aims to detect Earth-mass planets in Earth-like orbits around solar-type stars. The search will use the radial velocity method, i.e. searching for the motion of the star as star and planet orbit their common center of mass. To measure the radial velocities we are installing a new spectrograph on the Isaac Newton telescope in La Palma, as well as roboticising the telescope, and will then carry out a ten-year search for exoplanets. Although we will not be able to detect Earths in one-year orbits in the first few years of data, we should detect higher-mass and shorter-period planets, and so the graduate student will be involved in the early operations and early science.

Project description Record-breaking sea surface temperatures were observed around the UK in Summer 2023, and recent research has shown that the number of marine heatwaves globally has risen by more than 50% in the 30 years to 2016, compared with 1925-54. Marine heatwaves can result in the mass mortality of marine flora and fauna, leading to significant losses in habitat, biodiversity and income from fisheries and tourism. While it is clear that UK marine heatwaves will increase under climate change, the socio-economic implications and impacts on local marine ecosystems remains an important policy question. Aims and objectives This exciting project aims to evaluate the socio-economic and ecosystem impacts of marine heatwaves in the UK. The work will include analysis of both historical observations and state-of-the-art regional ocean climate projections to quantify the potential changes in frequency, intensity and duration of UK marine heatwaves over the 21st century. The potential scale and impacts of these events will be assessed through a combination of: (i) analysis of past data; (ii) literature reviews; and (iii) targeted modelling studies. A particular focus of the research will be on the increased potential for harmful algal blooms, with implications for aquaculture, water quality, tourism, and human health, alongside legal and policy aspects (e.g. health warnings) and socio-economic impacts (e.g. on the desirability and viability of existing tourist and aquaculture sites). Training Through the University of Exeter PGR supervision system, the student will have monthly supervision meetings, providing research support and ensuring sustained progress towards completing their project within 3 years and 8 months. The student will have access to the resources and support services available at the host and partner institutions. In particular, the student will receive advanced training in research design, research methodology, research ethics, and the necessary quantitative and qualitative methods, through well-established teaching modules (which will also help integrate the student into a community of learning). The University of Exeter Doctoral College stimulates, supports and sustains a vibrant research and intellectual environment across and between disciplines for postgraduate and early career researchers. The student will also be invited to be a member of relevant academic research centres and networks, including the Environmental Intelligence Network and Exeter Marine. Supervisory team The project will be supervised by a transdisciplinary team of researchers from The University of Exeter, Plymouth Marine Lab, Cefas and the Met Office.

Protein molecules are nanoscale machines that support almost all life processes. My research aims to understand how proteins change their structure in order to sense their environment and to catalyse chemical reactions. Knowledge of these biophysical rules will enable us to engineer proteins as biotechnology tools and medicines and will underpin the discovery of important new classes of drugs that are safer and less toxic than current chemotherapy. The processes of life are dynamic - it is change on a molecular level that enables us to grow and move, but also to become ill and treat disease. Just as the shape and posture of our body can determine our readiness to perform a task, the structure and conformation of a protein molecule can determine its function or activity. Humans make over 20,000 unique proteins and each of these needs to move in order to function - often undergoing dramatic changes in shape with no clear mechanism to link these to the environmental triggers. Crucially, it is the ability for proteins to reconfigure dynamically and rapidly that underpins many critical activities in biology, disease and medicine. However, we are currently limited to study proteins, including many important enzymes, at high resolution in space or time - but not both. Static structural models have contributed to major advances, such as in gene editing technology. This structural information is also critically important for drug discovery, accurately guiding design and optimisation efforts. These are major new applications that rely on precisely controlling dynamic changes in protein structure. These aims - and our understanding of fundamental biology - will be greatly advanced by bridging high resolution information in both time and space. We now have a unique opportunity to make measurements of the structural perturbations in large enzymes both with high structural resolution (per amino acid building block) and high temporal resolution (per millisecond). A vast number of naturally occurring proteins across all of life employ allostery to regulate biological processes in response to their changing environment, notably the archetypal allosteric enzyme, glycogen phosphorylase. With our prototype instrumentation, we have provided a quantitative description of the intra-molecular regulation in the archetypal allosteric enzyme, glycogen phosphorylase. To observe changes in structure during the processes of enzyme regulation, we then created a novel method: non-equilibrium hydrogen/deuterium-exchange mass spectrometry (neHDX-MS). This resolved unexpected transient structural changes at near-amino acid resolution that occur during allosteric activation of glycogen phosphorylase, revealing that a short section - just 1% of the protein - dynamically reconfigures to facilitate activation of the enzyme. Excitingly, these changes are absent when the protein is measured in the inactive or active states, hence they went unnoticed for decades in this extensively studied enzyme. Our new method represents a straightforward way to identify transient protein dynamics that occur during almost any allosteric process. Therefore, we are now focused on its application to gene editing enzymes to identify currently hidden features that critically enable their regulation and catalytic function. We will then screen changes made to these highly focused locations in an effort to optimise properties critical to their use as biotechnology tools, such as specificity and efficiency. This research programme brings together expertise in building novel experimental methods, cutting edge data science approaches, development of new software tools and a direct relevance to fundamental biology and applications in biotechnology and drug discovery.

My doctoral thesis will produce the first in-depth, object-driven scholarship on mother-of-pearl (or nacre) in Enlightenment France, employing this mutable, iridescent medium as a new way to understand empire and otherness during the knowledge-seeking Siècle des Lumières. Heeding Michael Yonan's call to arms to bring materiality to the centre of art historical discourse, my artefact-focused research will use this conchological periphery's pearlescence, its resilience, its evanescent beams, to illuminate the themes of (in)visibility, loss and exploitation which starkly juxtaposed this enlightened era's traditional rhetoric of dazzling human progress. Mother-of-pearl is the concealed, autonomously-generated inner layer of some bivalve molluscs and snails, its highly-grooved surface diffracting light into myriad coloured rays which simultaneously bewitch and befuddle. Each nacre unique in colour, thickness and size, this composite material is non-biodegradable, nonporous and almost as strong as silicon. This enchanting, exotic substance was then 'ennobled' by the finest Parisian goldsmiths like Joseph Vallayer and Claude de Villers. Fashioned into exquisite items of sociability such as snuffboxes and bonbonnières housing transatlantic colonial commodities, it also featured in rifle, musical instrument and furniture inlay, buttons and interior decoration. Timely and original, my project will foreground and make links to wider histories of colonialism, human and environmental exploitation, and global trade and exploration, as well as interrogating the Enlightenment itself. Significantly, La Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes held the monopoly over the sale of tobacco in France, and over the Slave Trade, just at the point when trade with both China and India flourished. Furthermore, in the century when the pearling industry (and trade in its associated 'waste product') boomed, thousands of impoverished divers (who ranged in age from 15-60 and from the nineteenth century included enslaved Africans), risked shark-infested waters and decompression sickness to meet Western demand. Moreover, nacre - a material bridging the animal and mineral worlds and impossible to capture on the page - presented a puzzling challenge to eighteenth-century natural history taxonomy, a discipline which privileged the external over the internal. And yet its universality - as a substance consumed by both the elite, the poor, and available to maritime communities around the world - and its plasticity, perfectly manifested shifting notions of empire and enlightenment thought throughout this seminal period in global and colonial history. Indeed, if shells are an apt Enlightenment metaphor - emblematic of exploration, curiosity and erudition, and themselves 'catalysts of ideation', then mother-of-pearl, part of yet removed from its conchological origin, offers an exceptionally vivid, tangible means of revealing, expressing and problematising the numerous global Enlightenments recently uncovered by scholarship. This recentring project - bringing the inside out, the periphery to the centre - will be achieved by addressing the following research questions: How did mother-of-pearl's kaleidoscopic capriciousness and ephemeral shimmer reflect the ideological dichotomies and societal inequalities of France during the long eighteenth century? Might French imperial ambitions and exploits, so inherent to this tumultuous epoch, be traced in a series of scintillating case studies? And to what extent could nacre be regarded as metaphoric of centre and periphery - speaking variously of doctrine and counter-doctrine, metropole and empire, of both Ancien Regime and impassioned revolutionary fervour?

Our aim is to understand the reproductive behavior of animals of species in which offspring stay and help their parents raise siblings. Many species of mammals and birds do this, along with many insects, especially bees, ants and wasps. There is much variation in behaviour between and within species that is currently poorly understood. Life-history theory predicts how individual variation and environmental differences affect reproductive decisions such as age at maturity, fecundity and longevity. However, this theory does not apply to cooperative breeders because it ignores conflict over reproduction within groups. This gap is highly problematic because cooperative breeders and eusocial species often play critical roles in ecosystems (e.g. pollination, seed dispersal, crop herbivory, pest predation). This is impeding our ability to predict how organisms respond to changing environments, and their interactions with other species. This knowledge is imperative for securing the future of our natural resources.