Recreational sea angling is an incredibly popular activity in the UK with the around 758,000 adults taking part annually. Alongside its associated wellbeing benefits, fish are a critical food source for humans. Worryingly, the catch of biologically sustainable fish stocks has decreased while the biologically unsustainable proportion has risen sharply. The solution to slowing these trends is multifaceted, but it is widely accepted that ensuring the sustainability of global fish stocks is dependent on the effective interplay between policy, individual behaviors, and the features of the marine environment itself. Management strategies spanning these factors are key in ensuring human needs are met while fish stocks remain sustainable. While the commercial fishing sector has gained much attention in this respect, recreational fishing is also now recognized as critically important in the sustainability of marine resources. In response, environmental policies in several countries worldwide have given more weight to marine recreational fishing. This became particularly relevant to the UK with the introduction of the Fisheries Act 2020 following Brexit. For the first time, the UK government explicitly embedded recreational sea angling in the fisheries policy framework in response to a growing need to take a more holistic approach to the sustainable management of marine resources. However, at that point little was known about the recreational sea angling community in the UK to support this new integration and research had shown that management strategies are improved when catering for diverse needs and expectations of stakeholders. Understanding differences among recreational sea anglers is therefore vital for effectively managing UK marine fisheries. My doctoral research presented the first typology of recreational sea anglers in England and Wales to inform future fisheries policy in the UK. Heterogeneity across anglers taking part in the study was best described by a typology consisting of four types: consumers; trophy anglers, leisure-identity anglers; and social anglers. Several data-driven conclusions were made: angler types reflect those generated by other studies on mixed/freshwater fisheries outside the UK; attitudes varied across the sample more than behaviors, specifically views on the importance on angling in life and the environment, and; specialization did not feature as appropriate theory to describe diversity in the sample. A refined data collection tool based on angler self-allocation was also designed as part of the research with the aim of inclusion in future catch reporting studies; this will improve the accuracy of catch data based on studies using samples that may be disproportionate regarding the inclusion of different angler types. The research also demonstrated variation in the likely responses to different policy objectives based on angler type, highlighting that blanket style policies are likely to be less effective when aimed at a diverse end user group. There are four aims of the fellowship: 1) to use the data gathered in my doctoral research to produce a series of related journal publications; 2) to invest in new research that continues to understand the impact of angler type, specifically in the context of compliance to sea bass regulation in the UK; 3) to collaborate with DEFRA in order to further embed the research findings in current and future fisheries policy; 4) use the consolidated outputs of the fellowship to kick-start an academic career in research and teaching including a RCUK/EU research bid focusing on standardizing measures of angler heterogeneity in policy.

Plants are under constant attack from a diverse set of both old and newly emerging pathogens that cause disease. Diseases of crops take away an estimated 20-40% of our crop yields every year [1], leading to serious food shortages that have devastating impacts on the health and well-being of over 800 million people estimated to be food insecure [2]. To prevent yield losses, we need to understand what tools pathogens use to cause disease; these tools are referred to as "virulence" genes. We also need to understand how pathogens that infect the same crop might share these tools with each other. The sharing of virulence genes between unrelated pathogens is known as "horizontal gene transfer" (HGT). HGT between pathogenic species is dangerous because it can lead to rapid changes in speed at which a pathogen damages the plant, driving much larger yield losses. HGT is also known to lead to the rapid spread of antibiotic resistance genes. While we have a good understanding of the ways in which bacterial pathogens use HGT to exchange virulence/antibiotic resistance genes, our knowledge of how fungal pathogens do this is very limited. This lack of knowledge is of grave concern as fungal diseases are already difficult to control, and the growing negative impact of fungi is a risk to both human and plant health. I have recently discovered that a virulence gene, called ToxA, has jumped via HGT between three fungal wheat pathogens inside of a giant transposon. Transposons, also known as "jumping genes", contain genetic machinery that enables them to move around a genome. The finding of ToxA in a transposon is important because this protein alone can cause serious disease symptoms on wheat, and if transferred to a new fungal species a new disease could emerge. These giant transposons belong to a new transposon group called "Starships". They are unusual because of their large size, often exceeding some small fungal chromosomes, because they carry many genes. I hypothesize that the extra genes that Starships carry enable them to move themselves between different fungal species. The goal of this Fellowship is to uncover how Starships jump both within a genome inside one species and also between different fungal species, with the intention to use this knowledge to then predict which fungal species Starships can hop into. Starships have only been described within the last year making them very novel and exciting new components of fungal biology. I aim to be one of the first groups in the world to understand how these Starships work and how they might threaten our global crop yields by moving dangerous genes between different fungal pathogens. In the long-term my aim is to adapt these transposons for our own use in biotechnology by programming them to capture genetic material of our choice and moving this material into a suitable host for further study. Adapting natural systems, such as Starships, for our own use in bioengineering has led to several monumental steps forward in human health, sustainable production of biomaterials and medicines. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021 [2] https://www.fao.org/3/cc0639en/online/cc0639en.html

Anticoagulant rodenticides have been used for control of rodents (principally rats and mice in the UK) for over 50 years. UK and European legislation requires that manufacturers of poison baits provide efficacy data, including how many rodents are killed by a new bait formulation. As a consequence a small number of procedures are carried out in the UK every year which necessitate allowing animals to die from anticoagulant poisoning. There is a lag-time, of 4-6 days, from ingestion of bait to death associated with all anticoagulant rodenticides. This project aims to identify behavioural or biochemical markers during that lag-time that can be used to predict death or survival and allow humane methods to be used for ending the experiment before the animals die.

Half of humanity - 3.5 billion people - lives in cities today and 68% of the world's population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050. This increase in urbanisation is contributing to biodiversity decline worldwide due to changing land use. At the same time, digital technologies are changing our cities. Innovations such as real-time bus information, smart rubbish bins, smart parking, and smart street lighting are often referred to as the smart city, and optimistically promised as a social and environmental good. But these interventions generally fail to take into account the ways in which human and non-human inhabitants of cities (such as plants, animals, micro-organisms, as well as sensors) are inter-related and interdependent in urban space. The MoSaIC: More-than-Human Sustainable and Inclusive Smart Cities fellowship will investigate the design of more inclusive, sustainable and flourishing smart cities. It will do this by exploring how digital technologies such as networked sensors, AI, and data visualisation approaches can help us plan and design smart cities for all their inhabitants - human as well as other species. The research will be undertaken in three living labs, which are real world testbeds for co-creating research and innovation in public-private-people partnerships. These will take place in three types of site: urban community gardens, buildings, and waterways. In these living labs we will co-design new prototypes that demonstrate how digital technologies can enable sustainable, more-than-human smart cities in practice and policy. We will use inclusive and creative co-design methods, working in close collaboration with key community, business, and policy partners to include the perspectives of human and non-human inhabitants. We will produce the following outputs from the research: new methods for decentering the human in smart cities, new digital and data visualisation prototypes, new artworks and a book, open source toolkit and data sets, practical guidelines for designing more-than-human smart cities in for industry, policy and with communities, an interdisciplinary workshop and cross-sector symposium for the general public. We will also conduct public engagement and dissemination activities that include art commissions and an exhibition that will help to deliver a transformational agenda to the wider public and create impact at scale.

This project will fund a fellowship placement for a mid-career researcher to work for 9 months with the better regulation teams at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Environment Agency (EA). 'Better Regulation' is the UK government's approach to developing regulation that achieves the desired outcome while avoiding unintended consequences and limiting costs for companies, consumers and the taxpayer. For Defra and the EA, the challenge is to improve, simplify, consolidate and even remove environmental regulations, while achieving at least equivalent outcomes for the environment, society and the economy. Academic research can offer useful guidance on how to tackle this challenge through providing evidence on the impacts, costs and benefits of various approaches to environmental regulation. The project will enable a researcher who specialises in company responses to environmental regulation to provide their expertise to Defra and the EA. During the fellowship the researcher will (1) collate research evidence on the relationships between environmental regulation, innovation, firm performance and economic growth, and (2) consult these and other government agencies to develop an action plan for future research collaboration on better regulation for a sustainable economy.