Brain research has witnessed remarkable advances in recent decades. And yet, the dynamics of neural circuits, their specification of an animal's behaviours, adaptation to context or internal state, and variability across individuals, remain poorly understood. To integrate neuronal function, circuit-level computation, and brain-wide coordination, whole-brain imaging in freely-behaving animals is essential. While daunting in most animals this technology is available and fast-maturing in the mm-long nematode, C. elegans. Despite its relative simplicity, C. elegans is a freely behaving animal that makes decisions, learns, forgets, adapts to ever-changing conditions, and engages in collective behaviour, in order to survive, forage for food and escape predation. Like all animals, it develops, sleeps and ages, and its study has proved it a powerful model system for neurobiology, neurogenetics, the neural basis of learning, plasticity and behaviour, and neurodegeneration. While the functions of many C. elegans neurons have been studied extensively, understanding the dynamics of larger circuits poses new challenges: whole-brain imaging provides essential observation of neuronal activity, but not the interactions between neurons. We therefore argue that to obtain an integrated understanding at cellular, circuit and global-brain levels requires mechanistic and explanatory models. Such models must account for brain-wide activity that emerges from the neural circuitry, as specified by an animal's connectome. To address this goal, our overall aim is to build the first digital twin of the C. elegans brain. A digital twin is a software representation of a real-world system, used as a model to predict, explain or control the system's response under different conditions. While commonly applied to engineering assets, the methodology, and the challenges (in particular, limited access to the internal working and limited observables of the outputs) suggest important commonalities with whole-brain modelling from data. Specific objectives include: AI: To develop AI tools to train a digital twin, based on whole-brain-activity data constrained by the C. elegans connectome. To apply, test and extend optimisation methods for whole-brain models of individual animals, using brain-wide activity data for >50 animals. To augment whole-brain-data and bootstrap our optimisation methods using deep neural models that learn low-dimensional representations of high-dimensional time-series (i.e. neural activity traces). To unify our framework in order to obtain families of solutions representing clusters of model animals with similar neuronal activation patterns and behavioural encoding. To develop and apply novel AI tools for training populations of models based on populations of datasets, using probabilistic and population density tools. Digital Twin: To develop biologically-grounded mechanistic models of the C. elegans brain, at cellular resolution. To implement neuronal and circuit models with appropriate grounding in C. elegans neurobiology, e.g. the conserved and variable connectome, known synaptic polarities, bilateral symmetry, etc. To test and evaluate optimised models against data and implement post-selection mechanisms for successful solutions, based on biological realism. To apply successful models in simulations to derive predictions for validation experiments and new hypotheses for future research, with focus on understanding distributed encoding and its flexibility, adaptability and variability. If successful, a digital twin will transform our understanding of the C. elegans brain, and hence, the nervous systems of other animals. This project, will put in place AI tools that bring us closer to this goal. The novel AI, and the integration of AI, simulations and complex data, will benefit the construction of other digital twins, across life and engineering sciences.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The fellowship will support the completion of a book, titled 'How Does Speech Timing Work?'. Speakers manipulate speech sound durations for a variety of meaning-related purposes. This book will discuss the kinds of timing patterns people produce when they speak, and will evaluate theories of how speech articulation is controlled to produce these timing patterns. Because speech timing patterns are often termed rhythmic, it will also discuss available definitions of speech rhythm, and will evaluate rhythmicity claims for speech against available evidence. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in how speech production works, including linguists, psycholinguists, motor control specialists, speech technologists, and speech therapists.

Advanced composites have been used extensively in high performance lightweight applications ranging from aerospace, automotive to renewable energy sectors, with a global market of composite products over £60bn by 2017 together with a compound annual growth rate of 7% since 2011, and a projected £10bn growth in sales of composites in UK industry by 2030. However, with the ever increasing demand for zero-impact and sustainable development, the environmental impact of each stage from composite production to their end-of-life options should be considered to take the advantage of this high growth rate in the composite sector. Three important questions remain for the clean growth of the sector: (1) how can we manufacture the composites in an environmentally sustainable way, i.e. reduce the energy consumption for the rapid growing production needs; (2) how to effectively reduce, recycle, and reclaim valuable materials from end-of-life composite wastes; (3) how to truly reveal the lightweight feature of composites and reduce the overdesign in composites while avoiding unexpected catastrophic structural failures. This project will address all three questions by materials and manufacturing innovation, creating a circular economy for the composite industry by providing an extremely energy efficient and intrinsically safe manufacturing method based on recycled composite wastes as new functional fillers. With only 1% of energy consumption compared to current manufacturing methods, high performance composites with integrated new functions like deformation and damage sensing as well as de-icing will be manufactured without needs of even an oven. This new method will be tuned to fully comply with the processing requirements of existing high performance composite systems, reducing costs in capital investment, operational, and maintenance aspects. The new functions will also provide real-time health monitoring of components' structural integrity to enable condition based maintenance with high reliability. This research will be supported by a strong joint force from both academia (WMG, University of Warwick, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US) and UK industry (ELG Carbon fibres Ltd, and LMK Thermosafe Ltd), with leading expertise from polymer and nanocomposite processing, smart composites, to carbon fibre recycling and intrinsically safe heating applications, to ensure a great success of the project and a large impact on relevant research fields, as well as a direct contribution to addressing the UK Grand Challenges of "clean growth" and "future of mobility" and international competitiveness of the UK economy, with world leading development in lightweighting in transportation, manufacturing and efficient use of resources.

For millennia people have wondered, "Do other Earths exist?" "Are they common?" "Would they show signs of life?". We now have the technical capability to answer these questions. New radial-velocity spectrometers are capable of detecting the reflex motions of stars hosting Earth-mass planets in their habitable zones; the James Webb Space Telescope has the power to probe the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets. Yet the unprecedented precision of these instruments' measurement capabilities is up against a fundamental astrophysically-imposed barrier to achieving these goals: contamination of exoplanetary signals by stellar activity and variability. Further progress is contingent on solving this "variability problem". REVEAL gathers world-leading experts in exoplanetary and stellar physics to tackle this problem in synergy: - We will build on recent advances in magnetohydrodynamic simulations of stellar atmospheres, and data-driven efforts to separate the exoplanet signal from the stellar variability. - We will simulate the "ground truth" of the turbulent physics of entire stellar photospheres resolved at the level of individual convective cells for a broad class of stars. - We will model the emergent spectra of these "virtual" stars and "observe" them using the same data-processing pipelines as stellar radial-velocity and transit-spectroscopy observations. We will continue to observe the Sun and stars hosting small planets found with TESS and PLATO. The stars' own spectra will REVEAL the clues needed to disentangle stellar variability from our measurements of their planets' masses and the fingerprints of molecules in their atmospheres. Our unified efforts will enable the new cutting-edge space observatories and ground-based facilities to realize the full potential of their designs, bringing us closer to the most profound discoveries we could hope to achieve in our lifetimes - the identification of another Earth or even possible signs of life on another planet.