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Louise Gould, the Royal Society. Background image Getty Images
The Faraday Discovery Fellowships, supported by a fund from the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, provide selected researchers with grants of up to £8 million over 10 years to pursue high-quality original research and develop world-leading research groups in the UK.
Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said: ‘This exciting first cohort of Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship fellows are using cutting-edge techniques to explore questions at the frontiers of human knowledge…These 10-year fellowships give researchers space to pursue new knowledge, build their research groups and develop close collaborations around the world that will ensure the UK continues to develop and attract the next generation of scientific talent and bring benefits to the whole country.’
Lord Vallance, UK Science Minister, said: ‘Turbo-charging our world-class institutions with the very best research talent will be critical to unlocking breakthroughs that could help protect our food chains, put AI to work in the economy, and tackle climate change. That's why DSIT has backed the Royal Society with £250 million in long-term funding to support the work of mid-career researchers who are at the top of their game.’
Among the awarded scientists, one is from the Medical Science Division:
Professor Timothy Behrens, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences (Fellowship held jointly between Oxford and UCL).
Professor Behrens researches some of the most complex human behaviours, such as reasoning and planning. ‘To plan effectively, we need to know the relationships between objects and events in the world - we need a model of the world inside our brains,’ he said. ‘As part of the Faraday grant, we will try to find out what this model looks like, in terms of the neurons in our brains and the connections between them.’
He and his group will measure the neuronal connections that underlie a world model and investigate how these connections are built by learning. They will then test whether these patterns match predictions made by theories in computational neuroscience and AI. ‘We will also determine whether we can establish rules that the brain uses to build models, from the simple models that might be used for a mouse navigating a maze, all the way to complex models that underlie sophisticated human reasoning.
Congratulations to all the awardees!
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website.