The research and innovation leaders of the future will be supported to develop their careers while tackling ambitious challenges through the latest round of UK Research and Innovation’s Future Leaders Fellowships.

The 90 UKRI Future Leaders Fellows, including Lancaster University’s Dr Jasmine Fledderjohann (Sociology), Dr Joseph Lindley (ImaginationLancaster) and Dr Rebecca Willis (Lancaster Environment Centre) have been announced today.

Director ofthe UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships Kirsty Grainger said: “The Future Leaders Fellows represent some of the most brilliant people working in the country. We’re supporting researchers from every background – from the arts to medicine, and the social sciences to engineering – helping them become the research and innovation leaders of the future.”

Dr Jasmine Fledderjohann’s £1.39 million Future Leaders Fellowship will focus on food insecurity - difficulties with consistent access to enough safe and nutritious food to support a healthy lifestyle - in India, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Peru, where current evidence is limited.

Much of what is known about food insecurity focuses on households. The experiences of adolescents in particular are often overlooked in such household studies. Dr Fledderjohann will analyse survey data from the Young Lives project to document how food insecurity is associated with adverse health, education, and employment outcomes in the long-term for children and adolescents.

She and her team will also collect primary interview and survey data in the four selected countries. Ultimately, she aims to reconceptualise food insecurity to document not only inequalities in food insecurity between households, but also to measure and understand inequalities withinhouseholds, highlighting how some individuals may be vulnerable to food insecurity even when their household is not.

Dr Joseph Lindley’s Fellowship is worth £1.2m for the first 4 years.

Based on a number of long-term case studies with prestigious partners (including Microsoft, Oxford University, and the RSA) he will demonstrate how the next generation of Design Research will help address the huge challenges and opportunities that technologies like Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things pose in the 21st century.

“This work is crucial because as technology shapes the world around us increasingly rapidly we need ways to make sense of the new reality that tech is creating - Design Research's natural ability to make sense of the social and technical aspects at the same time makes it a uniquely powerful tool to do this,” he explained.

By the end of the fellowship he will have established and will direct a Socio-Technical Research Institute at Lancaster and will have built an unprecedented body of evidence showing Design Research's unique value in industry, policy, education, and academia.

The UK has committed to reducing carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050 and a four-year, £1.15 million Fellowship will enable Dr Rebecca Willis and her team in the Lancaster Environment Centre to look at how people will respond to this challenge and see what scope there is for people to live their lives differently.

Achieving the net-zero goal will require people’s active participation, switching to different forms of electricity use, transport and heating; and giving informed consent to infrastructure projects and policy shifts. However, the UK’s current system of energy and climate governance relies on an understanding of the individual primarily as a passive consumer.

This project will use novel deliberative methodologies, bringing citizens together with experts to develop new understandings of the role of the individual in governance, co-designing policy and strategy, and embedding deliberative methods into the policy process.

It is a partnership between Lancaster University, the Committee on Climate Change and the Energy Systems Catapult, as well as two academic partners: The Centre for Climate and Social Transformations (CAST) and the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC).

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