To mark International Women’s Day, we are celebrating some of the incredible female academics at Lancaster University – each of whom have secured research awards of at least one million pounds. These accomplished researchers are advancing knowledge, addressing significant global challenges, and ensuring their work contributes meaningfully to society.

Professor Rebecca Willis: Climate citizens and policy innovation

Professor Rebecca Willis is helping to lead the way in climate policy with her pioneering Climate Citizens research group. Based at Lancaster University's Environment Centre, her use of a combination of citizen panels, and partnerships with government at national and local levels, is ensuring the public have a strong voice in policy making around climate issues. Her research plays a vital role in shaping strategies to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, ensuring that public voices are heard in the fight against climate change.

Dr Hannah Stewart: Advancing auditory technology for children

Dr Hannah Stewart, recipient of the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, is pioneering research into how auditory technology can better support children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss (MMHL). Despite being the most common form of childhood deafness, MMHL is poorly understood due to limited global research. At the state-of-the-art ‘Pediatric Listening, Cognition and Neuroscience’ (PELiCAN) Lab, Dr Stewart and her team are assessing the long-term impact of different auditory technology on children's communication, classroom experiences and lifelong hearing skills.

Dr Sophie Nightingale: Combating AI threats and deepfake harms

Dr Sophie Nightingale is tackling one of the most pressing digital challenges of our time - the misuse of deepfake technology. With a £1.8 million Future Leaders Fellowship, she is developing a forensic verification system to detect non-consensual intimate forgeries, a harmful use of deepfake technology that disproportionately targets women and girls. Collaborating with law enforcement, policymakers, and technology experts, Dr Nightingale is creating a practical, trusted, and sustainable system to protect individuals from digital abuse.

Dr Amber Leeson: Training the next generation of Environmental Data Scientists

Dr Amber Leeson has recently won a NERC Doctoral Landscape Award in Exascale Computing for Geosciences (ExaGEO) worth over £2.6M to Lancaster. Through this award, thirty new PhD students will be trained at Lancaster in big data and high-powered computing techniques and will then use these skills to develop new understanding of the natural world. ‘We have seen an explosion in the volume of environmental data in recent years’, Dr Leeson said, ‘ExaGEO will equip the next generation with the skills they need to exploit this new data to better understand – and predict—the causes and consequences of environmental change’.

Professor Stacey Conchie: Trust and security in a digital age

Professor Stacey Conchie is leading a new network that brings together academia, industry and government to develop the next generation of behavioural science for national security and defence. The network will advance our understanding of how new data forms afforded by emerging technologies together with advances in behavioural analytics (i.e., what we can infer from big data) can be used to keep the UK safe. She does this off the back of directing the national ESRC centre CREST, which over a period of 10 years has supported over 200 behavioural and social science researchers and PhD students, from more than 40 universities, delivering research, training and impact to law enforcement worldwide.

Each of these remarkable women typify the excellence and impact Lancaster University’s female researchers and academics provide. Through their pioneering work, they are shaping policy, advancing technology, tackling climate change, and protecting society from digital threats.