Two Trinity Fellows receive European Research Council grants

Trinity Fellows, Professor of Thermofluid Dynamics Matthew Juniper, and Group Leader in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) Professor Marta Zlatic, have each been awarded Advanced Grants from the European Research Council (ERC).

They are among 11 academics at Cambridge to receive grants – the highest number of any institution in this funding round, which attracted 2,534 proposals. Funding totalling €721 million will go to 281 researchers across Europe.

Professor Juniper’s research is in Fundamental AI for Physical Systems and has real world applications in medicine and engineering.

The key insight is that information hidden within experimental data can be revealed more accurately and efficiently if computers are programmed to know as much as possible about the data before it arrives.

The more the physics is already known, the less computer power is required. Some problems that currently require high performance computer clusters can be solved on a laptop.

The five-year €2.5m ERC grant will fund two post-doctoral researchers and three PhD students to apply Fundamental AI to two key areas: medical Flow Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Flow-MRI) and jet engines, which were chosen for their potential positive impact on society.

Flow-MRI uses magnetic fields to measure the speed of blood flows in the body. Professor Juniper’s research could reduce hospital Flow-MRI scan times by 10 to 100 times while improving the accuracy of information provided to doctors.

‘The more we know about the data beforehand, the more it can tell us about what we don’t know,’ he said.

Take for example a raw Flow-MRI image, which is difficult for a human to interpret. Professor Juniper said:

If we know that the image is of blood pulsing through an artery then a computer can infer the flow more accurately than a human can because it can be programmed with prior physical knowledge about how blood behaves.

With quicker scans providing better information, the health of your major arteries could be monitored regularly and you could be brought in for minor preventative surgery before a problem develops, rather than major acute surgery afterwards.

Professor Juniper’s research into the stability of aeroplane engines uses experimental data from his industrial collaborators. He said:

Experiments on aeroplane engines are expensive but are crucial to ensure safety as the industry moves from kerosene to sustainable aviation fuel. By extracting more information from each experiment, we can move faster and with more certainty towards a sustainable future in aviation.

Professor Zlatic is a neuroscientist intent on understanding how the brain learns and how it uses what it learns to make decisions. The sorts of questions she asks include:

How can this relatively tiny organ be so powerful computationally? How can it be so flexible in the huge diversity of learning tasks? How can it store memories? How can it then rapidly use them in a context dependent manner?

The five-year €2.5 million ERC grant will enable her lab at Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and at the MRC LMB to investigate the why and how the learning ability of closely related species differs.

‘The underlying causes of these differences are unknown,’ says Professor Zlatic. ‘Differences in learning could be due to different structural and functional properties of learning circuits.’

Using fruit fly species – one that is smarter and learns more quickly, and another that learns more slowly – the team will identify differences in their brains.

Professor Zlatic said: ‘The final goal is to manipulate circuit structure and functional properties to improve learning and transform the slower-learner into a fast-learner.’

This project will uncover the underlying structural, functional and genetic causes of variability in learning and will reveal the ways in which learning can be improved. Since genes are highly conserved across the animal kingdom, the molecular mechanisms that can improve learning will likely be conserved and applicable to humans.

Professor Zlatic and her team achieved a milestone in 2023 with the creation of the first 3D map of all the neurons in the brain of a fruit fly larva and how they are wired together.

Published in March 2023 in Science, ‘The connectome of an insect brain’, received global media coverage. The team’s research provides an important tool for scientists to examine how the brain processes the flow of sensory information and translates it into action.