Railway embankments are at the risk of serious deformation caused either by the dynamic loads from moving vehicles, geohazards or both, and as such pose a threat to not only safety, but comfortable rail operations. Given that Europe cannot always be building its way out of ageing railway infrastructure, it must therefore retrofit and complement existing assets with new technologies. Moreover, the ability to predict and repair damaged railway earthwork in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner to ensure a safer, more reliable, efficient, sustainable and resilient railway earthwork infrastructure offers a great value not just to transport network operators but also to utilities, insurance companies and government agencies. Therefore, this fellowship improves the resiliency of railway earthwork infrastructure and mitigates potential economic, life, and property losses resulting from failure to apply a systematic approach. A toolkit and platform to enable the integration of resiliency-improving forecasting will be developed by combining traditional laboratory and field studies, data mining, machine learning, uncertainty quantification and reliability-based design so to utilize the data to its full potential, and an ecofriendly reinforcement control by using biopolymer for railway embankment deformation. This project will address critical gaps remaining in our understanding of the life cycle performance of biopolymer-reinforced railway earthworks related to material synthesis, degradation, repair as well as the interaction with the soil ecosystem through integrated geochemical and geotechnical experiments and numerical modeling.

To develop new innovative practices, equipment and materials to develop the manufacturing processes to enable the mass customisation of helmet shells and/or cradles.

Elliptic curves are the heart of contemporary research in number theory. For example, their modularity played a crucial role in Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Understanding their rational points is the subject of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture (BSD), one of the seven $1M Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prizes. This proposal is concerned with rational points on elliptic curves and linked to both BSD and modularity. The Darmon Programme is an ambitious project initiated by Henri Darmon, aiming to provide constructions of points on elliptic curves over number fields, and to prove new cases of BSD. The proposed action is an initiative to extend the Darmon Programme, make known constructions explicit and algorithmic to provide extensive data that will be invaluable to researchers in the field, and guide further theoretical work. Warwick has one of the largest and most active explicit number theory groups in the world, consisting of 2 professors, 3 lecturers, 8 research fellows and 12 PhD students, making it a natural host for the project. The supervisor Siksek, is a leading expert on elliptic curves, rational points and modularity, with considerable experience in supervising research including 5 Marie Curie fellows. Masdeu did his undergraduate studies in Barcelona. He completed his PhD (McGill) under the supervision of Darmon, and therefore has intimate understanding of the Darmon Programme. Masdeu then worked as Ritt Assistant Professor at Columbia University before joining Warwick as a postdoc in 2014. Therefore his research experience has almost entirely been confined to North America, even though his ambition is to establish himself as an independent researcher at a prestigious European university. Masdeu has substantial research results with 8 papers accepted in strong journals. This project will integrate him into the European research environment, and give him new skills and research directions to enable him to realize his goal.