Anglophone scholarship has overwhelmingly privileged the history of correspondence in early modern Europe at the expense of knowledge-making (and sharing) across Northern and Baltic locations. Our workshop series responds to this gap, with the primary aim of drawing a new map across Northern European centres of learning. The objective is twofold. Firstly, the network emphasises the impact of academic mobility through the early modern migration of people and ideas, identifying, for the first time, an epistemic unity from the Baltic to Central Europe which linked geographical areas that might otherwise seem separate. Secondly, this focus fosters closer, interdisciplinary work on collections of early modern knowledge that have been hitherto marginalised within Anglophone scholarship. The network transcends national and disciplinary boundaries by bringing together intellectual historians, historians of science, literary scholars, art historians, maritime historians, linguists, and curators, from the UK, continental Europe, and North America. Northern Networks provides a platform for these different academic communities - who rarely otherwise collaborate in research - to meet, share and expand knowledge of the understudied intellectual networks across early modern Northern Europe. The first workshop will be held at the University of Aberdeen in March 2022. The focus will be on sixteenth and seventeenth-century medical research and academic mobility between Scotland and continental Europe. Our aim, drawing on the rich collections at the Sir Duncan Rice Library, is to reconsider the foreign transactions in medical research that paved the way to Isaac Newton's era in the British Isles. This workshop will focus especially on the archive of the physician Duncan Liddel (1561-1613) and the work of the Edinburgh-born medical practitioner John Craig (died 1620), who was first physician to James VI, later James I of England, and a practicing astronomer. Both the geographical focus and the designated time period of this research have been overlooked by past scholarship, which has tended to focus on continental academic activity during the 'Republic of Letters', later in the seventeenth century. The second workshop takes place at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Our disciplinary focus for this gathering is the history of collecting, and the methodology is artisanal epistemology, or making as a way of knowing, which enables a brand new study of mathematical communities in Central Europe who negotiated with their Northern counterparts. We chose Prague because of the well-known presence of Kepler and Tycho Brahe, but also to complement Aberdeen and Uppsala with a major imperial court. Within this scheme, we will attempt to highlight the rich cosmological production of makers such as Erasmus Habermel (1538-1606), Joost Bürgi (1552-1632) and the Prague-born clockmaker Heinrich Stolle. Building on the existing expertise of local scholars, who will 'dissect' a few selected pieces, this object-based workshop makes full use of the digital dissemination we explain in our management section of this bid. The third workshop will be at Uppsala University in March 2023. The Carolina Rediviva Library houses a collection of early modern astronomical texts known as the Copernicana, thought to have been owned by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) - the largest number of texts with his provenance in the world. In addition to its invaluable contribution to Copernican studies, the library also provides rich resources for the history of early modern medical research in the Waller Collections, which hold over 50,000 natural philosophical works dating from the middle ages to the 1950s. With a focus on the contents of these extraordinary archives, this workshop will reconsider the substantial, yet significantly understudied, early modern Swedish contribution to Northern European intellectual networks.

It is estimated that more than one in three of us will develop cancer in our lifetime, and for one in four it will be the cause of death. Scientists play an important role in combating this illness. Worldwide activities range from basic research into understanding the causes of cancer to the subject of this proposal, which is the development of new anticancer treatments.This research is concerned with the study of new drugs that have metal atoms as important constituents (metallodrugs), and which only become toxic to cancer cells upon irradiation of light (photoactivation). The combination of light-sensitive drugs and lasers as light sources means that the site of treatment can be carefully controlled, minimising side effects and avoiding killing healthy cells. To optimise the treatment, this research will also develop new ways to irradiate cancer cells using modern lasers with optical fibre delivery, thereby allowing any part of the body to be irradiated. In addition, new ways to deliver the drugs to the cancer cells will be studied. The drug-delivery method that will be investigated is the use of liposomes, which act as microscopic spherical containers. These can be used to store large amounts of the metallodrug and to preferentially bind to cancer cells by modifying the surface of the liposome. It may even be possible to burst open and release the drugs upon demand by activating light-sensitive molecules in the liposome.Modern science invariably requires increasingly sophisticated instrumentation and technology, and cancer research is no exception. The research described in this proposal is reliant on state of the art laser systems and advanced microscopes, which are available at the specialist COSMIC centre within the University of Edinburgh. This research will also involve close collaboration with biologists and clinicians, and the longer-term view would be for these photoactivated metallodrugs and liposome delivery systems to be in clinical trials in the next 5-10 years. In this respect, this area of research is well positioned to benefit from the rapidly expanding UK biotechnology sector, thereby maximising the potential for exploitation.

There is growing evidence that extreme events such as heatwaves, rather than increases in average temperatures, will have the most immediate and harmful effects on plants and animals as the climate changes. This is particularly true for species-rich tropical ecosystems, where recent heatwaves have already caused severe population crashes for some species. Most studies investigating the impact of extreme climatic events on biodiversity focus on individual species in isolation. However, natural communities are complex, interacting networks of species, linked by competition, mutualism, predation and parasitism. We therefore need to understand what happens when whole communities of interacting species are subjected to a heatwave or other extreme climatic event, and how these effects change depending on the duration and intensity of the event. How resilient will the surviving populations and species be in the longer term, when faced with further extremes? The answer is likely to depend on both ecological responses (changes in the abundance and interactions of different species depending on their ecological tolerances), and evolutionary processes (the evolution of novel tolerances through natural selection). To understand fully how and why ecological communities are altered by extreme events, we need to carry out experiments simulating extreme conditions and follow the consequences over multiple generations. In most contexts such experiments would be practically or ethically impossible. However, we can design experiments that do exactly this by focusing on a special study system: food webs of Drosophila fruit flies and the parasitic wasps that consume them. At our study site in the rainforests of tropical Queensland, Australia, these flies and wasps form discrete ecological communities within individual rotting fruits. They have short generation times, allowing us to observe community responses to climate extremes in real time. Australian tropical rainforests are a high-diversity ecosystem that is threatened by climate change, and we expect rainforest insects to be particularly vulnerable because they are already operating close to the upper limits of their thermal tolerances: modest further increases in temperatures could make populations and communities unviable. These characteristics make our study system ideal for understanding the resilience of ecological systems to extreme climatic events. In our experiments, we will use heating cables in the rainforest to simulate heatwave conditions that are expected to affect Australian rainforests in the coming decades. We will then investigate the ecologically and evolutionary responses of individual species and the food web of interactions among them to further perturbations. By challenging communities that have previously been subjected to heat waves with further heat waves, we will be able to test under what conditions climatic extremes make communities more or less resilient to future shocks and understand the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that underpin community resilience.

Ecological communities are complex, interacting networks of species, linked by competition, mutualism, predation and parasitism. In the 'Origin of Species', Charles Darwin famously wrote of 'an entangled bank', comprising a bewildering richness of species and an even more complex web of connections among them. Fundamentally, ecologists and evolutionary biologists seek to unravel this complexity, by establishing why species occur where they do, why they replace each other under certain conditions, and how the species interactions that make up ecosystems will change as environments change. As the climate warms and extreme events become more frequent, existing connections between species are changing in strength, or being severed completely; and new connections are forming as species change in abundance and shift their distributions (e.g. colonising cooler habitats, while becoming locally extinct in warmer habitats). Biologists use information about the range of temperatures where species currently occur to predict where species will occur in a future, warmer world. However, better predictions about the consequences of climate change will be possible if we can also take into account changing interactions between species, as well as the potential for species to evolve to cope with new conditions. We urgently need to test how whole food webs of interacting species are structured by biological processes (e.g. competition and predation) and by temperature, and how these ecological networks will respond to climate change. It is also important to test the extent to which current adaptive divergence across species' geographical ranges will increase their resilience to future climate change. To achieve this, our project will exploit a unique model system (Drosophila fruit-flies and parasitic wasps that are associated with them, called parasitoids) in a high-diversity ecosystem threatened by climate change (Australian tropical rainforests). With this system we will use field observations, field transplant experiments and mathematical models to test: (i) what determines species' local distributions and food web structure; (ii) the responses of natural and simulated networks of interacting species to simulated climate change; and (iii) the underlying mechanisms driving these changes, including the effects of genetic variation among populations within species and the potential for rapid evolutionary adaptation to warmer temperatures. The outcome will be a better and more predictive understanding of how climate change will affect the biotic interactions that characterise biodiversity and underpin the functions and services of natural ecosystems.

In this fellowship I will deliver the next generation of magma-filled fracture models, by building on my track record of developing novel methodologies and applying a multidisciplinary approach to instigate a step change in eruption forecasting and volcanic hazard assessment. The communication revolution requires rapid and reliable decision making in the lead up to and during volcanic crises, but existing models of magma sub-surface flow are insufficient to allow this. We need to identify the conditions under which different magma flow regimes and host-rock deformation modes dominate, because these directly affect the eruption potential of underground magma. We need to recognise how magma ascent pathways and eruption potential are influenced by petrological characteristics, 3D geometry and heat transfer. We need to ground-truth our theoretical, physical and chemical understanding in exposed ancient volcanic plumbing systems. Finally, we need to synthesise insight from analogue, mathematical and field experiments and enable these combined models to be deployed to improve the accuracy and reliability of volcanic eruption forecasts. I will use my multidisciplinary expertise in volcanic plumbing systems and work closely with Project Partners from academia and government organisations to integrate analogue modelling, mathematical modelling, geophysical observations and geological analyses of volcanic systems to build the next generation of dyke and sill models. I will use novel imaging techniques combined with analogue modelling to couple the dynamics of magma intrusion and host-rock deformation with the associated surface distortions. I will develop cutting-edge mathematical models to explore the thermal, petrological and geometric behaviour of magma intrusions, considering magma flow dynamics and host-rock deformation, from propagation to solidification. I will perform state-of-the-art field experiments on two complementary and distinct suites of intrusions and use laboratory techniques to understand how the magma flow and host rock deformation occurred. I will compare field, analogue and mathematical model insights and collaborate with volcano and space observatories to test and develop them so they can be integrated into geohazard assessment systems. These models will form part of the international infrastructure of volcanic hazard assessment used to significantly minimise the human and economic cost of volcanic eruptions.