Quantum technology will revolutionise many aspects of life and bring enormous benefits to the economy and society. The Centre for Doctoral Training in Quantum Informatics (QI CDT) will provide advanced training in the structure, behaviour, and interaction of quantum hardware, software, and applications. The training programme spans computer sciences, mathematics, physics, and engineering, and will enable the use of quantum technology in a way that is integrable, interoperable, and impactful, rather than developing the hardware itself. The training programme targets three research challenges with a strong focus on end user impact: (i) quantum service architecture concerns how to design quantum networks and devices most usefully; (ii) scalable quantum software is about feasible application at scale of quantum technology and its integration with other software; and (iii) quantum application analysis investigates how quantum technology can be used most advantageously to solve end user problems. The QI CDT will offer 75+ PhD students an intensive 4-year training and research programme that equips them with the skills needed to tackle the research challenges of quantum informatics. This new generation will be able to integrate quantum hardware with high-performance computing, design effective quantum software, and apply this in a societally meaningful way. The QI CDT brings together a coalition with national reach including over 65 academic experts in quantum informatics from five universities - the University of Edinburgh, the University of Oxford, University College London, Heriot-Watt University, and the University of Strathclyde - and three public sector partners - the National Quantum Computing Centre, the National Physical Laboratory, and the Hartree Centre. A network of over 30 industry partners, diverse in size and domain expertise, and 9 leading international universities, give students the best basis for meaningful and collaborative research. A strong focus on cohort-based training will make QI CDT students into a diverse network of future leaders in Quantum Informatics in the UK.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target the unfinished agenda for child survival with 5.3 million deaths of children before their fifth birthday. Importantly, the SDGs also reflect families' and national governments' aspirations that all children thrive as well as survive, meeting their full developmental potential. Unfortunately, children most at risk include those with neurodevelopmental delays and developmental disabilities like cerebral palsy, who are less likely than their peers to access pre-primary and primary school education. Whilst 48% of low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) countries have policies to address pre-primary education, there remain major gaps in provision, and major gaps for evidence-based, feasible approaches that are inclusive of children with NDD/D. OPPORTUNITY: 'Reach Up' (a Jamaican home visiting programme) is one of the most evidence-based parenting programmes to support early child development and educational outcomes. Effects have been seen into adulthood, including increased earning power. Up until now 'Reach Up' has focused on children under 3 years of age and has not included those with severer developmental delays and disabilities. Effects on pre-school readiness children at the age of 5 years, an important factor in longer term educational achievement, have not to date been examined and is the focus of the 'Every Newborn-Reach Up Early Education Intervention For All Children' (EN-REACH) research PARTNERSHIP: Our proposal builds on a well-established, equitable partnership since 2015 between three leading research institutions in Bangladesh, Nepal and Tanzania and the UK. We have a cohort of 2,000 children, now aged 2-3 years, in these three countries to compare accuracy and feasibility of range of early child development (ECD) assessment tools, known as the EN-SMILING study. EN-SMILING is partnering with the World Health Organization and UNICEF, to contribute to accurately measuring ECD and detecting disability early in children in LMICs and provides. It provides a timely opportunity to rigorously test more feasible ways to improve educational outcomes for all children, including those with disabilities. OBJECTIVES: The EN-REACH study has 3 objectives: Objective 1: INNOVATION To adapt the existing "Reach Up" parenting package to include those with disability and additional materials to support pre-school readiness for all children. Objective 2: IMPACT EVALUATION To conduct a 'quasi-experimental' research study to compare early child development markers for school readiness and other important development, health and well-being outcomes for children and their families between those receiving the adapted "Reach-Up" package, and those who did not. Objective 3: IMPLEMENTATION: To improve our understanding of important factors in implementing the new adapted 'Reach up' package to support integration of the package into routine child health systems if it is found to be effective. IMPACT EXPECTED: EN-REACH could have significant impact for children in these three high priority countries, both for education and care of children at risk of poor developmental outcomes, with strong links to national and global policy including MoHs WHO, UNICEF and many stakeholders. Direct research benefits will include identification and roll-out of testing tools to screen children for developmental delay and disability to ensure early detection of difficulties. This research would enable understanding of acceptability of the parenting package to be inclusive of children with disability more widely across Africa and Asia. Since the team have a 5-year track record of collaborative work, with strong site teams and have proven ability to deliver outputs and joint publications throughout 2020, ongoing effective work can be anticipated despite the COVID19 pandemic.

Earth's present belies its violent past. Catastrophic impacts during the Earth's first 500 million years generated enough energy to melt the planet's interior, creating planetary-scale volumes of melt, or "magma oceans". Their subsequent cooling and crystallisation would have set the chemistry of the Earth and its future long-term habitability. However, we do not know exactly where and how the Earth's magma oceans crystallised, what their composition was and whether remnants of early magma ocean material remain present in the Earth's deep interior, potentially acting as important reservoirs for volatiles and precious metals. A key piece of information may reside in the deep Earth: as the magma ocean cooled it would have started to crystallise, with the dense newly formed crystals sinking to the base of Earth's mantle. This would have generated strong chemical layering in the mantle, which could persist to today. This project focuses on finding the chemical evidence for these piles of dense magma ocean crystals, and thus identifying a key missing piece of evidence for Earth's earliest history. As the deepest mantle is inaccessible to direct sampling, we must rely on nature to do this for us. This occurs when regions of the mantle heat up, buoyantly rise and melt, ultimately producing volcanism; a phenomenon exhibited at Iceland, Hawaii and other "mantle plumes". We can use the chemistry of these lavas to probe the composition of the material that melted to form them, thereby gaining a window into the deep Earth. The chemical signals in both modern and ancient lavas have resulted in the paradigm of isolated and "primordial" regions of the Earth's interior, often presumed to be located at the very base of the Earth's mantle, at the boundary with the planet's central metallic core. It has been suggested that the mineralogy and composition of these deep mantle domains has allowed them to resist being entrained into the convecting mantle for billions of years, where they may store volatile- and heat-producing elements. Do these regions of the Earth's mantle have their origin in magma ocean crystallisation? Has magma ocean material always remained isolated from the convecting mantle? Can residual frozen melts or crystalline material left over from magma ocean crystallisation be transported into the upper mantle, and if so, can it melt and contribute to the chemistry of modern and ancient primitive lavas? To answer these questions, we need chemical tracers that, 1) respond directly to the type of minerals that would have formed during the crystallisation of a deep magma ocean, 2) are resistant to alteration when volcanic rocks are weathered at Earth's surface so that they can be applied to ancient lavas, and 3) reflect the bulk properties of the mantle that these lavas were derived from. We propose to use iron (Fe) and calcium (Ca) stable isotopes as tracers. Reconnaissance measurements of 3.7 billion year old rocks shows that these tracers are robust to the rocks' weathering history. The data also contain the tantalising suggestion that these volcanics were derived from melting material residual from a former magma ocean. We will use these tracers to explore the Earth's magma ocean history and its role in defining the chemical and physical state of the planet today. Important steps are: 1) Constraining the partitioning of Fe and Ca isotopes during magma ocean crystallisation. We will do this by high-pressure laboratory experiments, where we will simulate the conditions of magma ocean crystallisation and analyse the crystal residues that we produce. 2) Undertaking new Fe and Ca isotope analysis of volcanics ranging from 3.7 billion years old to the present. 3) Develop a series of thermodynamic models to track the Fe and Ca isotope effects of magma ocean crystallisation and to predict the composition of volcanics derived from the entrainment and melting of these magma ocean crystal piles in the upper mantle.

Understanding the changing global precipitation patterns that result from a changing climate represents one of the great research priorities of the next decades. In order to better define the future we need to understand the present and the inter-annual variability of the precipitation cycle, which mirrors, in short periods, the expected climate-change-induced long-term variability. However, while observational studies based on the past 30 year records suggest rises in precipitation and evaporation at a global rate of 6-7%/K, global and regional climate models predict a muted response of the hydrologic cycle (2-3%/K). Quantitative estimation and prediction of precipitation still remain grand challenges in the hydrological and atmospheric sciences, both carrying huge uncertainties and thus preventing us from solving the previous conundrum. Observation-wise surface precipitation varies on spatial scales ranging from tens of meters to hundreds of kilometers, thus inhibiting the determination of spatio-temporal structures of precipitation fields from pointwise measurements only (e.g. rain gauges). Active and passive space-borne microwave measurements (precipitation radars, multi-wavelength radiometers) are considered to be suitable for estimating day and night-time precipitation rates and distributions on a planetary scale. Thanks to a satellite constellation concept the NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Mission, due to launch early in 2014, promises to produce a significant step forward in improving coverage and reducing uncertainties in global precipitation products at a level sufficient to critically challenge numerical models. The presence of a first-ever-in-space dual frequency radar in the core satellite, with coverage up to 65 degrees latitude, will allow not only to know how much rain falls at the surface but also the detailed three-dimensional knowledge of rain, snow, and other forms of precipitation within the atmosphere above the surface and, with it, the links and the transfer of latent heat energy between the Earth's surface and atmosphere. This is an unprecedented opportunity in the mid-latitudes. In our effort, by specifically focusing on UK and on the North Atlantic region, we will address two scientific objectives: 1) To quantify, understand, and potentially mitigate regime dependent biases that are present in today's passive microwave rainfall retrieval over ocean; 2) to critically assess the potential of Global Precipitation Mission-era passive microwave rainfall over mid-latitude coastal and rural areas. The UKMO radar network will be used as ground-reference for the satellite products; as a result, improvements on radar-based rainfall estimates over UK are expected as well. In addition, through improved measurements of precipitation globally, the Global Precipitation Mission will help advancing our understanding of Earth's water and energy cycle, improving forecasting of extreme events that cause natural hazards and disasters, and extending current capabilities in using accurate and timely information of precipitation to directly benefit society. This project will foster and help UK scientists and UK society in taking full advantage of such a unique opportunity.

Measuring the volume and structure of a tree accurately allows us to calculate the total above-ground carbon (C) stored in the tree, a very important property. Trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and can store this C for decades or even centuries until the tree dies, when some of it is released back to the atmosphere through decomposition. Tropical forests store around half of all above-ground terrestrial C, but are at particular risk due to deforestation and degradation, as well as from changing rainfall and temperature patterns. Surprisingly, our knowledge of tropical forest C stocks is quite poor, and errors in these stocks are large and uncertain. This uncertainty feeds into estimates of CO2 emissions due to deforestation, degradation and land use change. We will address this major uncertainty in the terrestrial C cycle by deploying a new, NERC-funded terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) to scan 1000s of trees in tropical forests on three continents: Amazonia, the Congo Basin and SE Asia. The laser data will allow us to measure 3D tree volume and biomass non-destructively to within a few percent of the best current estimates, made by destructive harvesting and weighing. The current, large uncertainties arise because weighing a tree is extremely difficult: tropical trees may be over 50m tall, and weigh 100 tonnes or more. Harvesting also precludes revisiting trees over time to measure change. In practice, a small sample of trees that have been harvested and weighed are related to easy-to-measure parameters of diameter and height, using empirical 'allometric' (size-to-mass) relationships. These relationships are then used to translate diameter and height measurements made over wider areas into estimates of biomass. Allometry is also the only way to infer biomass at very large (pan-tropical) scales, from remote sensing measurements. Unfortunately, the sample of harvested trees underpinning global allometric relationships is geographically limited, and contains very few large trees. Current estimates of tropical forest C stocks from satellite and ground data, all based on these very limited allometry samples, diverge significantly in size and pattern, leading to heated debate as to why this should be. We hope to settle this debate, given that our lidar-derived estimates of biomass are completely independent of allometry and unbiased in terms of tree size. We will 'weigh' more trees than are currently included in all global pan-tropical allometries and quantify uncertainty in the allometry models. We will also test assumptions made in allometric models regarding tree shape and wood density. Our measurements will also answer fundamental questions about geographical differences in structural characteristics across tropical forests. Our data will be vital for testing new estimates of biomass from remote sensing; the UK-led ESA BIOMASS RADAR and NASA GEDI laser missions will both estimate pan-tropical C stocks by relying on allometric relationships between forest height and biomass. Our work will feed into these two missions through long-standing collaborations with the lead scientists. More generally, the large number of tree measurements we will collect would be of great interest to researchers in tropical ecology, forestry, biodiversity, remote sensing and C mapping, among others. A key aim of the project is to ensure the widest use of our results, by making our data and tools publicly available. We will work with partners to explore routes for commercial developments and input into government policy, particularly relating to forest management and C mapping and mitigation. Lastly, we will make our work accessible through a range of outreach activities, including developing links between a school in the Amazon and UK schools, to raise awareness of scientific, conservation and policy issues surrounding tropical forests.