The potential for ferroelectric materials to influence the future of small scale electronics cannot be overstated. At a basic level, this is because ferroelectric surfaces are charged, and so interact strongly with charge-carrying metals and semiconductors - the building blocks for all electronic systems. Since the electrical polarity of the ferroelectric can be reversed, it can both attract and repel charges in nearby materials, exerting complete control over both the charge distribution and movement within the device. It should be no surprise, therefore, that microelectronics industries have already looked very seriously at harnessing ferroelectric materials in a variety of applications, from solid state memory chips (ferroelectric random access memories, or FeRAMs) to field effect transistors (ferroelectric field effect transisitors, or FeFETs). In all such applications, switching of the direction of the polarity of the ferroelectric is the most important aspect of functional behaviour. The mechanism for switching invariably involves the field-induced nucleation and growth of domains. Domain coarsening, through domain wall propagation, eventually causes the entire ferroelectric to switch its polar direction. It is therefore the existence and behaviour of domains under the influence of an external bias field that determine the switching response, and ultimately the performance of the ferroelectric in any given electronic device. Understanding domains and domain dynamics is therefore the key to fully understanding switching behaviour and eventually rationalizing and predicting device performance.However, integrating ferroelectrics into commercial devices has not been altogether straightforward. One of the major issues has been that the properties associated with ferroelectrics, in bulk form, appear to change quite dramatically and unpredictably when at the nanoscale: new modes of behaviour, and different functional characteristics appear. For domains, in particular, the proximity of surfaces and boundaries has a dramatic effect: surface tension and depolarizing fields both serve to increase the equilibrium density of domains, and domain walls, such that minor changes in scale or morphology at the nanoscale can have major ramifications for domain redistribution. Given the importance of domains in dictating the overall switching characteristics of a device, the need to fully understand how size and morphology affect domain behaviour in small scale ferroelectrics is obvious. That the near future plans for microelectronic ferroelectric devices are to move from simple planar 2D to more complex 3D architectures, only increases the imperative for study. This proposal seeks to map and understand the manner in which reduced size and increased morphological complexity affect the switching behaviour of small scale ferroelectrics. Our revolutionary approach will be to make devices in which single crystal ferroelectric material has been machined to thin film dimensions using focused ion beam milling (FIB). 'Stroboscopic Piezo-Force Microscopy (PFM)' will be used to map the dynamics of domain wall motion during in-plane switching, induced by an external electric field dropped between coplanar electrodes. Observations made on nanoscale domain dynamics can then be meaningfully correlated to the measured 'macroscopic' functional behaviour of the devices. Using FIB to machine holes and slits into the thin ferroelectric slabs will allow us to directly investigate the manner in which physical defects alter the nucleation and propagation of domain walls. The study will also be extended to investigate axial switching of discrete FIBed single crystal ferroelectric nanowires with and without topographic complexity (in terms of notches, antinotches and kinks). Prior support on static domain states in passive ferroelectric nanoshapes has enabled this research, but there is no overlap - this new work concerns domain dynamics in active devices.

The puzzling predominance of sexual reproduction amongst animals has been repeatedly identified as one of the major outstanding questions in biology and has received an enormous amount of study. Meiotic recombination is one of the fundamental forces of evolution and plays a very significant role in both generating and mixing the genetic diversity present in sexual organisms. Recombination is also suggested to be instrumental in shaping the content of eukaryotic genomes. Here we propose to study the role of breeding system and recombination in shaping the content and diversity of animal genomes using an exceptionally powerful natural system- the Root Knot Nematodes. We will, for the first time, be able to take a comparative genomic view of radically different reproductive modes in a phylogenetic design. Together these studies will give us a novel and powerful understanding of the role sexual reproduction plays in shaping genome content.

This fellowship will change the face of software development by transferring the challenging and time-consuming task of software specialisation from human to machine. It will develop novel approaches for specialising and improving efficiency of generalist software for particular application domains in an automated way. The developed techniques will be program-agnostic and thus applicable to any type of software. Therefore, they will allow to speed-up computationally intensive calculations that arise, for instance, in the field of bioinformatics or healthcare. This fellowship thus can contribute to driving research development in other fields of research by providing an automated way of adapting and speeding-up existing software used in a plethora of areas, both in research and in the industry. The project will utilise and develop novel methods in the field of software engineering, called genetic improvement, to achieve the goals of the project. Genetic improvement is a novel field of research that only arose as a standalone area in the last few years. Several factors contributed to the development and success of this field, one of which is the sheer amount of code available online and focus on automated improvement of non-functional properties of software, such as energy or memory consumption. Dr. Petke is a world-leading expert on genetic improvement, publishing award-winning work on automated software specialisation and transplantation. She won two `Humies' awarded for human-competitive results produced by genetic and evolutionary computation and a best paper award at the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. This work was also widely covered in media, including the Wired magazine and BBC Click. The potential of genetic improvement for automating certain aspects of the software development process has thus been already recognised in the academic community and beyond. Dr. Petke will collaborate with a UK-based company, called Satalia, which provides the latest optimisation techniques to the industry. She will apply deliverables of this project to automatically adapt and speed-up their generalist optimisation algorithms to particular classes of real-world problems. An example is specialisation of a general routing program to devising an optimal network for broadband connections. Therefore, the deliverables of this project will contribute to the UK economy by providing techniques that will automate the process of software specialisation for real-world optimisation problems.

The aim of this fellowship is to advance our understanding of how the chemical environment affects electron attachment to biomolecules. Electron attachment processes play an important role in radiation damage to biological material. In particular, electrons released by the ionization of local molecules (mainly water) can lose energy in a series of collisions before attaching to nucleobases in DNA. The resultant negative ions may be unstable and hence fragment yielding reactive species. A high density of such dissociation events in DNA constitutes a clustered lesion, recognised as a key precursor to mutations and cancers. Detailed knowledge of how electrons attach to biomolecules and the stabilities of the resultant anionic states is therefore essential to understand radiation damage on the molecular scale. Moreover characterising low-energy electron interactions with specific biomolecules can inform how manipulating their chemical environment with dopants can affect their radio-sensitivity with important applications in radiotherapy and radiation protection.The project will be centred on the development of an original experimental system to irradiate hydrogen-bonded biomolecular clusters with electrons at precisely defined energies (around 1meV to 15eV) and analyse the resultant anions by mass spectrometry. The key strength, novelty, and challenge will lie in applying the deflection of polar species in inhomogeneous electric fields (Stark deflection) to provide exceptional control over the target cluster configurations before the interactions with electrons. To date, direct comparisons with theory have been limited by the spread of neutral cluster sizes in experiments. The programme will be carried out in close collaboration with leading theoreticians (Gorfinkiel, OU, and Fabrikant, University of Nebraska) pioneering new methods to simulate electron scattering from / attachment to molecules within clusters. Electron interactions with specific neutral clusters will therefore be probed in equivalent experiments and calculations for the first time. The initial biomolecular targets will be complexes comprising water molecules, DNA bases, and a related azabenzene molecule, pyridine. Understanding the molecular-scale processes that initiate radiation damage in biological material has recently motivated extensive research into low-energy electron interactions with biomolecules. Experimental and theoretical studies of gas-phase biomolecules have revealed detailed information about the electron attachment sites and fragmentation patterns of specific anions. However hydrogen bonding can dramatically change the electron affinities of molecules as well as introducing new pathways for energy dissipation and electron loss from anionic states. The interpretation of experiments on biomolecular clusters without size selection and on condensed biomolecules is compromised by the lack of precise knowledge of the target and by dielectric surface charging, respectively. Size-selected neutral clusters provide a powerful test case to probe the effects of hydrogen bonding, notably by studying fragment anion production from a key biomolecule as a function of the precise number of associated water molecules. In summary, my objective is to develop a unique programme of experiments with strong theoretical support to advance our understanding of electron attachment processes in size-selected neutral clusters as model multi-molecular systems. This research will help to bridge the complexity gap between understanding radiation-induced processes in isolated molecules and in condensed material, with applications in modelling and potentially modifying biological damage processes on the nanoscale.

Electron attachment plays an important role in radiation chemistry, for example in DNA damage and ozone depletion. Detailed understanding and quantification of electron attachment processes in isolated molecules and condensed environments is therefore essential to model radiation effects on the nanoscale. My EPSRC CAF probes electron attachment dynamics and reactive pathways in selected biomolecular clusters, building on recent advances such as the observation of electron driven proton transfer in Watson Crick pairs [Bowen et al. ChemPhysChem 11 (2010) 880]. However, relatively little is known about how clustering modifies the absolute probabilities for electron attachment induced processes. While theoretical calculations by my collaborators Fabrikant and Gorfinkiel [J. Chem. Phys. 136 (2012) 184301] have provided evidence for strong enhancements in specific cluster configurations, absolute experimental data for electron attachment to clusters are extremely rare. This project is centered on developing an original technique to produce neutral mass-selected beams with known target density for electron attachment experiments. The method involves neutralization of mass-selected cluster anions by electron photo-detachment from specific weakly-bound anionic states, with minimal change in stability and hence dissociation. The project will provide a breakthrough in quantifying the effects of the local chemical environment on electron attachment induced processes.