The use of autonomous robotic technologies is increasingly common for applications such as manufacturing, warehousing, and driverless vehicles. Automated robots have been used in chemistry research, too, but their widespread application is limited by the cost of the technology, and the need to build a bespoke automated version of each instrument that is required. We have developed a different approach by using mobile 'robotic chemists' that can work within a relatively standard laboratory, replicating the dexterous tasks that are carried out by human researchers. These robots can operate autonomously, 24/7, for extended periods, and they can therefore cover a much larger search space that would usually be possible. Also, the robots are driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and can search highly complex multidimensional experimental spaces, offering the potential to find revolutionary new materials. They can also carry out multiple separate experiments in parallel, if needed, to make optimal use of the available hardware in a highly cost-effective way. Our proposal is to establish a globally unique user facility in Liverpool that covers a broad range of materials research problems, allowing the discovery of useful products such as clean solar fuels catalysts, catalysts for plastics recycling, medicinal materials, and energy materials. This facility will allow researchers from both academic teams and from industry to access this new technology, which would otherwise be unavailable to them. Because the automation approach is modular, it will be possible for users to bring along specific equipment for their experiments to be 'dropped in' temporarily to create new workflows, greatly expanding the possible user base. The scope here is very broad because we have recently developed methods that give these robots have very high placement precision (+/- 0.12 mm): to a large extent, if a human can use the instrument, then so can the robot. We have identified, initially, a group of 25 academic users across 12 universities as 'day one' prospective users, as well as 7 industrial organisations with a specific interest in this technology. The potential user base, however, is far broader than this, and we will solicit applications for access throughout the project and beyond. This will be managed by a Strategic Management Team and an Operational Management Team that involves academics as well as permanent technical, administrative, and business development staff in the Materials Innovation Factory in Liverpool. Our overall objective is to build a sustainable AI-driven robotic facility that will provide a unique competitive advantage for the UK to discover new functional materials on a timescale that would be impossible using more conventional research methodology. In addition to focusing on excellent science, we will also consider diversity and career stage when prioritising access; for example, even a short, one-week visit to this autonomous facility might lead to 100's or even 1000's of new materials with associated property measurements, which might radically transform a PhD project or the change the direction of the research programme for an Early Career Researcher. This facility will therefore build the base of the UK research pyramid, as well as supporting activity that is already internationally leading, and our day-one user base includes researchers at all career stages.

Internal communication does more than transfer information, it infuses organizations with meaning. This 3-year research programme traces the history of internal communication in the UK. As a specialized activity internal comms originates from company magazines in the late 19th century. Since then magazines have morphed into complex systems of intranets, emails, internal social media, company newsletters, road shows, briefing groups, huddles, blogs and roadshows. It is estimated that around 45k professionals are currently engaged in internal communication. The history of internal communication will be studied through the archives of 14 prominent organisations, where research access has been secured: BBC; Boots; British Airways; British Army; British Rail; Cadbury; GlaxoSmithKline; HSBC; John Lewis; National Coal Board; Prudential Insurance; Royal Mail; Shell; and Unilever. In addition the archives for 5 professional bodies and a leading consultancy will be used: AB Communications, which provides internal comms for prominent global and UK organisations; Chartered Institute of Marketing; Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; Chartered Institute of Public Relations; Institute of Internal Communication; and the Industrial Society. The British Library, which has extensive historical holdings of internal comms, has also agreed to assist with disseminating findings from the research. The changing form and content of internal comms will be mapped, tracing the transformation of the magazine format into the contemporary system of internal comms that aims at enhancing employee engagement, voice, and corporate identity. Discussions about the role of communication will be examined in documents such as minutes from board meetings and reports. Internal comms practitioners and company archivists theorise their own practices. The discourses of practitioners and their relation to actual practices will be examined through communications produced by professional bodies and consultants. Historians accept that nations have been imagined as communities through national newspapers and television channels. Corporations can also be seen as communities that have been imagined through internal comms. Three discourses of imagined communities have legitimated both organisations and the role of internal comms: esprit de corps, where the corporation is imagined as an extended family or military unit; brand community, where employees are imagined as part of community with consumers; and democratic polity, where the employees are imagined as citizens with internal comms as a free press holding government to account. The discourse of brand communities is now predominant, but the interplay between these discourses will be examined throughout the 20th century. Management scholars refer to the instrumental use of the past by corporations as "rhetorical history", which is usually studied in relation to uses of the past in the present for external marketing communication with customers. But references to the past featured in company magazines almost from the outset. The research will produce an account of how rhetorical history has been used in the past both to legitimate organisations to their employees, and to legitimate the role of internal comms. This research program will produce a theoretically informed history of internal comms as a reference point for contemporary debates, such as the response of organisations to the coronavirus pandemic. Company archivists will be interested in how their work informs internal comms, and how internal comms constitutes archives. The internal comms profession will be enhanced by historical debate, and organisations will be interested in finding out what made for effective internal comms in the past. As the wider public consists of many current and former members of large organisations, there will be general interest in remembering how these bodies communicated with their members in the past.

Materials both enable the technologies we rely on today and drive advances in scientific understanding. The new scientific phenomena produced by novel materials (for example, lithium transition metal oxides) enable the creation of technologies (electric vehicles), emphasising the connection between the capability to create new materials and economic prosperity. New materials offer a route to clean growth that is essential for the future of society in the face of climate change and resource scarcity. To harness the power of functional materials for a sustainable future, we must improve our ability to identify them. This is a daunting task, because materials are assembled from the vast and largely unknown coupled chemical and structural spaces. As a result, we are forced to work mostly by analogy with known materials to identify new ones. This necessarily incremental approach restricts the diversity of outcome from both scientific and technological perspectives. We need to be able to design materials beyond this "paradigm of analogues" if we are to exploit their potential to tackle societal challenges. This project will transform our ability to access functional materials with unprecedented chemical and structural diversity by fusing physical and computer science. We will develop a digital discovery platform that will advance the frontier of knowledge by creating new materials classes with novel structure and bonding and tackle key application challenges, thus focussing the developed capability on well-defined targets of scientific novelty and application performance. The discovery platform will be shaped by the need to identify new materials and by the performance needed in applications. This performance is both enabled by and creates the need for the new materials classes, emphasising the interdependent nature of the project strands. We will strengthen cutting-edge physical science (PS) capability and thinking by exploiting the extensive synergies with computer science (CS), to boost the ability of the physical scientist to navigate the space of possible materials. Computers can assimilate large databases and handle multivariate complexity in a complementary way to human experts, so we will develop models that fuse the knowledge and needs from PS with the insights from CS on how to balance precision and efficiency in the quest for promising regions in chemical space. The development of mixed techniques that use explainable symbolic AI-based automated reasoning and model construction approaches coupled with machine learning is just one example that illustrates how this opportunity goes far beyond interpolative machine learning, itself valuable as a baseline evaluation of our current knowledge. By working collaboratively across the CS/PS interface, we can digitally explore the unknown space, informed and guided by PS expertise, to transform our ability to harvest disruptive functional materials. Only testing against the hard constraints of PS novelty and functional value will drive the discovery platform to the level needed to deliver this aim. As we are navigating uncharted space, the tools and models that we develop will be compass-like guides, rather than satellite navigation-like directors, for the expert PS team. The magnitude of the opportunity to transform materials discovery produces intense international competition with significant investments at pace from industry (e.g., Toyota Research Institute $1bn) and government (e.g., DoE $27m; a new centre at NIMS, Japan, both in 2019). Our transformative vision exploits recent UK advances in autonomous robotic researchers and artificial intelligence-guided identification of outperforming functional materials that are not based on analogues. The scale and flexibility of this PG will ensure the UK is at the forefront of this vital area.

A clinical trial run by an established UK company has identified two natural plant molecules that inhibit skin inflammation. Unfortunately, the amount of these molecules from the source plant is very low and therefore extraction from the source plant is not feasible on an industrial scale. A potential solution to this problem is to use cultured plant cells, which can been grown on a large scale in multi-tonne bioreactors and optimised for the production of these target plant natural products. Significantly, by employing non-GM genetic approaches, the yield of these target molecules will be significantly increased in these cultured plant cells. This approach will also enable new insights into the biochemical regulation of these molecules within the source plant, potentially leading to further improvements in yield. The target natural products isolated from the generated plant cell lines will also be tested and compared to the same molecules extracted from the source plant in a large number of biomedical-based assays. It is anticipated this work will show the molecules produced from the generated plant cell lines are functionally equivalent to those extracted from the source plant. Once confirmed, and beyond the scale of this particular research project, the company will scale-up the growth of the generated plant cells and isolate the target molecules for their introduction into commercial products.

The recent advances in high through-put data generation for DNA/RNA, proteins and metabolites has resulted in a paradigm shift in how we seek to answer some of the fundamental questions of biology. Over the past decade, significant amounts of these large data sets encompassing resident microbial communities (microbiome), specific host responses and environmental conditions have been generated. To date the integration and exploitation of these complex datasets in a structured way has been highly problematic. However recent advancements in in-silico methodologies can for the first time help to unlock the full potential of these data, facilitating improved understanding of and discovery of novel interventions for host-microbiome interactions. With the advent of these technologies it has become apparent that interactions between environmental, host and microbial factors give rise to the various changes in skin homeostasis that result in cosmetic conditions such as dry skin and dandruff. Dandruff and dry skin are widespread conditions impacting over 50% of the world's population affecting quality of life including self/body confidence and their treatment is the basis of a sector worth over 10bn Euros annually. In this study, in collaboration with our industrial partners, Unilever, we will investigate the physiological changes of normal, dry skin and dandruff through unique integration of computational biology and modelling with microbiology. We will develop a computational and experimental platform for skin host-microbiome interactions to reveal the microbial mechanisms involved in different skin states. Using this approach, we will identify and evaluate new therapeutic targets as well as reveal the underlying physiological events in skin homeostasis. Using a combination of skin samples collected by tape strips from normal, dry skin and dandruff, as well as data generated from reconstituted skin models and keratinocyte monolayers, we will generate data that accurately describes skin-microbe interactions. we will also identify the key species and strains of Malassezia, Staphylococcus and Cutibacterium associated with different skin states. In parallel by using the available multi-omics data from Unilever and the public domain, we will generate computational models for microbes and host skin tissue and cells. Having both in-silico and in-vitro set ups, we will investigate the impact of key metabolites and anti-metabolites on the relationship between the skin and key microbes and microbial communities. Finally, we will explore the impact of key host factors, such as cytokines (e.g. IL-36, IL-1, IL-17, IL-20 family) and antimicrobial peptides (e.g. beta-defensins, S100, LL-37) on the resident microbial communities. We will then categorize these therapies based on their mode of action on skin-microbiomes interactions. The new therapeutic targets generated and validated through this combination of both computational and experimental techniques can then be tested for host toxicity and efficacy. This cutting-edge integrative platform could be easily extended to identify new targets or drugs for different microbial constituents in human body, their association with a range of hosts and pathologies. As such it will delineate an entirely novel approach to investigating host-microbiome interactions that will have broad applicability across a wide range of sectors, including medical, veterinary, cosmetic and agricultural.