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Congratulations! Dr Emily Kostas awarded UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship
4 December 2023
Well done to our colleague Dr Emily Kostas who has been awarded a prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (Round 7). The UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships are awarded to especially talented people in businesses, universities and other innovation and research environments.
The scheme aims to enable companies and universities to grow and develop the most talented researchers and enable them to take on innovation, leadership and enterprise roles in the future.
Emily, who joined the Department of Biochemical Engineering in 2019 from The University of Nottingham with a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship, has secured £1.3 million to undertake her project ‘SEACONOMY: Integrated Manufacturing and Biorefinery Research for Building the UK’s Seaweed Bioeconomy’. This will help her to build a research group at the new Manufacturing Future’s Labs at UCL East that’s dedicated to solving the engineering, bioscience and societal challenges to scale up seaweed biorefineries in the UK. Emily’s project partners and collaborators include, Dr Marco Marques (UCL), Prof. Michele Stanley (Scottish Association of Marine Science), Dr Orla Williams (The University of Nottingham), Dr Hector Ruiz (The Autonomous University of Coahuila, Mexico), PlantSea Ltd, Cefas, and the Seaweed Alliance.
“I am delighted and honoured to have been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. This funding will enable me to achieve my research vision of establishing seaweeds as an important UK sustainable feedstock, and to drive the development of a seaweed bioeconomy that will help to achieve Net Zero and meet the UN’s sustainable development goals.” Dr Emily Kostas, December 2023
This project will take place at the newly opened Manufacturing Futures Lab (MFL), located at UCL's new campus in East London. UCL has created an innovative facility to support the development of new strategic research focused on knowledge-based manufacturing to deliver the sustainable products and processes of the future.