E-Lab Research Associate awarded ARIA research grant for innovative project to address climate instability
Chris Micklem has been awarded a £500,000 research grant from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), the largest award size possible for the grant.
A huge congratulations to Chris Micklem who has been awarded a £500,000 research grant from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), the largest award size possible for the grant.
It comes as a part of ARIA’s Programmable Plants opportunity space, led by Programme Director Angie Burnett, and it aims to support explorations into how we can programme plants to remove more CO₂, fight drought, and deliver medicines to those in need.
Chris, a King’s E-Lab Research Associate and a postdoctoral researcher at the Sainsbury Laboratory, is seeking to pioneer a new direction in synthetic biology through the design of gene circuits that use noise, instead of suppressing it. By embracing stochasticity, not fighting it, the aim of Chris’s project is to program plants more robustly and more effectively.
In this era of increasing climate instability, such unexplored approaches may hold the key to enabling a more sustainable coexistence of humanity with the planet and, for Chris, it is hoped that his project will help accelerate progress towards such a future.
Chris’s work has also been showcased for his use of AI as a part of a deep neural network-based approach to facilitate more effective use of photosynthetic bacteria for climate positive purposes.
Alongside James Beattie and Charles Emogor, Chris joined Coco Newton, Nadia Mohd-Radzman and Ismail Sami as E-Lab Research Associate this year. Read more about their work here.
On receiving the award, Chris said:
It is a huge privilege to be selected for ARIA’s Programmable Plants Opportunity Seed. What is so exciting about ARIA’s approach is the direct mandate to turn ambitious science into real-world solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges. This focus, coupled with the King’s E-Lab’s invaluable support, provides the perfect environment to pursue both groundbreaking research and its commercial potential, to drive transformative change.
About ARIA:
ARIA is an R&D funding agency created to unlock technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. Created by an Act of Parliament and sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, we fund teams of scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is scientifically and technologically possible.