Engineering Ecosystem Resilience
Living organisms underpin our food, climate stability, and materials – ecological collapse threatens the foundations of civilisation. By pairing advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting interventions, we could halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive.
What is an opportunity space?
Opportunity spaces are areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs. They are defined by our Programme Directors, and must be highly consequential for society, under-explored relative to their potential impact, and ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible.
Core beliefs
The core beliefs that underpin this opportunity space:
With ecosystem degradation accelerating globally, humanity’s most vital unsolved technical capability is engineering ecosystem resilience → success could pave the way towards unparalleled human and planetary prosperity.
Our tools to measure, predict, and manage ecosystems are insufficient → effective stewardship demands proactive deployment of fit-for-purpose technologies.
Ecosystems are complex adaptive networks where small changes can have outsized effects → with the right tools, we can design highly effective interventions that are both ethical and environmentally responsible.
Converging advances in high-throughput genomics and prediction, gene editing, accelerated evolution, robotics, novel sensors, and AI analytics → together unlock a new integrative paradigm for engineering ecosystem resilience.
Give feedback on this opportunity space
Help inform the development of the programme thesis.
Pre-programme discovery funding
We are now looking to develop an ambitious research programme within this space. To help guide our thinking and shape the programme’s development, we are looking to fund ~10, 3-month exploratory projects with up to £20,000.
We welcome proposals that:
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Dive deep on research directions relevant to the Engineering Ecosystem Resilience opportunity space. Exploration should be oriented by a combination of your scientific interests and backgrounds, and the needs of programme development efforts.
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Explore technical feasibility, risks, identify gaps and opportunities in the opportunity space.
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Identify and explore ethical, governance and community engagement needs and concerns
Apply by 18 September (14:00 BST)
Resources:
Call for proposals
Call for proposals (accessible version)
Accessibility support
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a core team that provides a blend of operational coordination and highly specialised technical expertise.
Yannick Wurm
Programme Director
Yannick joins ARIA from Queen Mary University of London, where he is Professor of Evolutionary Genomics & Bioinformatics. Yannick pioneered the use of molecular tools to assess pollinator health, has built startups to commercialise genome analysis software, and created a real-time network for pollinator monitoring.
Seth Barribeau
External Technical Advisor
Seth is a biotech strategist who has led evolutionary ecology labs in the US and UK, co-founded computational oncology startup Intervance, and led international genomics consortia across 20+ institutions. He holds a PhD in Zoology from University of Canterbury and has held roles at Kyoto University, Emory University, ETH Zurich, East Carolina University, and the University of Liverpool.
Alice Pettitt
Frontier Specialist
Alice works with the Programme Directors to scope out emerging areas of technology that can shape current and future ARIA programmes. Before ARIA, she was a Venture Fellow at Creator Fund and a Founder's Associate at Gathr. She holds a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from UCL and has also carried out conservation research in the Amazon rainforest.
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