Opportunity spaces
Our opportunity spaces are critically important but underexplored areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs.
They each serve as a bedrock for multi-year programmes directed by our Programme Directors, as well as additional flares of seed funding to support researchers pursuing bold ideas.
Even if you are new to a topic, we urge you to dive in below – a variety of perspectives are just what we need to change what’s possible.
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.
Manufacturing Abundance
Ages of human history are defined by materials that transformed societies and mark breakthroughs in mastery over matter. Rather than a single material, the next age will be defined by our ability to assemble molecules into bespoke solutions for today’s challenges and unlock sustainable abundance.
Trust Everything, Everywhere
Trust 'building blocks', like encryption, enable digital industries to flourish securely, but they don't extend into the physical world. With emerging technology blurring the line between digital and physical, a new trust infrastructure that straddles both worlds could unlock cyber-physical markets.
Sculpting Innate Immunity
As the body’s first line of defence, the innate immune system has enormous therapeutic potential, sensing and initiating responses to infection, injury, metabolic stress, and chronic inflammation. Modulating innate immunity with precision and accuracy could unlock a new paradigm in human health.
Bioenergetic Engineering
Genetic engineering now lets us control life’s information, yet the engineering of life’s energy remains underdeveloped. New tools could bridge the gap, enabling breakthroughs ranging from treatments for neurodegenerative disease to biohybrid solutions for environmental remediation and resilience.
Scalable Neural Interfaces
Neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders have overwhelming societal and economic impacts. We need to build highly targeted, minimally invasive technologies that enable us to interface, at scale, with the human brain.
Programmable Plants
Plants enable human life and offer solutions to key challenges like food insecurity, climate change, and environmental degradation. Programmable plants can secure our future, ensuring food and a sustainable biosphere for future generations.
Mathematics for Safe AI
We don’t yet have known technical solutions to ensure that powerful AI systems interact as intended with real-world systems and populations. A combination of scientific world-models and mathematical proofs may be the answer to ensuring AI provides transformational benefit without harm.
Nature Computes Better
We can redefine the way computers process information by exploiting principles found ubiquitously in nature. In doing so, we can better understand how the natural world around us performs computation and build dramatically more efficient computers.
Scoping Our Planet
Our understanding of the Earth system is limited by serious measurement and modelling gaps that lead to uncertainties in weather and climate predictions. By cultivating frontier technologies, we can fill these gaps and equip society to better respond to the climate crisis.
Smarter Robot Bodies
Throughout history, humans have used tools and machines to reduce the burden of physical labour. We are entering a new era with robots smart enough to act independently in complex and dynamic environments. But to reap the benefits of smarter machines, we need smarter bodies.
Future Proofing Our Climate and Weather
If an abrupt alteration in our climate system were to unfold, we would have no tools to mitigate the effects. Through careful research, we can expand our options for adaptation and lay the groundwork for informed choices in a crisis.
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Keep up-to-date on the progress of our existing and emerging opportunity spaces.
Emerging areas
Our second cohort of Programme Directors joined in April 2025 with initial ideas to explore. Following a collaborative and intensive discovery process these areas will be developed into opportunity spaces.
Programme Directors
Our Programme Directors drive our pursuit of breakthroughs. They define bold visions for how science + technology could shape the future and direct funding to turn them into reality.