My work to date has focused on food security: ensuring access to sufficient, nutritious food for all people at all times. I’ve spent my career building our understanding of what limits growth and productivity in crop plants.

Now, I want to explore what might happen if we removed the idea of limits altogether. In the uncertain climate of tomorrow, we’ll need transformative new approaches to food security. I’m motivated by the prospect of developing new technologies that not only alter our understanding of the plants within our food system, but help us use plants to reshape it.

I’m an applied physicist and neuroscientist. Having spent the best part of a decade building new kinds of computer chips to accelerate quantum computing and AI, I transitioned into neuroscience to apply these same technologies to understand how our brain processes information at the level of individual neurons.

During this transition into neuroscience, I was struck by the gap between the technologies that are used in advanced engineering (e.g. computing, telecommunications) and the technologies that are used to understand the brain. Put crudely: the devices we put in brains are decades behind the technologies we put in our pockets. Motivated by the desire to advance human health, I believe that closing this gap and building next-generation neurotechnologies will enable an entirely new suite of therapeutic tools to treat a variety of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, ultimately helping many more people living with disabilities.

We’re both passionate about the future health of our planet and the people on it. Working in the health tech space, we have created new tools to allow us to safely see inside humans in new ways using light. We believe that there are emerging optical technologies at the edge of the possible, which will disrupt the current landscape. As co-PDs, we’ll look to accelerate these technologies, initially by exploring ideas around non-invasive optical mapping and sensing across a range of applications – from monitoring human health to climate change.

I’ve spent my career working on advanced computing from multiple vantage points. The dramatic rise and power of AI algorithms coupled with the near end of exponentially improving compute performance will have massive ramifications to our society, economy, and planet. I’ve always been enamoured with how transformative technologies originate, gather momentum, and ultimately make their mark on the world. Now, as an ARIA Programme Director, I’ll work to create alternative hardware paradigms that can allow us to sustainably scale AI compute to benefit everyone in society.

I have spent the past few years examining how mathematical approaches could be used to guarantee reliable and trustworthy artificial intelligence. As an ARIA Programme Director, I want to mobilise a concerted R&D effort to show this is possible. The first step is to create LLM-powered software tools that assist human scientists and engineers in developing and refining mathematical explanations of real-world phenomena, such as the dynamics of energy infrastructure, infectious disease, or the Earth climate system. If successful, these explanations would ground the semantics of a human-intelligible formal language in which to specify bounded tasks for future AI systems, so they perform safely and as intended.

As an electrochemist, I’ve spent the last 15 years developing sustainable fuels and chemical processes in the drive towards net zero. Now, as an ARIA Programme Director I want to explore technologies for actively reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and for climate intervention at the regional and global scale.

Limiting further increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by achieving net zero is necessary but insufficient to prevent the worst consequences of climate change. The full effects of delaying action will be felt by our children and grandchildren. We need to know what our options are for responsible climate intervention technologies, and if, where and when we should deploy them. If we are serious about combating climate change, we need to evaluate these technologies now.

Originally trained in physics, I’ve spent over 25 years as a computational visual neuroscientist, specialising in “3D” or stereo depth perception. Now, as an ARIA Programme Director, I plan to move to an adjacent area: robotics. I’ve long felt we could do science ‘better’, specifically through more effective, interdisciplinary collaboration. Coming into the field with fresh eyes, I’ll look to facilitate links between fields that too rarely connect. Most importantly, I believe there is enormous untapped potential for robots to help humans build a secure and prosperous future.