UEA’s grant and funding success – October 2026

By: Communications

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S-LATTICE – Scalable Synthesis of Defect-Free Metal-Coordinated 2DProtein Frameworks

UEA project leads: Prof Julea Butt (BIO) and Dr Amit Sachdeva (CPP)

Partners: Prof Louise Horsfall (Edinburgh), Dr Tanmay Bharat (MRC, Cambridge), Prof Caroline Ajo-Franklin (Rice (USA)), Dr Lin Su (QMUL) and Dr Joshua Atkinson (Princeton)

Prof Julea Butt (BIO) and Dr Amit Sacheva (CPP) are part of a newly formed UK-US consortium funded through the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) Universal Fabricators Programme.

The team has been awarded £5.3 million to engineer microbial S-layer proteins into large-area, defect-free 2D lattices with metals built into the structure for tuneable functionality with application in molecular separation, catalysis, and photonic materials.

Led by Louise Horsfall (Edinburgh), the team includes Caroline Ajo-Franklin (Rice), Tanmay Bharat (MRC LMB), Joshua Atkinson (Princeton), Erwin Reisner (Cambridge), Lin Su (Queen Mary), in addition to UEA's Julea and Amit.

Autoformalising Habiro rings

UEA project lead: Dr Christopher Birkbeck

Dr Christopher Birkbeck from the School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics has been awarded a four-year Future Leaders Fellowship funded by UKRI (UK Research and Innovation).

This fellowship will focus on pioneering areas of number theory and geometry, such as the theory of Habiro rings and their connections to profound questions in the Langlands programme.

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