Three 91直播 researchers awarded Future Leaders Fellowships
Three 91直播 researchers have been awarded UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships to lead bold challenge-led research, spanning ocean engineering, wearable healthcare, and biotechnology - with applications ranging from offshore energy and cancer care, to sustainable manufacturing.
- Three 91直播 researchers named in UKRI鈥檚 2026 Future Leaders Fellowships (FLF) awards
- Researchers Dr Samuel Draycott, Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer and Dr Richard Obexer will receive four years of funding to become leaders in their field.
- Backed by a combined total of 拢5.4m, the researchers will drive research in offshore engineering, biotechnology and wearable healthcare
Three new Future Leaders Fellowships are empowering 91直播 researchers to tackle very different scientific challenges 鈥� from predicting extreme ocean waves to designing miniature biological factories to wearable health technology that transcends health inequalities 鈥� with potentially far-reaching consequences.
Backed by a combined 拢5.4 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Dr Samuel Draycott, Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer and Dr Richard Obexer are among the recipients of its 2026 Future Leaders Fellowships (FLF) awards. The funding will support four years of ambitious research in fields spanning ocean engineering, biotechnology and digital enabled health.
The Future Leaders Fellowships: at a glance
- How well we understand the ocean matters increasingly for the infrastructure we build, the energy we generate and our response to climate change. is investigating what happens when waves break in the complex conditions found in the ocean, with real implications for how we design offshore wind farms and other marine infrastructure, and for improving the accuracy of climate and ocean models that predict how the sea absorbs and releases carbon dioxide and other gases.
- Across 91直播's communities, is taking research directly into patients鈥� homes 鈥� creating a real-world test environment to help make wearable health technologies a routine part of cancer care. He's working to discover whether continuous data from wearable devices can help NHS clinical teams support patients through cancer surgery, and how to make sure this new model of care reaches everyone, including those at risk of digital exclusion.
Meanwhile, in another laboratory in 91直播, has been looking at the world on a different scale 鈥� exploring how nature packages enzymes inside tiny structures in living cells. He鈥檚 working to discover whether those same principles can be engineered to manufacture medicines, recycle carbon and produce valuable chemicals more efficiently.
Dr Samuel Draycott: Wavebreak
Offshore wind farms, ships and other marine structures all need to withstand the most powerful waves the ocean can produce, but many engineering models simplify the sea in ways that don鈥檛 fully reflect real-world conditions. This potentially affects how accurately we can predict the forces these structures will face.聽
Recent work by Dr Draycott and collaborators, published in Nature, . Through this fellowship, Dr Draycott and his colleagues will build on this research to recreate even more realistic ocean conditions in their laboratory, combining waves travelling in different directions with currents that change speed with depth, as they do in the real ocean.聽
The team will study what happens when waves break and what happens in the seconds afterwards, including how they move particles such as microplastics and phytoplankton, draw air into the ocean and transfer gases such as CO2 between the sea and atmosphere. This could improve our understanding of everything from pollution and marine ecosystems to the ocean鈥檚 role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.聽
Dr Draycott, Senior Lecturer in Ocean Engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering and Management, University of Manchester, said:聽
鈥淲e鈥檝e long relied on simplified models to understand how waves behave, but the real ocean is much more complex.
鈥淭his matters because engineers use estimates of extreme waves when designing offshore wind turbines, ships and platforms, so a better understanding of wave breaking could help us improve the safety and efficiency of this infrastructure. These are crucial industries, with the UK aiming to increase its offshore wind capacity to at least and a sector already employing tens of thousands of people .鈥澛�
The research, funded with 拢1.67m from UKRI, will take place in the University鈥檚 new Hydrodynamics Laboratory, using high-performance computer simulations and laboratory experiments to measure how waves break, how much air they draw into the water, and how they move particles.
Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer: 91直播 Digital Health Living Lab
Wearable devices can monitor vital signs such as heart rate, activity and sleep, providing clinicians with valuable data to inform on-going patient care. The NHS 10 Year Health Plan identifies them as one of its 鈥�5 Big Bets鈥� for transforming healthcare, but their use across the health service remains patchy, with benefits not reaching all communities equally. Through his fellowship, Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer will establish the 91直播 Digital Health Living Lab, a real-world testbed where patients, families, community organisations, clinicians, researchers, industry partners, and local government work together to design and evaluate wearable-enabled care.
The 拢2.4m-UKRI funded programme is built around three strands. The first will work with communities to understand what helps or hinders people in adopting wearables, with a focus on accessibility, trust, usability and digital inclusion. The second will develop secure systems that connect wearable data to electronic health records and explore how continuous streams of patient-generated data can be transformed into clinically meaningful real-time information to support care. The third will embed a wearable-enabled clinical trial, working with approximately 800 patients undergoing lung and hepato-pancreato-biliary surgery to trial adoption and evaluate their potential to improve health outcomes.
Findings will help shape the future use of wearable technologies across healthcare and inform the development of digitally enabled hospitals and care pathways in Greater 91直播 and beyond.
Dr Hughes-Noehrer, Lecturer in Mobile and Wearable Health Technology in the Division of Informatics, Imaging, and Data Sciences, and Lead for Computational Medicine at 91直播 University NHS Foundation Trust said:
鈥淎s someone who works at the intersection of healthcare and research, I see first-hand how health inequalities can affect who benefits from new models of care and emerging technologies. Wearables have huge potential to provide more personalised, proactive support, but only if everyone can access, use and trust them. By working directly with our communities in 91直播, I want to build a model for wearable-enabled care that is fair, safe and trusted, and that other places in the UK and beyond can follow.鈥�
Dr Richard Obexer: De Novo Biomolecular Condensates for Programmable Assembly of Enzyme Cascades
Inside our cells are tiny droplets that act a little like miniature factories. Without being surrounded by a membrane, they can bring particular proteins and enzymes together, allowing chemical reactions to happen faster and more efficiently.
These structures known as 鈥榖iomolecular condensates鈥�, occur widely inside living cells, and Dr Richard Obexer is exploring whether we can recreate this natural trick, then engineer it to make useful products more efficiently.
His new fellowship, funded by 拢1.3m from UKRI, will enable him to combine AI-powered protein design with a laboratory process inspired by natural evolution, to rapidly test thousands of protein variations. The aim is to create molecules that can encourage these droplets to form around a much wider range of enzymes, while controlling what happens inside them. This could give researchers unprecedented control over the conditions inside each biological factory.
The team will initially test their approach by building a five-enzyme system to manufacture islatravir, an anti-HIV drug that鈥檚 currently made using conventional chemical synthesis. Next, they will explore whether a ten-enzyme system could turn CO2 and methanol into starch, potentially creating a route for converting captured carbon into useful materials. Finally, they鈥檒l rebuild a biosynthetic pathway in bacteria to produce trunkamide, an anti-cancer compound that has proven difficult to manufacture at a useful scale.
Dr Obexer, BBSRC Discovery Fellow in Chemical Biology and Biological Chemistry, in the Department of Chemistry, University of Manchester, said:
鈥淣ature has already evolved incredibly efficient ways of organising chemistry inside cells, and we鈥檙e now asking whether we can recreate and engineer these to build tiny biological factories for ourselves. If we can combine that with AI-designed proteins, we could make entirely new manufacturing processes possible, from medicines to ways of turning captured carbon into useful products.鈥�