Fellowship news
Dr Marcus Newton, from the School of Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded a Future Leader Fellowship Renewal from UKRI. His project, “Multifunctional Materials Imaging of Nanoscale Devices in Three Dimensions” (MIND-3D), aims to advance the study of multiferroic quantum materials and devices.
Multiferroics exhibit properties like electricity, elasticity, and magnetism. Dr. Newton’s research focuses on developing low-power neuromorphic memory devices and integrated circuits, which could be over 100 times more energy-efficient than current technologies, potentially reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.
“There is considerable potential for new technologies to be developed and commercialised that utilise the novel properties of multiferroics,” says Dr. Newton.
To achieve these goals, Dr. Newton’s team will use Bragg coherent diffraction imaging (BCDI), a sophisticated X-ray microscopy technique that enables high-resolution, three-dimensional imaging at the nanoscale without the need for focusing lenses.
Dr Newton’s Future Leaders Fellowship Renewal award from UKRI is for £708,075.
Continuing with Fellowship news, Dr Lucy Oswald, Lecturer, in the School of Physics and Astronomy has been awarded a Stephen Hawking Fellowship under the EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowships.
This prestigious fellowship will fund a three-year research project titled “The pulsar population: revealing the extreme physics of neutron stars at the intersection of statistics, citizen science, and machine-learning.”
The research aims to uncover how pulsars form, evolve, and behave, and how they can be used to probe fundamental laws of physics and the universe’s invisible structures. The project will involve a citizen science initiative to classify pulsar observations, a study of the Milky Way’s structures and magnetic properties, and the application of machine-learning to analyse pulsar data.
With a background in studying pulsar radio emissions and the interstellar medium, Lucy Oswald previously worked at Magdalen College, Oxford, and joined Southampton as a Lecturer in AI and Data Science in Astronomy in September 2024. The project will commence in July 2025.