News

Researchers in the Astronomy Unit (AU), in the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary, have been awarded a total of £1.5 million from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to fund 3 research projects over the next 3 years. The research grants cover Queen Mary's internationally leading research in space plasma physics, planetary science, and cosmology and will support 3 postdoctoral researchers and 4 academic staff in the AU.

The funded projects are:

• a project, led by Dr Christopher Chen (PI), Dr Heli Hietala (Co-I), and Dr Davide Manzini (RIA), to understand how multi-scale plasma processes in near-Earth space work together to shape the energy transfer and control the dynamics in this key environment.
• a project, led by Dr David Mulryne (PI) and Dr Laura Iacconi (RIA), to connect inflationary cosmology to observations on all scales by confronting the interplay between predictions for large-scale structure observations and small-scale gravitational waves and primordial black holes.
• a project, led by Prof Richard Nelson (PI) and Dr Eleftheria Sarafidou (RIA) to investigate how planets interact with the protoplanetary discs in which they are born during the epoch of planet formation. This project is an essential step in understanding what determines the architectures of planetary systems and will play a central role in comparing the predictions of models of planet formation with forthcoming discoveries of exoplanet systems.

In a funding round that was particularly competitive this year, this is a significant achievement that reflects Queen Mary's leading Astronomy research.