Five UCL academics have received over £2.7 million in Wellcome Early Career Awards to support a diverse range of innovative research projects, spanning history, medical AI, neural tracking and electron microscopy.
These highly prestigious five-year financial awards support early-career researchers across disciplines whose work has the potential to transform understanding of human life, health and wellbeing.
Dr Markus Rademacher (UCL Physics & Astronomy) received £805,837 for his project titled ’Emphasis - Electron Microscopy Platform for High-throughput Analysis and Spectroscopic Imaging Systems,’ which aims to develop more powerful electron microscopes.
Dr Rademacher said: "I’m incredibly grateful to receive this Wellcome Early-Career Award. For me, it represents the opportunity to build a new generation of electron microscopy tools using quantum technologies that could help researchers understand biological structures and disease mechanisms much more quickly and in far greater detail.
"I’m excited that this support allows me to bring together physics, engineering and biomedicine here at UCL, and to contribute to the wider effort of developing technologies that advance health and benefit society."
Dr Yukon Zhou (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology) received £609,914 to support his project ’Advancing Medical Artificial Intelligence with Foundation Models.’ His research involves investigating how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to analyse medical data for quicker diagnoses and more personalised care.
Dr Zhou said: "Receiving this award is a tremendous honour and provides strong motivation and support for the next steps. It enables us to advance both the scientific development of large-scale AI models and their translation into real clinical tools.
"Our aim is to turn cutting-edge medical AI research into practical systems that enable earlier diagnosis, improve clinical decision-making and expand access to high-quality healthcare worldwide."
Dr Holly Fletcher (UCL History) received £442,145 for her project titled ’The Fats of Life in the Early Modern World, 1500-1750: Matter in Multispecies Medicine.’ She described it as the first academic project of its kind to examine the transformative impact of plant and animal fats within early modern medicine between about 1500 and 1750.
Dr Fletcher said: "It’s quite unusual for a humanities postdoc to have this amount of time and resources so it feels like a real privilege - it will allow me to acquire new skills, visit a broader range of archives, expand my international networks and ultimately delve deeper into the histories that I’m aiming to uncover. It’s also extremely gratifying for my research topic, which I personally find to be really fascinating and exciting, to receive the recognition and appreciation of an institution like Wellcome and their expert reviewers."
Dr Guangting Mai (formerly UCL Experimental Psychology) was awarded £667,866.91 for his project on ’Understanding and Improving Neural Tracking of audiovisual speech in adults with cochlear implants: the principle of cooperation and competition between modalities.’ Dr Mai received the award while at UCL, but will be completing his work at the University of Cambridge.
Malika Zehni (UCL History) has been awarded £234,535.27 for her project, ’Checkpoints of Contagion: Health and Disease in Tashkent, Hong Kong, and Manila, 1890-1920,’ which will begin next year. Her project will engage with ongoing debates on biopolitics, quarantine, and global health governance, pointing to the legacies of imperial public health interventions in contemporary epidemiology and border regimes.
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