Prof Mark Symes appointed as ARIA Programme Director

Professor Mark Symes of the School of Chemistry has been announced as one of the founding Programme Directors of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, ARIA. Professor Mark Symes of the School of Chemistry has been announced as one of the founding Programme Directors of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency , ARIA. ARIA is a non-departmental public body, sponsored by the UK Government's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. An R&D funding agency backed by £800m over the next four years, ARIA aims to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs to benefit everyone in the UK. Prof Mark Symes Professor Symes is one of ARIA's eight founding Programme Directors, each of whom are scientists and engineers with diverse fields of expertise and a range of experience across industry, academia and government. The directors were recruited after a global, open call for candidates which received more than 400 applications. Each programme director will set out to develop a vision of what the future will look like through a four-stage process. They will question the status quo, bound an opportunity space worth exploring, formulate a core hypothesis to underpin a programme, and launch a programme for solicitation from the wider research and development community. Professor Symes' academic research interests focus on energy conversion and the production of green fuels. He is also a co-founder of Clyde Hydrogen Systems Ltd, a spin-out in the green hydrogen space. Some of the questions Professor Symes will seek to investigate as a Programme Director are: - What are the options for actively cooling the Earth, and how can we improve our monitor-measure-predict feedback loops to identify the most responsible choices?