Submitted by Susan Meah on Fri, 13/06/2025 - 12:22
Two researchers from the School of Technology have been awarded prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grants. Professor Matthew Juniper from the Department of Engineering and Professor Róisín Owens from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology are among 11 Cambridge researchers who have won Advanced Grants awarded by the ERC.
Professor Matthew Juniper (Department of Engineering/Trinity College) for adjoint-accelerated inference and optimisation methods.
The 20th century mathematician John von Neumann is quoted as saying “with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” This is often interpreted to mean that physics-based models should contain only a few parameters. Today, however, scientists frequently use neural networks with millions of parameters containing no physics at all. What might von Neumann have said?
The European Research Council has just announced €2.5m funding to Prof. Matthew Juniper at Cambridge University Engineering Department for a research project that starts from this question. The project will develop a solution rooted in Probability Theory, accelerate calculations using adjoint methods pioneered by Prof. Juniper, and apply this in three important areas.
The first area is Flow-MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging of blood flows), which could reduce hospital MRI scan times by 10 to 100 times, increasing productivity in the NHS. The second area is the stability of aeroplane engines, so that they can be designed to be safe when using sustainable aviation fuel or hydrogen. The third area is rheology (the study of fluid behaviour), so that rheology can be performed in situ rather than in laboratory experiments.
The project's key insight is that the information content of experimental data depends on the question being asked of it. The more we know about the data beforehand, the more it can tell us about what we don't know. A raw Flow-MRI image is difficult for a human to interpret. If we know, however, that the image is of blood pulsing through an artery then a computer can be programmed to infer the flow accurately because we can provide it with prior physical knowledge about how blood behaves.
Returning to von Neumann's elephant quote, we can only guess what he would have said. Today we have better physical knowledge, faster numerical algorithms, higher performance computers, and larger amounts of data than he did 70 years ago. Perhaps von Neumann would have said 'put the physics in the model if you can,' which is exactly what this project will do.
Professor Róisín Owens (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology/Newnham College) for conformal organic devices for electronic brain-gut readout and characterisation.
Researchers in the department are creating bioelectronic tools to study gut–brain communication, aiming to transform care for millions.
The five-year project, CODEBREAKER, has received a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant to develop soft, tissue-like devices that can record gut activity in real time. Led by Professor Róisín Owens, the work targets digestive disorders affecting more than 100 million people across Europe – including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), inflammatory bowel disease, and neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, which often show early gut symptoms.
“Digestive disorders are incredibly common, but still poorly understood,” said Professor Owens. “Our devices adapt to complex gut tissue, enabling us to study it more realistically, with the ultimate goal of improving diagnosis and treatment.”
Current understanding of the gut-brain axis is limited by a lack of functional measurements for key gut parameters like permeability and gut motility and the enteric nervous system.
CODEBREAKER aims to overcome these challenges by developing ultra-sensitive bioelectronic interfaces made from conducting polymers that mimic human tissue. These materials allow the devices to conform to gut surfaces, picking up subtle electrical signals with greater accuracy and less noise than existing technologies.
The team has already developed early-stage devices that can interface with complex gut tissue in the lab. The next step is to adapt and refine them for use in more complex environments.
The devices will be tested across three research models. In vitro (in lab-grown gut tissue engineered to mimic real conditions), ex vivo (in tissue samples taken from animals or humans, to observe activity outside the body), and in vivo (inside live animals, to study how gut signals affect brain function in real time).
By working across these environments, the team hopes to build a more complete picture of how the gut functions – and what happens when things go wrong. The findings could help explain how stress, diet and neurological conditions affect gut health, and guide future development of more targeted treatments.
Professor Owens brings a unique blend of biology and engineering expertise to the project, having worked extensively with organic electronic devices and gut biology. Her philosophy is to adapt technology to the biology, not the other way around – a principle reflected in CODEBREAKER’s innovative device design.
She added: “I’ve been working at the intersection of biology and engineering for a long time, and that puts me in a good position to take this on – I’ve built up a strong network of collaborators across different fields. But what really makes this project possible is being able to connect the dots, to listen to what clinicians and microbiome experts need, and translate that into something we can measure. That’s where I think I can really make a difference.”
An ERC Advanced Grant is one of the most prestigious awards available to researchers in Europe. It provides long-term funding – up to €2.5 million over five years – to support ambitious, high-risk projects with the potential to make significant breakthroughs in their field. The grant recognises established researchers with a strong track record of significant research achievements over the past decade.
A list of all eleven successful grantees can be found on the University's Research News website.