In 2023/24, the University received a total of £457 million in research awards. The award total is notable as the record £488 million in 2022/23 was bolstered by a number of core awards from the Medical Research Council (MRC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Dementia Research Institute, totalling almost £90 million) The University of Edinburgh maintains a diverse funding portfolio but has seen particularly good performance in charity, UK Government and overseas funding (including EU) this year. The University’s research income in 2023/24 totalled £365 million. This is an increase of £25 million on the previous year and reflects the performance of world-class researchers at the University. Our application rate remained high in 2023/24 with colleagues submitting 2,776 applications worth £1.42 billion. The University of Edinburgh continues to enjoy a high success rate and expects a similar level of performance in 2024/25. Research highlights Research initiative to build collaborative and creative AI futures A £2.4 million initiative has been launched to help organisations develop solutions for pressing questions around the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI). The Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID) Fellowships are part of the BRAID programme. BRAID is led by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the BBC. The £15.9 million, six-year programme is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI). Researchers will address a range of AI-related challenges in industry, public organisations and the third sector through a series of fellowships. The Fellows, appointed from universities across the UK, will apply research expertise from humanities and arts, including data ethics, copyright law, digital design and qualitative analysis to address questions around the responsible use of AI. Each fellow, numbering 17 in total, will partner with an organisation from the public, private or third sector to unite expertise for tackling existing, new or emerging AI challenges. Partners from the technology sector include Adobe, Datamind Audio, Diverse AI, Mozilla Foundation and Microsoft. Project partners from regulatory and public organisations include Ada Lovelace Institute, The Alan Turing Institute, BBC, Institute for the Future of Work and the Public Media Alliance. Elsewhere, fellows will be working with arts and cultural institutions including the Arts Council England, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Serpentine Galleries, and Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. “The BRAID fellowships aim to bring together researchers with industry and the public sector to help bridge that divide between technical capability and the knowledge of how to use it wisely and well, to ensure that the benefits of AI are realised for the good of us all.” Professor Shannon Vallor BRAID Co-director The collaborative projects will address questions, including examining approaches for the use of generative AI in the media, exploring the societal and ethical factors shaping the adoption of AI in a medical setting, developing a responsible AI innovation framework for the arts and culture sector, and supporting the needs of creatives when using AI. Elsewhere, other collaborations will research the complex issue of copyright and generative AI in creative and cultural industries, including the impact of generative AI on writing novels, exploring the creation and ownership of AI-generated sounds, and examining the impact of generative AI in publishing. More information: Research initiative to build collaborative and creative AI futures Using AI’s power to fight climate change Dramatic shifts in weather patterns and extreme events caused by climate change pose stark threats to global food security, but the reverse is also true: the foods we eat, specifically, the environmental costs associated with them, are major contributors to climate change. At the University’s Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Systems, Dr Joe Kennedy has been working with AI to reveal the environmental impacts of UK food consumption as a whole for the first time. Previous research has shown the impacts of individual foods, for instance, it is well known that meat and dairy are the worst culprits, but carrying out in-depth analysis of the environmental footprint of an entire country’s dietary habits based on nationally representative surveys has simply not been possible. Working with Professor Lindsay Jaacks, Dr Kennedy is aiming to do just that. The researchers are using AI to match two huge, complex sets of data. One is UK Government data on consumption patterns and the nutritional content of different foods, and the other is data from FoodDB, a database holding details of the environmental impact of tens of thousands food products sold in UK supermarkets. Combining these two data sets will reveal the climate impact of UK diets by tallying sales figures on the foods people buy with data on their environmental footprint, from growing or making foods to transporting them to supermarket shelves. The process of matching these two data sets can be done manually by researchers, but it’s long, painstaking work. Part of what makes it so challenging is that the UK Government data is broad, while the data in FoodDB is very specific. For example, while beef lasagne is logged as one product in the UK Government data, details of more than 100 different beef lasagnes sold in supermarkets are recorded in FoodDB. That can make doing projects like this manually extremely time consuming and expensive – often prohibitively so. Dr Kennedy and the team worked out that it would take a team of four researchers around nine months and cost close to £300,000. Using AI, the matching took two weeks and cost around £300. As well as greatly speeding up the matching process, using AI makes the technique much more replicable. That means with the right data it could be used to calculate similar impacts for other parts of the world. Drilling down to that level of detail would provide policymakers with key evidence to inform decision-making about encouraging changes to diets and food production practices. ÒGiven the cost and time involved, this project simply couldn't have been done without AI. Dr Joe Kennedy Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Systems More information: Using AI’s power to fight climate change Study pinpoints cell that helps liver heal A type of cell responsible for repairing damaged liver tissue has been uncovered for the first time by scientists. A study showing how these new-found cells migrate to the site of damage provides fresh insight into the way the liver heals itself. Experts say the findings could spur the development of new therapies that harness the liver’s unique capacity to regenerate following damage. During acute liver failure, this ability to repair and regenerate is often overwhelmed, with patients requiring an emergency liver transplant to regain liver function. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh studied human liver tissue from patients with acute liver failure for signs of cell proliferation and regeneration following the rapid loss of liver function. They found that a significant proportion of cells retained the ability to multiply. There were, however, still substantial areas of damage in the patients' livers, suggesting that processes other than cell proliferation are critical during regeneration. The research team profiled the genes within every liver cell in both healthy and regenerating human liver tissue to better understand the regeneration process. They did so using a cutting-edge technique called single cell RNA sequencing. The findings uncovered a previously undetected population of wound-healing liver cells that emerge during human liver regeneration to boost its recovery. “We hope that our findings will accelerate the discovery of much-needed new treatments for patients with liver disease.” Professor Neil Henderson Centre for Inflammation Research Working with University of Glasgow scientists at the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute, the team used special imaging techniques in mice to view the wound-healing cells in action. During liver regeneration, so-called leader cells appear at the edge of the healthy tissue, dragging the tissue together to close the wound Ð similarly to how skin heals after a cut. Imaging also revealed that the population of healing liver cells appears before cell proliferation begins. Wide-spread infection is a major concern following acute liver failure. Bacteria from the gut can escape into the liver when the liver is damaged. This can lead to sepsis if the liver is unable to clear the infection. The liver may prioritise the healing of wounds before cell proliferation to restore the gut-liver barrier and prevent the spread of bacteria, experts say. The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, is published in the journal Nature. The research team also included scientists from the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge and Texas, University College London, and the United States Acute Liver Failure Study Group network. More information: Study pinpoints cell that helps liver heal This article was published on 2025-01-23
