ARIA, the UK’s new R&D funding agency, has announced its line-up of new programme directors – and three of them are current or former researchers from the University of Cambridge, including Fellow of Corpus Dr Sarah Bohndiek. The others are Dr Gemma Bale and Dr Angie Burnett.

ARIA is a government-funded agency that aims to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that could benefit everyone. Many of society’s most important advances have stemmed from those with the foresight to pursue new capabilities that most believed to be unattainable. ARIA aims to empower scientists and engineers with the resources and freedom to pursue those breakthroughs.

Writing on the ARIA website, Professor Bohndiek and Dr Bale said: “We’re both passionate about the future health of our planet and the people on it. Working in the health tech space, we have created new tools to allow us to safely see inside humans in new ways using light. We believe that there are emerging optical technologies at the edge of the possible, which will disrupt the current landscape.

“As co-PDs, we’ll look to accelerate these technologies, initially by exploring ideas around non-invasive optical mapping and sensing across a range of applications – from monitoring human health to climate change.”

About Professor Sarah Bohndiek

Sarah is a Professor of Biomedical Physics at the University of Cambridge, jointly appointed in the Department of Physics and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. Sarah leads an interdisciplinary team that uses optical imaging technology to monitor in situ tumour evolution and support earlier cancer detection. She has been a Fellow of Corpus since 2013.