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The Royal Academy of Engineering awards £39 million to the first ever Green Future Fellows.
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13 engineering innovators receive £3 million each to develop solutions that tackle multiple causes of the climate crisis, and mitigate and adapt to its impacts.
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Awardee solutions include storing renewable energy in ammonia, nanoengineered lightweight batteries to power electric planes and a new type of computer memory that doesn’t generate heat.
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The Green Future Fellowships are funded by a £150 million, long-term investment from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
New technologies to store renewable energy, power data centres and computers more efficiently and multiply the power of batteries four-fold are among the advanced engineering solutions awarded a share of £39 million by the Royal Academy of Engineering today.
A total of 13 Green Future Fellows have been awarded £3 million each to scale ambitious ideas and cutting-edge engineering over the next decade into commercially viable technologies capable of making a lasting impact on the climate crisis. The Green Future Fellowship programme is funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
The first awardees include innovators developing technologies that turns waste CO2 into useful products like plastics, fuels and chemicals, engineers creating more efficient and recyclable solar panels, and a project to extract critical metals for batteries, magnets, solar panels and fuel cells by filtering salty water.
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The way we store renewable energy for long-term future use is the focus of Professor Laura Torrente’s work at the University of Cambridge. She is using renewable electricity, water and nitrogen from air to produce ammonia cleanly and safely. In this way, clean energy is stored in the chemical bonds of the carbon-free ammonia which can be used as a fuel and as a backup for renewable power generation (producing only water and nitrogen when burnt). Her work also focuses on safe ammonia storage so it can be easily transported to parts of the country where more energy capacity is required.
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Data centres use 1.5% of all electricity produced, with up to 40% of that electricity used on air cooling. Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy from Lancaster University is developing a new type of memory that uses extremely short bursts of terahertz radiation – light pulses a thousand times faster than today’s technology. They flip the direction of small magnets that store bits of data. Because these pulses match the magnets energy, they can switch them without creating heat. This could lead to much faster, cooler and more energy-efficient data storage in the future.
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Professor Robert House at the University of Oxford is developing a new type of battery that’s four times more energy dense than current lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, making them much lighter and more powerful, perfect for electric or hybrid planes. Using nanoengineering, they overcome the challenges of current Li-ion batteries, which carry a lot of excess unused weight in the electrode materials, instead storing energy using lighter structures. Increasing the energy density four-fold means batteries can be made much smaller and lighter, which could help to electrify aeroplanes.
Other innovations use sound waves to destroy forever chemicals in water and soil as an alternative to pyrolytic incineration, use special microbes to convert carbon dioxide into clean hydrogen using green electricity, and capture and convert CO2 from manufacturing processes.
Baroness Brown of Cambridge DBE FREng FRS FMedSci, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Chair of the Green Future Fellowship Steering Group, said:
“The climate crisis is the challenge of our generation. We need era-defining solutions that address the enormity of the challenge. Many of these solutions exist, but need the dual investment of money and time to make them a success. The Green Future Fellowships support innovators who are pushing engineering boundaries, building bold solutions to climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience. The inaugural Green Future Fellows are pioneering truly advanced technologies and engineering solutions to protect the world we live in.”
Many of solutions to halt the rise in global average temperatures and adapt to the impacts of climate change need time and funding to be developed to scale and become commercially viable.
Supported by a £150m, long-term investment from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Green Future Fellowship was established to build bold solutions to climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience.
Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE, CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said:
“Engineering is playing a critical role in addressing the climate crisis. We are awarding £150 million over the next five years to at least 50 long-term, scalable, commercially viable solutions that will have real-world impact, with each awardee able to develop their solution over a 10-year period.
“This novel and ambitious approach to supporting climate solutions fills a gap in the funding landscape by providing flexible support to talented innovators from any background to convert transformational ideas into climate impact.
“The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Green Future Fellowships provide academics, entrepreneurs, innovators and engineers, the space and time to transform their cutting-edge ideas into scalable, commercially viable, technologies to secure a greener, fairer future.”
UK Science Minister Lord Vallance said:
“We can’t solve the climate crisis without engineering solutions. By supporting new approaches to key problems - storing renewable energy, extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and the huge carbon footprint of some industrial processes - these fellowships are empowering researchers to tackle global warming.
“Investing in this work reflects the Government's wider commitment to make the UK the natural home for the best science that we all benefit from, and our ambition to make the UK a clean energy superpower."
At least 50 Green Future Fellows will be appointed over five years. Successful applicants become a Green Future Fellow for the 10-year award duration, receiving up to £3 million alongside non-financial support such as training, mentorship, access to the Academy’s network of exceptional innovators, and additional tailored support.
Applicants can come from any country, however as a UK-funded initiative, they must locate their work in the UK. The solutions developed by the Green Future Fellows must deliver impact that benefits the UK, alongside any global impact.
The application period for the second round of funding closed in November with awardees to be announced in early 2027, while a third round is expected to open for applications in Autumn 2026. An Accelerated International Route is also open for exceptional non-UK-based applicants.
Notes for editors
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List of Cohort 1 Green Future Fellows
Dr Madeleine Bussemaker (University of Surrey) | A Sound Solution for Contaminants of Emerging Concern | Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), such as PFAS (also known as forever chemicals), pharmaceuticals and pesticides, are harmful pollutants that are hard to destroy. PFAS waste is usually incinerated, producing greenhouse gases. In England alone, the cost of cleaning up PFAS could be up to £120 billion. A new high-frequency ultrasound method, sonolysis, safely breaks down CECs without toxic by-products and with potential to be cheaper than incineration.
Professor Matthew Lloyd Davies (Swansea University) | ASPECT: Advancing Sustainable Perovskite Solar Energy | Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are a type of solar panel made from a crystal-structured material called perovskite that efficiently converts sunlight into electricity. ASPECT aims to make PSCs a mainstream, sustainable alternative to conventional solar panels – which are designed for a single life, are resource intensive and difficult to recycle. The project embeds circular economy principles, reducing toxic materials and improving recyclability to minimise environmental impact. ASPECT will develop scalable, low-cost, low-carbon solar modules, strengthening the UK’s leadership in next-generation solar technology.
Dr Akshay Deshmukh (University of Cambridge) | Membrane Cascades for Efficient Critical Metals Extraction and Purification from Brines and Leachates | This project develops clean, energy-efficient ways to extract critical metals important for batteries, magnets, solar panels, and fuel cells, without the harmful chemicals and waste of traditional methods. It uses membrane systems, like filters and electrically driven separators, to pull metals out of salty water and recycled materials while saving water, energy, and chemicals. By combining real-time monitoring and smart models, the approach could make metal extraction safer, scalable, and more sustainable, helping secure the metals needed for a green, Net Zero future.
Professor Robert Alexander House (University of Oxford) | Nanoengineering oxygen conversion electrodes for green electric flight | A new type of rechargeable battery that’s four-times more energy dense than current state-of-the-art lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, making them much lighter and more powerful, perfect for electric or hybrid planes. Using nanoengineering, they overcome the challenges of current Li-ion batteries, which carry a lot of excess unused weight in the electrode materials, instead storing energy using lighter structures. Increasing the energy density four-fold means batteries can be made much smaller and lighter, which could help to electrify aeroplanes.
Professor Rebecca Lunn MBE FREng FRSE (University of Strathclyde) | Mechanochemical reactions in silicate rocks: Decarbonising the production of critical materials | This Fellowship explores mechanochemical reactions – chemical reactions triggered by mechanical energy, such as the crushing, grinding, or fracturing of rocks. The mechanical force breaks chemical bonds in minerals, creating highly reactive surfaces that can react with greenhouse gases like CO2. When silicate rocks such as basalt and granite are crushed in CO2, these reactions trap the gas as stable silicon carbonates, while also altering the solubility of valuable metals in the rock. Applied to the 72 billion tonnes of waste rock crushed globally each year, this low-energy process could capture around 1 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, reducing emissions from mining and material production.
Dr Jaime Massanet-Nicolau (University of South Wales) | BIO-VISTA: Biorefining Waste into VFAs: In Situ Recovery and Low-Temperature Adaptation | BIO-VISTA is a technology to produce volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from waste carbon sources such as biomass and waste industrial gases. VFAs are short-chain organic acids with a wide range of uses including plastics, fuels and chemicals. Using novel, in-situ extraction and low-temperature fermentation, BIO-VISTA can boost yields of VFAs by 41% while cutting energy use by 60%. With a £10 billion global market, UK deployment could generate £1 billion annually and save up to 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The project aims to move from lab to industrial pilots with major partners, aiming to create a UK Centre of Excellence in VFA biorefining.
Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy (Lancaster University) | Terahertz magnetic recording for green data storage technology | As we rely more on wireless devices, cloud storage and artificial intelligence, data centres need to process more information and faster, generating a lot of heat. Data centres use 1.5% of all electricity produced, with up to 40% of that electricity used on air cooling. This Fellowship aims to develop a new type of memory that uses extremely short bursts of terahertz radiation – light pulses a thousand times faster than today’s technology. They flip the direction of small magnets that store bits of data. Because these pulses match the magnets energy, they can switch them without creating heat. This could lead to much faster, cooler and more energy-efficient data storage in the future.
Professor Moritz Riede (University of Oxford) | Achieving Terawatt-Scale Organic Photovoltaics | Organic photovoltaics (OPV) are solar cells made from carbon-based materials. These panels are flexible, lightweight and can be used on almost any surface. They already work well in the laboratory, but they are not yet good enough for factories to make cheaply at scale. OPV will complement traditional solar panels where they do not work, for example on curved surfaces, transparent building facades, or wearable electronics, and provide clean energy at a fraction of the environmental footprint of traditional solar panels. Professor Riede will use AI and robots to test thousands of designs automatically and quickly to improve OPV so they match what the best labs can do – accelerating OPV commercialisation, supporting UK Net Zero goals and advancing a fair clean energy transition everywhere.
Professor Laura Torrente (University of Cambridge) | Dynamic, efficient and safe green ammonia synthesis | The way we store renewable energy for long-term use is the focus of this Professor Laura Torrente’s work. She is using renewable electricity, water and nitrogen from air to produce ammonia cleanly and safely. In this way, clean energy is stored in the chemical bonds of the carbon-free ammonia which can be used as a fuel and as a backup for renewable power generation (producing only water and nitrogen when burnt). Her work also focuses on safe ammonia storage so it can be easily transported to parts of the country where more energy capacity is required.
Dr Sharon Velasquez-Orta (Newcastle University) | Carbon dioxide conversion by intensified electrobiocatalysis | This project develops a practical technology that turns CO2 into fuel using microbes and bioelectrochemical reactors (BES). It upgrades biogas to pure fuel, boosting its energy content. If used across all UK anaerobic digesters, it could cut 3.1 megatonnes of CO2 and save £120 million annually. The system uses new microbial 3D biocomposites to stabilise and speed up performance. Scaling from an experimental level to full technology could help farmers and industry meet Net Zero goals and convert biogas systems into zero-carbon fuel providers.
Dr Kilian Stenning (this award is subject to commercial negotiations with Imperial College London and Rayd Technologies) | Reconfigurable, non-linear photonic computing for energy efficient AI | AI and cloud computing use huge amounts of energy, causing unsustainable CO2 emissions. This Fellowship develops brain-inspired “neuromorphic” computing that uses light (photons) to process data and images extremely efficiently, with potential for more than 10,000 times less energy than current GPU microchips. The system can learn from small datasets where traditional AI falls short and already works for tasks like image classification and medical imaging. By miniaturising the hardware and expanding its capabilities, this technology could drastically improve AI's speed, energy and data efficiency, and lower data centre emissions. This will make AI faster and more environmentally friendly and enable a new class of AI which can learn and adapt limited data at the edge.
Idan Gal-Shohet (Fibe) | Sustainable natural fibre from agricultural waste | The company is turning fibrous farm waste, including from potatoes, into high-quality, low-carbon and affordable fibres as an alternative to cotton. Unlike cotton, this process uses very little water and no additional land. Cultivation of raw materials accounts for up to 2% of global emissions, yet 9.6 billion tonnes of fibrous agricultural waste is generated each year with limited value to farmers. Fibe’s technology aims to valorise these residues for the first time to significantly increase global production of sustainable natural fibres. The funding will be used to build a pilot plant and scale up processes to an industrial scale. This award is subject to agreeing suitable commercial terms.
Dr Aled Roberts (Dekiln) | SPARK: Scaling Production of Advanced Recycled Kiln-free tiles | Traditional ceramic tiles have a huge carbon footprint owing to high-temperature kiln firing necessary for their production. Dekiln has developed a technology (BioSintering) to produce tiles from over 98% recycled gypsum without the need for kiln firing, which slashes energy use and emissions. The goal of the SPARK project is to scale the process from lab-sized batches to full industrial production by integrating the technology with existing tile factories. By solving engineering challenges and working with industry partners, SPARK could provide a low-carbon, sustainable alternative for the tile industry and help revive manufacturing in the UK. This award is subject to agreeing suitable commercial terms.
2. About the Royal Academy of Engineering
The Royal Academy of Engineering creates and leads a community of outstanding experts and innovators to engineer better lives. As a charity and a Fellowship, we deliver public benefit from excellence in engineering and technology and convene leading businesspeople, entrepreneurs, innovators and academics from every part of the profession. As a National Academy, we provide leadership for engineering and technology, and independent, expert advice to policymakers in the UK and beyond.
Our work is enabled by funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, corporate and university partners, charitable trusts and foundations, and individual donors.