Early Career Researcher Showcase

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Early Career Researcher Showcase

ECR Showcase 2026 Programme [PDF]

This annual event celebrates the research being carried out by the Early Career Researcher community at ��ý.

Aiming to foster cross-disciplinary connections, our ECR's showcased their research to the wider community and in parallel, took part in a competition to communicate their research via a short presentation pitch.

Competitors were assessed on their ability to explain their research in a way that can be shared with the public. Our judges assessed the visual impact & creativity of each presentation.

Prizes were awarded for 1st, 2nd & 3rd place based on the judges scores. There was also a People’s Choice Prize which was voted for by visitors to the Showcase event.

Timetable of Events

10:30 - 13:00	Judging Session & Open Exhibition	Seminar Rooms 120-122, SAFB
14:00 - 15:00	*Keynote Speech & Prize Ceremony** * ‘The 3 C’s for Impact' with	G34 lecture theatre, SAFB
15:00 - 15:45	Drinks Reception & Networking	Ground Floor Foyer, SAFB

Prize Winners 2026

We are delighted to announce the results of the ECR Showcase 2026 were as follows:

1st Prize - Alejandro Hermida Carrillo, Imperial Business School
2nd Prize - Alberto Bodas Gallego, Department of Aeronautics
3rd Prize - Hendrik Beck, Department of Bioengineering
People's Choice Prize - Sepideh Akbari, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Creativity Prize - Afraa Alzoubi, Department of Bioengineering
Creativity Prize - Mario Miranda, Department of Aeronautics
Creativity Prize - Sumesh Erikandath, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Creativity Prize - Alexanra Yarger, Department of Bioengineering

Faculty of Engineering (Aero - Bio)

Department of Aeronautics

Mario Miranda - Built to Bend: Smarter Wing Design for Turbulent Skies

Future aircraft wings are getting longer and slimmer to save fuel, meaning they may bend significantly in flight. However, engineering these flexible wings safely is a major challenge. Designers must track tiny, millimetre-sized cracks while ensuring the entire structure handles intense flight forces and sudden wind gusts. Traditionally, these problems are tackled at different stages using different tools, which can result in costly design flaws being overlooked until later stages, creating avoidable setbacks in the design process.

Our new approach solves both problems at once. By pairing a machine learning model with a fast flight simulator built for large wing deflections, we can evaluate new wing designs 100 times faster than before. This speedup lets us check for tiny structural failures during wind gusts at every step of the design process, something never done before. The result? Lighter, safer wings with fewer costly surprises.

Entry Number: AERO 1

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Alberto Bodas Gallego - Magnetic Control of Hydrogen Flames for Sustainable Flight

Hydrogen fuel will be fundamental for our transition to a fossil-free society, especially in industries like aviation which are hard to electrify. However, hydrogen turbines still face several challenges. Hydrogen fuel is hard to mix with oxygen when the two are initially separated, but it can be very dangerous if hydrogen and oxygen are already mixed when entering the turbine. This is because premixed hydrogen flames often experience violent ‘flashbacks’, where the flame is sucked into the fuel source.

Our aim is to design a magnetic field that can push and pull on certain molecules in the fuel mixture (oxygen, nitric oxide and hydroxide) to improve their mixing with hydrogen, maximising efficiency while keeping the turbine safe from flashbacks. This project uses interdisciplinary ideas from quantum mechanics to understand the magnetism of molecules, fluid mechanics to model the mixing, and machine learning to bridge the gap between modelling and experiment.

Entry Number: AERO 2

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Hui Ling Wong - Greener routes, bumpier rides? Investigating the turbulence risk of ice supersaturated regions (ISSRs)

Do flight routes which avoid the formation of contrails solve a safety problem or create one? That is the core question my research aims to answer.

Contrails (or condensation trails) are clouds which form behind an aircraft. They are estimated to have a warming effect that are greater than or equal to the emissions from burning fossil fuels. Given that turbulence was the leading cause of commercial aviation accidents from 2009 to 2018 and turbulence will increase in frequency and intensity with climate change, it is critical to understand whether contrail-avoiding routes expose passengers and crew to greater turbulence risk before airlines can confidently adopt them. Here, I quantify this risk by comparing how much more likely it is to encounter moderate or greater turbulence - turbulence severe enough that a pilot would change course - inside a potential contrail-forming region compared to outside of one.

Entry Number: AERO 11

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Ningyuan Fu - Smart Surfaces for Reducing Aerodynamic Drag

The aviation industry contributes around 3% of global CO₂ emissions, creating an urgent need for a more sustainable and efficient future. In cruise conditions, skin-friction drag can account for about half of the total drag, making it a promising target for reduction. Previous studies have shown that carefully controlled travelling waves along a surface can reduce this drag, but generating such motion reliably in practice is very challenging. This project explores a new approach: designing a smart surface made of repeating microstructures, known as metamaterials, that can guide and amplify waves through the surface itself. Instead of forcing the whole wall to move directly, the material distribution within the surface is optimized so that the desired wave pattern can be produced. Simulations and topology optimization are used to design the surface, with the long-term aim of developing an energy-efficient test surface for drag-reduction experiments.

Entry Number: AERO 12

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Department of Bioengineering

Afraa Alzoubi - Ultrasound for drug delivery to the brain

The vast majority of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and brain tumors cannot be treated because 98% of drugs fail to reach the brain. That is due to the presence of a protective shield around our brains called the blood-brain barrier (BBB). It comprises a complex network of diIerent types of cells which form a natural fortress guarding the brain and preventing foreign substances in the blood stream from entering. Unfortunately, this includes beneficial medicine. To overcome this obstacle our lab uses ultrasound waves with injected micro-sized bubbles to help drugs pass the BBB and treat brain diseases. While this serves as a successful approach for drug delivery, a little is understood about how it is achieved which is what my project explores. It aims to understand the underlying mechanism in which this method works to fine-tune it and increase its applicability and safety in humans.

Entry Number: BIO 3

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Alexandra Yarger - How dragonflies feel their wings

Many systems in nature precisely control highly deformable structures, yet monitoring deformations has posed a significant challenge for biologists and engineers. I use the flexible wings of dragonflies to demonstrate a straightforward solution for monitoring deformations. I found that the natural structure of the wing passively constrains the range of motion and produces strain patterns that align with strategically placed sensors. This allows dragonflies to monitor their wings using a simple timing-based code. This work shows how complex information can be effectively represented through simple strategies that can be applied to both natural and engineered sensory systems.

Entry Number: BIO 4

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Hendrik Beck - What insects can teach robots about walking

Six-legged robots are promising for search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and other work in dangerous or hard-to-reach places. Their many legs make them stable and help them keep moving even if one leg is damaged. Yet, these robots are still far from moving with the agility of their biological counterparts: insects.

By combining animal locomotion and robotics, we explore whether insect walking patterns are the best solutions possible or instead reveal compromises between competing demands such as speed and energy consumption. To understand what could be learned from nature, we record insects on a small treadmill where they can walk freely. These movements are compared to computer simulations that virtually explore and evaluate all possible walking styles. The discovered walking patterns are then directly tested on a physical robot.

Our results could help engineers design more capable walking robots while also revealing new insights into the evolution of animal movement.

Entry Number: BIO 5

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Jiatong Jiang - Personalised Neurostimulation: Helping the Nervous System Recover Movement

Millions of people live with conditions such as stroke, spinal cord injury and Parkinson’s disease, which can make everyday movements, from walking to grasping a cup, difficult or impossible. Existing treatments can help, but they do not work equally well for everyone, and many people are left with long-term movement problems.

My research explores a new way to support rehabilitation by using carefully designed, non-invasive electrical stimulation to communicate with the nervous system. Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, I aim to develop personalised neuromodulation methods that adapt to each person’s body and changing condition. This involves building new stimulation technology, designing experiments to understand how nerves and muscles respond, and using computational models to guide safer and more effective stimulation strategies.

By combining engineering, neuroscience and rehabilitation, this project aims to help restore movement and improve quality of life for people with neurological disorders.

Entry Number: BIO 13

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Margherita Montavoci - Your body already knows how to fight cancer: sometimes it just needs a little help!

Immunotherapy fights cancer using your own immune system, the same defence that clears everyday bacteria and viruses. However, with time, cancer learns to hide and deceive the immune system, so immunotherapy works by making it visible again.

In my PhD, I design “bispecific antibodies”, drugs that bind two cells at once, promoting their proximity and interactions. One end recognises a cancer cell; the other one a rare but extremely powerful immune cell - “type 1 conventional dendritic cell” - that switches on the body’s whole attack to cancer.

In the lab and in early mouse studies, I’ve shown that these antibodies pull more of these powerful immune cells into the tumours and strengthen their contact with cancer cells. They can't shrink tumours on their own yet, but they show promise when combined with existing treatments.

Entry Number: BIO 15

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Thomas Else - Molecular ultrasound: hearing cells deep inside the body

Ultrasound is used across many areas of medicine. It is safe, fast, cheap, and portable, making it ideal for scans of everything from babies to the heart. We use ultrasound in our research to study diseases like diabetes in model animals. Normally, ultrasound only gives a scan of the shape and form of the body’s organs without revealing what is happening on the smallest scales within cells, like the molecular and genetic processes, which can often change because of diseases. However, we are working on a technology that allows ultrasound to pinpoint individual cells deep inside the body and measure changes in their genetics, something that usually requires looking through a microscope at thin slices of organs. Our research could dramatically improve how we study disease in the lab, reducing the use of animals like mice, and giving us a window to view cells with just a harmless ultrasound scan.

Entry Number: BIO 16

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Faculty of Engineering (Chem Eng - EEE)

Department of Chemical Engineering

Aqiela Mahannada - Turning Sunlight and Water into Clean Hydrogen: Why Heat and Material Design Matter

Clean hydrogen made from sunlight and water could help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, but current technologies are still not efficient or long-lasting enough. In this work, we study how the design of materials and heat from sunlight affect the performance of a solar water-splitting device.

We compared two designs of a key material: one made of tiny needle-like structures, and another with an added flat layer. We also tested how stronger sunlight and higher temperatures influence performance. While stronger light increased hydrogen production, it also caused the materials to degrade faster.

We found that the needle-like structure produced more hydrogen and remained stable for longer. Importantly, we also showed that filtering out infrared heat reduced overheating and slowed damage.

These findings highlight that both material design and heat management are crucial for developing more efficient and durable systems for clean hydrogen production.

Entry Number: CHEM 19

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Ari Luna Rueda - From Models to Controllers: An LLM-Driven Workflow for Autonomous Process Control Design

What if a machine could learn the pulse of an industrial process, then shape the code that keeps it steady?

This research asks whether AI can become more than a source of advice for engineers. It follows a structured workflow: reading the process model, identifying what needs to be controlled, writing the controller, testing it in simulation, and tuning it to improve performance.

We tested the method on a gas preheater system, where pressure and temperature are tightly connected, making the control task more challenging. The controller ran successfully, and after automatic tuning, its performance improved by about 26.5%.

The work points to a future where engineers can move from idea to prototype more quickly, with AI acting not as a replacement, but as a practical co-engineer in early-stage process design.

Entry Number: CHEM 20

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Aubin Ramon - From llamas to the clinic: designing nanobody drugs with AI

Antibodies are proteins naturally produced by our immune system to recognise and neutralise threats like viruses. Because antibodies are tailored to bind one specific target, they have become a successful class of medicines, while nanobodies, a compact variant found in camelids, have emerged as promising therapeutics thanks to their small size, stability, and ease of production. But designing them computationally is challenging: a good nanobody must bind its target tightly while remaining stable, soluble, and compatible with the human immune system.

During my PhD, I developed AI models to predict these properties and applied them to engineer safer nanobody therapeutics for cancer, optimising sequences one property at a time. I am now taking this further by building a generative AI model that designs nanobodies simultaneously optimised for clinical viability and conditioned on a specific target antigen, bringing computational design one step closer to the clinic.

Entry Number: CHEM 21

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Diya Agrawal - Stealth Medicine: Hiding Life-Saving Drugs in Red Blood Cells

Strokes and heart attacks occur when a blood clot blocks blood flow to vital organs. While ‘clot-busting’ drugs exist, they are a double-edged sword that often cause severe internal bleeding, and are almost ineffective against denser, aged blood clots.

To address this, we developed targeted nanoparticles from natural human red blood cells. These naturally derived nanoparticles act like guided missiles: they package the drug, safely bypass the body’s immune system, and release it only upon reaching a blood clot. This targeted approach not only reduces the bleeding risk associated with the drug but also helps reduce the overall drug dose required for treatment.

Testing shows that our nanoparticles dissolve human blood clots faster and more completely compared to conventional drugs, and successfully clear dense clots that current drugs struggle to treat alone. This technology promises to make emergency healthcare for stroke and heart attack patients safer, faster, and more reliable.

Entry Number: CHEM 22

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Shivam Sharma - How Battery Gases Reveal Hidden Chemical Reactions

Batteries are essential for technologies ranging from mobile phones to renewable energy storage, but many of the chemical reactions that occur inside them remain poorly understood. My research focuses on sodium-ion batteries, a promising alternative to lithium-ion batteries that could offer a more sustainable and widely available energy storage solution. During battery operation, the electrolyte components inside the battery react with the electrode surface to form a thin protective layer known as the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI). This layer plays a critical role in battery lifetime, safety, and performance. By monitoring the gases released during charging and discharging, I investigate how these hidden reactions occur and how different battery chemistries influence them. Understanding these processes can help guide the development of safer, longer-lasting, and more sustainable batteries needed for future energy and transportation technologies.

Entry Number: CHEM 23

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Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Qijie Li - CITYVERSE

CITYVERSE is an innovative urban system platform designed to help cities better understand and respond to multi-hazard risks. Our mission is to advance urban science and engineering through a novel framework for multi-process coupled modelling and adaptive risk governance, enabling cities to become more resilient, sustainable, and responsive to uncertainty and climate change.

Cities are inherently complex systems shaped by dynamic interactions among infrastructure, environmental processes, and human. While recent advances in data science and artificial intelligence have improved predictive capabilities, major challenges remain in understanding cross-scale risk interactions and supporting trustworthy real-time decision-making.

To address these challenges, we are advancing physics-informed AI, digital twins, and embodied robotic intelligence to develop next-generation smart urban systems with real-time perception and adaptive response capabilities.

Our vision is to bridge the gap between scientific evidence and engineering practice for sustainable and resilient cities by integrating physics-based modelling, data-driven intelligence, and system-level optimisation.

Entry Number: CIV 6

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Sumesh Erikandath - Closing the concrete carbon loop

Concrete is one of the most widely used construction materials in the world, but cement production is responsible for a significant amount of global CO₂ emissions. At the same time, large quantities of concrete waste are generated from demolition and construction activities.

This research explores a circular approach that aims to connect these two challenges. Fine powders derived from demolition waste are treated with captured CO₂ so that the gas becomes permanently stored within the material in the form of stable minerals. The resulting carbonated material has the potential to be reused in new concrete as a supplementary material, creating a circular pathway that connects cement production emissions with construction and demolition waste.

The project investigates how recycled cement-based materials react with CO₂ and how solution chemistry and processing conditions influence the carbonation process. The overall aim is to support the development of more sustainable and circular construction materials.

Entry Number: CIV 7

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Molly Balassa - The efficient design of wind turbine support towers

Wind Turbine Support Towers (WTSTs to the offshore industry) are tall, slender, and extremely thin structures, more slender than even the largest orbital launch vehicles, the closest point of comparison. All such structures (thin shells) have a risk of collapsing by folding over themselves (buckling) without any measurable signal beforehand. Designing them to prevent this has long required specialist expertise and relied on engineering judgement.

My research pushes forward the state of the art of Finite Element Analysis to create, for the first time, a computer program which can represent these human intuitions in a mathematical form, a measure of which parts of a tower are too weak or too strong, the “relative criticality spectrum”. Engineers will attest that anything measurable can be optimised for peak efficiency: in this case building WTSTs that use less steel to do the same work at the same level of safety.

Entry Number: CIV 24

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Sepideh Akbari - When One Failure Brings Everything Down: What Structural Design Guidelines Miss in Progressive Collapse

How can the failure of a single structural element trigger the collapse of an entire building or bridge? This phenomenon, known as progressive collapse (PC), has drastic implications, as in the 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Bridge, where damage to one supporting pier led to collapse of the entire bridge.

The key point is to provide a mechanism for transferring the forces carried by lost elements to the remaining structural elements. Current design approaches often rely on over-simplified or prescriptive methods that do not fully capture this response. The challenge is greater in precast structures, which are assembled from prefabricated elements and are more susceptible to PC, yet are inadequately addressed in guidelines.

My research aims to propose efficient methods based on analytical-experimental investigations to prevent PC and improve structural safety. The methods aim to realistically redistribute forces in the remaining parts of the structure, with more focus on precast structures.

Entry Number: CIV 25

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Yu Cheng - Can Chaos Be Calmer

When a slender structure buckles, we usually think something has gone wrong. But after buckling, the structure can also behave like a tiny mechanical switch, resting in either of two shapes and snapping between them when shaken. My research maps how this motion changes under different loading conditions. Sometimes the structure vibrates gently around one shape; sometimes it snaps regularly between both; and sometimes it moves chaotically. An interesting result is that the chaotic motion, although messier to look at, can be less energetic than a clean, repeating snap-through motion. This goes against intuition: the more irregular motion is not necessarily the more severe one. By predicting where these behaviours occur, the work helps us understand how buckled structures could be avoided in safety-critical designs, or deliberately used in vibration control, energy absorption and mechanical metamaterials

Entry Number: CIV 26

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Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Katherine Sephton - Investigate below the surface of a painting with machine learning

Paintings are built up layer by layer, with pencil sketches and paint added over several days, weeks or months, and sometimes even by another hand years later. Peeling back those layers by scanning a painting can reveal mysteries hidden just beneath the surface. Did the artist change the composition while they worked? What materials did they use and can this confirm who the artist was and when they painted it? However, to confidently interpret images of a painting, we need to correctly align the images captured using different imaging techniques. One imaging technique may highlight different features than another. In the same way that an x-ray reveals a person’s bones, while a photograph does not. Machine learning makes it possible to align images even when they lack matching visible features, by learning the shift added to each pixel to align the images.

Entry Number: EEE 8

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Annie Chiu - A Map for Mending Broken Heart(beats)

Ba-dum, ba-dum. We have all felt our hearts beating – but what controls that rhythm? An intricate electrical conduction system is behind the scenes, driven by ions flowing in and out of cells. Each heart contraction is triggered by these travelling electrical signals. When the signals go wrong, however, the heart can beat irregularly, a condition called arrhythmia. For some patients, doctors treat arrhythmia by destroying small areas of the heart tissue that cause faulty signals. Where exactly are they? That is the challenge my research addresses. To “look” into the heart, typically tiny electrodes are inserted into the heart to measure voltage signals. My work aims to build a faster and better map between the measured signals and the underlying tissue properties. This enables us to accurately flag, for example, abnormal cells that fire electrical pulses randomly, and guide doctors towards more precise treatment.

Entry Number: EEE 28

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Faculty of Medicine

Brain Sciences

Sam Boulger -The first to fall: identifying the brain cells most vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease

In Alzheimer’s disease, certain types of the brain’s nerve cells die while others survive. We set out to find which are most at risk, and why, by first looking in a region affected early in Alzheimer’s disease which is vital for memory. Studying post-mortem human brain tissue, we found one group of cells that dies earliest. These cells sit in the outer layers of this brain region and are distinguished by a protein called calbindin that controls calcium inside cells. We argue that they are vulnerable from the onset, even in healthy brains, because their internal chemistry favours the build-up of tangles, the damaging knots of protein that are a key feature of the disease. Finally, we tested existing medicines and found several, including common anti-inflammatory drugs, that could shift these cells towards a more resilient state and may help protect them from death.

Entry Number: BRAIN 17

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Institute of Clinical Sciences

Rafaella Sigala - Proteins, Hearts & Big Data: Unlocking the Secrets of Human Cardiovascular Disease

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, yet we still do not fully understand why some individuals develop heart disease while others do not. This project uses data from the UK Biobank, one of the world's largest health databases, which includes blood plasma protein measurements from approximately 54,000 individuals and detailed heart MRI scans from around 50,000 individuals. This research aims to investigate the biological factors underlying cardiovascular disease and to identify proteins that could be targeted for new therapies.

By combining protein profiles with detailed heart scans, we pinpointed the proteins associated with changes in heart structure and function. We then conducted genetic analysis to identify proteins that may actually cause heart changes rather than simply being associated with them. This approach helps us prioritise the most promising candidates for future drug development.

Ultimately, this research brings us a step closer to understanding and preventing heart disease at a molecular level.

Entry Number: ICS 31

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Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction

Alexander Bracanovic - Unlocking the Genetics of Preterm Birth in South Asian Women

Preterm birth, when a baby is born too early, affects around one in ten pregnancies worldwide and is a leading cause of illness and death in young children. However, most genetic studies of preterm birth have focused on people of European ancestry, leaving important gaps in our understanding of risk in other populations.

This study is the first large genetic investigation of spontaneous preterm birth in women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ancestry. Researchers analysed genetic data from approximately 10,000 women in the Genes & Health cohort and identified a region of DNA linked to increased risk of early birth. The region contains genes that produce proteins that help the body fight infection. The findings suggest that differences in immune responses may contribute to preterm birth risk in this population.

This work helps to advance our understanding of preterm birth and demonstrates the importance of including diverse populations in research.

Entry Number: MDR 36

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School of Public Health

Haoyu Dang - How Do Indoor Phthalates Enter the Human Body through Inhalation Exposure?

Phthalates are widely used in indoor products, and some are known or suspected endocrine-disrupting chemicals, raising concerns about long-term exposure in daily life. My research focuses on inhalation exposure: how phthalates in indoor air are inhaled into the respiratory tract, undergo phase changes and mucus adsorption, and subsequently contribute to internal exposure through transport into the bloodstream, whole-body distribution, and metabolism. Because phthalates can exist in multiple forms indoors, their behavior after inhalation is not straightforward. I developed mass-transfer models to describe their phase changes in the respiratory tract, their adsorption by airway mucus, and their adsorption on blood vessel walls after entering the body. By linking indoor exposure with internal transport in the human body, this work helps explain how inhaled phthalates may contribute to health risks and supports more accurate exposure and risk assessment.

Entry Number: SPH 38

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Department of Surgery and Cancer

Emiko Sultana - Your Postcode Shouldn’t Decide Your Surgery - But It Might

Imagine two patients with the same condition, the same symptoms, and the same need for surgery but receiving completely different care. This is the reality for many people with pelvic floor disorders in the UK.

Pelvic floor conditions affect millions and can severely impact dignity, independence, and daily life. Yet access to specialist care is not equal. Where a patient lives, their background, and how they enter the healthcare system may determine how quickly they are seen, what treatment they are offered, and ultimately their outcomes.

My research explores why these differences exist. Using national NHS data, I analyse patterns in access to surgery alongside surveys of clinicians and general practitioners to understand variation in decision-making and referral pathways.

By bringing together data, professional insight, and patient experiences, this work aims to identify where inequalities occur and how they can be addressed.

Entry Number: S&C 9

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Charlie Johnson - Causal Clinical-Radiomics Analysis Reveals Heterogeneous Survival Benefit from Chemotherapy in Lung Cancer Patients

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Medical imaging can extract hundreds of measurable tumour features (a field called radiomics), which show promise for predicting patient outcomes. However, existing prediction models can only identify associations and cannot answer questions like "Would this patient survive if their tumour characteristics changed?" We present the first pipeline combining causal discovery with survival prediction in lung cancer radiomics, using CT scans from 605 patients. Our approach learns the causal relationships between tumour features and builds a model capable of simulating hypothetical scenarios. Validated on simulated data, the model accurately recovered individual survival trajectories under different conditions. Applied to real patients, it revealed that chemotherapy benefit varied substantially depending on disease stage and imaging-derived risk scores. This work moves radiomics beyond association toward genuine causal reasoning, with direct implications for personalised treatment planning.

Entry Number: S&C 39

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Grace MacDonald - Radiotheranostics as an emerging tool for cancer diagnosis and treatment

Radiotheranostics is a tool that combines diagnosis and therapeutic treatment of diseases such as cancer using similar radioactive compounds. A diagnostic radioisotope can be used for PET or SPECT imaging, where the radioactive imaging agent improves the contrast between specific cancer cells in the body and healthy tissue. Then, if the specific cancer cells are present, a similar compound with a therapeutic radioactive isotope can be used to target and emit radiation that kills the cancer cells by damaging their DNA. This works as a personalised approach as the radioactive drug will accumulate only in tumour sites that express the disease specific target meaning that the healthy tissue will receive less radiation than traditional radiotherapy. The benefit of radiotheranostics is that the diagnostic imaging can help identify personalised treatment for patients with the best chance of success.

Entry Number: S&C 40

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Tianhui Zhu - Is Your AI Ready for Clinical Practice? CARES-AI, a Readiness Checklist

Healthcare AI tools are increasingly being developed and introduced into clinical practice. However, current approaches to evaluating healthcare AI often focus on test performance, with less attention to whether a tool is ready for everyday clinical use. A healthcare AI tool may achieve strong test results but still be difficult to adopt if it does not fit clinical workflows, NHS systems, governance requirements, or adoption processes.

CARES-AI is a structured checklist for those who develop, evaluate, or fund software-based healthcare AI tools. It helps them consider, at an early stage, whether a tool has a clear clinical purpose, defined technical requirements, appropriate performance evidence, and a realistic plan for governance and implementation.

CARES-AI is being developed through literature reviews, stakeholder interviews, and a Delphi consensus process with experts and public contributors. It aims to provide a shared standard for assessing whether healthcare AI is ready for clinical practice.

Entry Number: S&C 41

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Faculty of Natural Sciences

Centre for Environmental Policy

Chatchawan Genarkarn - Can Carbon Pricing Finance Climate Technologies in Southeast Asia?

Carbon pricing creates demand-pull signals to accelerate technology readiness, yet Southeast Asian (ASEAN) countries’ current prices (USD 2–20 per tonne) fall far below the cost of climate technologies needed for net-zero targets. This study evaluates revenue recycling from carbon pricing to finance carbon dioxide reduction and removal (CDRR) across four ASEAN countries. A Rapid Evidence Assessment of 86 papers reveals that existing schemes are insufficient to finance CDRR independently, while measurement and verification barriers create a structural financing trap. A Market Penetration Optimisation Model quantifies revenue recycling impacts on CDRR deployment and costs through 2050, incorporating reduction/removal potential and dynamic learning curve effects. Results show that recycling carbon revenues delivers meaningful impact across all CDRR technologies, with higher recycling rates amplifying reduction/removal potential proportionally and sustained recycling accelerating cost reduction. Optimised revenue recycling is essential for scaling CDRR in ASEAN, and the study will further design optimal revenue allocation across a cost-effective CDRR technology portfolio to support ASEAN's national net-zero targets.

Entry Number: CEP 18

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Department of Life Sciences

Belinda Boateng - Biology, ecology, and management implications for the Coreid bug

The Coreid bug is a pest of crops such as cocoa and coconut in West Africa. Both adults and young attack the flowers and young nuts, causing premature nut drop and deformation of older nuts, resulting in significant losses if not properly managed. To manage it effectively, in-depth knowledge of the pest's biological characteristics and ecological relationships is essential. My work involves a field study of the insect's distribution patterns across different agro-ecological zones, taking into account how temperature, humidity, and the presence or absence of certain organisms affect its distribution. The second component is laboratory work, in which the pest is reared in the lab, and its different life stages are subjected to various pest control strategies to determine which causes the most mortality. This approach eliminates the indiscriminate use of synthetic chemicals and promotes environmentally friendly pest management strategies.

Entry Number: LS 32

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Jecinta Ayamba - Development of An Antigen Capture Test for Onchocerciasis Diagnosis

Onchocerciasis (river blindness) is a neglected tropical disease caused by the nematode Onchocerca volvulus, and transmitted by Simulium blackflies. The disease currently affects 21 million people (99% in sub-Saharan Africa), and causes a devastating socio-economic impact on communities (severe itching, skin damage, blindness, and poverty as fertile riverine areas where black flies breed are abandoned).

Current diagnostic tests are inadequate making it challenging to monitor the success of drug treatment programs. The gold standard microscopy skin snip is invasive and insensitive to low infections; PCR 0150 test is not field applicable; the Ov-16 antibody test cannot distinguish between active infections and past exposure; and 15–25% infected persons that report negative serve as reservoirs for transmission. This study seeks to validate OVOC768 antigen/OVOC768-1 peptide as potential diagnostic candidates, for the development of an antigen capture test, important in mapping endemic regions and assessing drug treatment endpoints for Onchocerciasis elimination.

Entry Number: LS 33

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Joy Jacob - Learning from survivors: A new approach to malaria vaccines

In 2024, over 280 million people worldwide were infected with malaria, and about 600,000 of them died. 95% of these deaths occurred in Africa.

Malaria is caused by a parasite, which enters the body through infected mosquito bites. The parasite moves into the liver, then travels to the blood where it enters red blood cells and makes people ill.

Although two malaria vaccines exist, they do not provide enough protection, highlighting the need for more effective vaccines.

The answer to better vaccines may already exist in people whose bodies naturally fought off malaria.

I aim to develop more effective malaria vaccines that target the stage when the parasite makes people ill.

I study people who were exposed to malaria but never got ill, to understand how their immune systems controlled the parasite. This knowledge will be used to design a vaccine that teaches the body to do the same.

Entry Number: LS 34

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Yinka Adeniji - Not Learned, But Known: The Voice in the Dark

Close your eyes. Someone knocks. You hear a voice you don't recognise; do you open the door?

Manx shearwaters (Puffinus puffinus), seabirds nesting in pitch-black burrows across UK islands, face this exact dilemma. A female will call back to a familiar voice at the burrow entrance. She will stay silent for a stranger. That split-second discrimination based entirely on sound protects her nest, her bond, perhaps even her life.

But here's what makes this extraordinary: these birds never learned their calls. Unlike humans and songbirds, their voices are fixed by biology even before they hatch. So, what makes one call recognisable? How can an individual identify a lifelong partner by a voice it was never taught to produce?

My research combines small sound recorders and artificial intelligence to uncover the biological fingerprints hidden within every call, one that could also let us monitor thousands of seabirds invisibly, without catching any.

Entry Number: LS 35

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Imperial Business School

Alejandro Hermida Carrillo - ‘Gonna Hear Me Roar’: The Acoustics of Political Persuasion

When politicians speak, crowds don’t stay quiet: they reveal collective feelings through cheers, boos and chants. But what triggers these reactions? Is it the message, is it the volume of the voice, or its pitch? And what about the rhythm of delivery? Answering this requires connecting three pieces that have been rarely studied together: what a speaker says, how they say it, and how the crowd reacts.

In my fellowship, I am leading the development of a methodological framework that allows us to study records of political speech across eras and cultures. We use state-of-the-art sound recognition technologies to automatically transcribe speeches word-by-word, extract acoustic features sentence-by-sentence, and detect the type of crowd reactions they spark.

At a time when political trust is eroding, understanding the science of political persuasion is not an academic luxury—it is a democratic necessity.

Entry Number: IBS 29

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Eligibility and Competition Rules

The Showcase is open to the following groups:
- Imperial College Postgraduate Doctoral Students
- Imperial College Research Staff
All participants are required to present their research at the event on Wednesday 01 July 2026 from 10:30-13:00 in Seminar Rooms 119-122 in the Sir Alexander Fleming Building.
All participants will be allocated a 1m x 1m poster board or a table (to be chosen upon application).
Participants can use their poster board or table to display anything that will assist them in communicating their research. This could be a research poster, a selection of images/artwork or any other visual aids/props; this is your chance to be creative!
To assist with any material and printing costs incurred, all participants will be sent a £25 e-voucher after registration on the day of the event.
Participants will be assessed by a selection of judges which will include Imperial staff and ��ý from all levels of study.
Participants will be asked to present their research individually to each judge; the pitch should not exceed 3 minutes and must be aimed at a layperson.
Participants will be judged on their ability to explain their research in a way that can be understood by the general public and on how well they visually & creatively communicate their research (full judging criteria detailed below).

Judging Criteria

09:30 - 10:15	Registration & Set-Up	Seminar Rooms 119-122, SAFB
10:30 - 13:00	Judging Session & Open Exhibition Register for an Exhibition Ticket	Seminar Rooms 119-122, SAFB
13:00 - 13:45	Lunch for participants	Ground Floor Foyer, SAFB
14:00 - 15:00	Keynote Speech* & Prize Ceremony *with , Grantham Institute for Climate Change Register for an Audience Ticket	G34 Lecture Theatre, SAFB
15:00 - 15:45	Drinks Reception & Networking	Ground Floor Foyer, SAFB

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