Three new Chancellor’s Fellows will join Informatics

A total of 40 academics have been announced as the latest Chancellor’s Fellows, a five-year tenure track that invests in researchers delivering cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and innovation.  

Participants will be encouraged to build an excellent track record of research, innovation or impact as future leaders, and to develop new areas of focus. 

Each will benefit from a tailored programme that helps them reach their research, innovation and leadership ambitions, and will be supported to transition into open-ended roles in the University. 

Participants with a range of backgrounds and experience are represented in the 2024 cohort, in which half are women and one in five are from black or minority ethnic groups. The University is committed to ensuring equality, diversity and inclusion throughout the candidate selection process.   

New Informatics Chancellor’s Fellows will be working in two distinct thematic areas: Health and Life, and Data Science and AI. 

Dr Nina Kudryashova works in the field of NeuroAI, and will apply her research to understanding the mechanisms underlying neurological conditions and enabling effective decoding of movement for developing prosthetic devices and human-machine interfaces.

Dr Nikolay Malkin's research will develop the algorithmic foundations of machine reasoning and their applications in mathematical and scientific discovery, empowering AI systems to explore and explain the world in ways that are understandable to humans. His research will contribute to the creation of safe, reliable intelligent systems that augment human cognitive abilities, opening new possibilities for understanding patterns in nature and society.

Dr Emily Allaway’s research will develop interpretable neuro-symbolic methods to improve defeasible reasoning in computational systems. These methods will incorporate theoretically-grounded components into deep learning models in order to provide interpretability. Using these methods, her research will improve computational defeasible reasoning in real-world texts, focusing on dialogues, argumentation, and text-based games.

Chancellor’s Fellowships, which have been awarded at the University since 2014, aim to enable promising academics to progress their careers and to carry out pioneering work. 

The appointments have been enabled through an increase in the University’s Scottish Funding Council, following the University’s strong REF2021 results.