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Most of the Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) have little name-recognition in industrialized nations, but together they cause severe disability in the world‘s poorest countries, decreasing productivity by billions of dollars. Both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have recently identified these diseases as ‘targets of opportunity‘ to improve global health. By providing safe and effective drug treatments to individuals, mass drug administration (MDA) can control seven NTDs. The proposed research aims to: i) evaluate the effect of different MDA-based interventions on the infection prevalence and intensity of two NTDs: schistosomiasis and trachoma, and on the likelihood of their elimination; and ii) evaluate the performance of the diagnostic tools currently used for Monitoring & Evaluation of interventions against these two NTDs. Robust statistical analysis of relevant data will help to optimize the design of future NTD control programmes, and evaluate the impact of current strategies so that a better quality of life for some of the world‘s poorest communities can be achieved. The results of this research will have implications for infections prevalent in the UK, such as genital Chlamydia, partly responsible for infertility in reproductive age women.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

Random numbers are a fundamental part of science and technology, being especially relevant for cryptography, gaming, simulations or statistics. Quantum random number generators (QRNG) rely on the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics to generate true and unpredictable random numbers, unachievable from the classical physics perspective. Methods and protocols to certify and quantify the randomness in the output of a quantum system are a current subject of intensive research. In this thesis, we focus on the emergent field of quantum random number generation proposing two semidevice- independent schemes to harvest quantum entropy while discussing in detail their strengths and weaknesses. With the purpose of developing a certification protocol for these approaches, we thoroughly study the implementation of the photodetector and the possible vulnerabilities it might introduce in our approaches. Finally, we perform a proof-of-concept experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of the suggested schemes and experimentally investigate the correctness of the derived theoretical models. The results for these experiments revealed a satisfactory agreement with the theory and enabled us to extract 1.58 bits of quantum randomness per sample with an 8-bit digitisation out of our QRNG.

The inspection of safety-critical components in the nuclear power industry depends on procedures that can detect defects to a given threshold of severity; the acceptance process for this is known as inspection qualification. Inspection qualification in the UK is a highly developed formal activity, and is representative of the best practice in the world. However it can be very conservative if there is uncertainty in the expected measured response. A vital example is the scattering of ultrasound from the tips of rough cracks, such as thermal fatigue cracks or stress corrosion cracks. Ultrasound scattering from crack tips is widely exploited to measure crack sizes, but while the nature of the scattering is well understood for smooth cracks, scattering from the tips of rough cracks can differ significantly, and is not readily predictable. Consequently the qualification of ultrasound inspections for rough cracks has to be subject to severely conservative assumptions, and even so there remains a risk of misinterpreting findings. This project aims to bring understanding to the nature of the scattering, and to develop predictive modelling tools, such that these conservative assumptions can be safely eroded and the reliability of inspections improved. This will enable industry to reduce the costs of manufacturing and repairing, and down-time from outages, as well as improving confidence in the safe operation of safety-critical plant. The project will build on a strong UK heritage of the knowledge of ultrasound scattering, including recent work by the proposers on the stochastic nature of wave reflections from rough surfaces. The key aim is to deliver a new analytical approach that will predict the statistically expected scattering from the tips of cracks of given characteristics of roughness. The work will also include experimental investigation of real cracks and numerical modelling studies. The new ideas will be applied to the primary ultrasound inspection techniques of Time-of-Flight-Diffraction, Pulse-Echo, and array imaging. The work will be undertaken as a collaboration between researchers in Mechanical Engineering and in Mathematics at Imperial College. The proposal is being submitted within the UK Research Centre in NDE (RCNDE) to its targeted research programme. The proposal has been reviewed internally by the RCNDE, approved by the RCNDE board, and supported financially by five RCNDE industrial members.