Soft Matter is ubiquitous, in the form of polymers, colloids, gels, foams, emulsions, pastes, or liquid crystals; of synthetic or biological origin; as bulk materials or as thin films at interfaces. Soft Matter impinges on almost every aspect of human activity: what we eat, what we wear, the cars we drive, the medicines we take, what we use to keep clean and healthy, in sport and leisure. Soft Matter plays a role in many industrial processes including new frontiers such as digital manufacturing, regenerative medicine and personalised products. Soft Matter is complex chemically and physically with structure and properties that depend on length and time scales. Too often the formulation of soft materials has been heuristic, without the fundamental understanding that underpins predictive design, which hampers innovation and leads to problems in scale up and reformulation in response to changing regulation or customer preferences. Durham, Edinburgh and Leeds Universities set up the SOFI CDT in 2014 in response to the challenge from manufacturers across the personal care, coatings, plastics and food sectors to provide future employees with the skills to transform the design and manufacture of soft materials from an art into a science. The dialogue continues with industrial partners, both old and new, which has resulted in this bid for a refreshed CDT in Soft Matter - SOFI2 - that reflects the evolving scientific, technological and industrial landscape. We have a new partnership with the National Formulation Centre, who will lead a training case study and contribute to the wider training programme, and with many new partners from SMEs to multinationals. We will seek to involve more small and medium-sized companies in SOFI2 by providing opportunities for them to engage in training and project supervision. SOFI2 will have increased training in biological soft matter, which has been identified as a growth area by the EPSRC and our partners, and in scale-up and manufacturing, so that our students can understand better the challenges of taking ideas from the laboratory to the customer. Social responsibility in research and innovation will be embedded throughout the training program and we will trial new ideas in participatory research where the public is involved in the creation of research projects. Each cohort of 16 students will spend their first six months on a common training programme in science and engineering, built around case studies co-delivered with industry partners. They then select their PhD projects and join their research groups in Durham, Leeds or Edinburgh. Generic and transferable skills training continues throughout the four years, bringing the cohorts together for both academic-led and student-led activities. We aim to produce SOFI2 graduates who are business-aware and who are good citizens as well as good scientists. The importance of Soft Matter to the UK economy cannot be understated. Industry sectors relying on Soft Matter include paints and coatings; adhesives, sealants and construction products; rubber, plastics and composite materials; pharmaceuticals and healthcare; cosmetics and personal care; household and professional care; agrochemicals; food and beverages; inks and dyes; lubricants and fuel additives; and process chemicals. A 2018 InnovateUK report estimate the formulated products sector (most of which involves Soft Matter) contributed £149 billion annually to the UK economy. The formulated products sector is undergoing a rapid transformation in response to a shift to sustainable feedstocks, environmental and regulatory pressures and personalised products. It will also be shaped in unpredictable ways by data analytics and artificial intelligence. SOFI2 will equip students with the knowledge and skills to thrive in this business environment.

To secure a continued supply of safe, tasty, affordable and functional/healthy proteins while supporting Net Zero goals and future-proofing UK food security, a phased-transition towards low-emission alternative proteins (APs) with a reduced reliance on animal agriculture is imperative. However, population-level access to and acceptance of APs is hindered by a highly complex marketplace challenged by taste, cost, health and safety concerns for consumers, and the fear of diminished livelihoods by farmers. Furthermore, complex regulatory pathways and limited access to affordable and accessible scale-up infrastructure impose challenges for industry and SMEs in particular. Synergistic bridging of the UK's trailblazing science and innovation strengths in AP with manufacturing power is key to realising the UK's ambitious growth potential in AP of £6.8B annually and could create 25,000 jobs across multiple sectors. The National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC), a cohesive pan-UK centre, will revolutionise the UK's agri-food sector by harnessing our world-leading science base through a co-created AP strategy across the Discovery?Innovation?Commercialisation pipeline to support the transition to a sustainable, high growth, blended protein bioeconomy using a consumer-driven approach, thereby changing the economics for farmers and other stakeholders throughout the supply chain. Built on four interdisciplinary knowledge pillars, PRODUCE, PROCESS, PERFORM and PEOPLE covering the entire value chain of AP, we will enable an efficacious and safe translation of new transformative technologies unlocking the benefits of APs. Partnering with global industry, regulators, investors, academic partners and policymakers, and engaging in an open dialogue with UK citizens, NAPIC will produce a clear roadmap for the development of a National Protein Strategy for the UK. NAPIC will enable us to PRODUCE tasty, nutritious, safe, and affordable AP foods and feedstocks necessary to safeguard present and future generations, while reducing concerns about ultra-processed foods and assisting a just-transition for producers. Our PROCESS Pillar will catalyse bioprocessing at scale, mainstreaming cultivated meat and precision fermentation, and diversify AP sources across the terrestrial and aquatic kingdoms of life, delivering economies of scale. Delivering a just-transition to an AP-rich future, we will ensure AP PERFORM, both pre-consumption, and post-consumption, safeguarding public health. Finally, NAPIC is all about PEOPLE, guiding a consumers' dietary transition, and identifying new business opportunities for farmers, future-proofing the UK's protein supply against reliance on imports. Working with UK industry, the third sector and academia, NAPIC will create a National Knowledge base for AP addressing the unmet scientific, commercial, technical and regulatory needs of the sector, develop new tools and standards for product quality and safety and simplify knowledge transfer by catalysing collaboration. NAPIC will ease access to existing innovation facilities and hubs, accelerating industrial adoption underpinned by informed regulatory pathways. We will develop the future leaders of this rapidly evolving sector with bespoke technical, entrepreneurial, regulatory and policy training, and promote knowledge exchange through our unrivalled international network of partners across multiple continents including Protein Industries Canada and the UK-Irish Co-Centre, SUREFOOD. NAPIC will provide a robust and sustainable platform of open innovation and responsible data exchange that mitigates risks associated with this emerging sector and addresses concerns of consumers and producers. Our vision is to make "alternative proteins mainstream for a sustainable planet" and our ambition is to deliver a world-leading innovation and knowledge centre to put the UK at the forefront of the fights for population health equity and against climate change.

The Horizon institute is a multidisciplinary centre of excellence for Digital Economy (DE) research. The core mission of Horizon has been to balance the opportunities arising from the capture, analysis and use of personal data with an awareness and understanding of human and social values. The focus on personal data in a wide range of contexts has required the development of a broad set of multidisciplinary competencies allowing us to build links from foundational algorithms and system to issues of society and policy. We follow a user-centred approach, undertaking research in the wild based on principles of open innovation. Horizon now encompasses over 50 researchers, spanning Computing, Engineering, Law, Psychology, Social Sciences, Business and the Humanities. It has grown a diverse network of over 200 external partners who are involved in ongoing collaborative research and impact with Horizon, ranging from major international corporations to SMEs, from a wide variety of sectors, alongside government and civil society groups. We have also established a CDT in the third wave of funding that will eventually deliver 150 PhDs. Our critical mass of researchers, partners, students and funding has already led to over 800 peer-reviewed publications, composed of: 277 journal articles, 51 books and book chapters, and 424 conference papers, in a total of 15 different disciplines. Over the years Horizon's focus has evolved from an emphasis on the collection and understanding of personal data to consider the user-centred design and development of data-driven products. This proposal builds on our established interdisciplinary competencies to deliver research and impact to ensure that future data-driven products can be both co-created and trusted by consumers. Core to our current vision is the idea that future products will be hybrids of both the digital and the physical. Physical products are increasingly augmented with digital capabilities, from data footprints that capture their provenance to software that enables them to adapt their behaviour. Conversely, digital products are ultimately physically experienced by people in some real-world context and increasingly adapt to both. This real-world context is social; hence the data is social and often implicates groups, not just individuals. We foresee that this blending of physical and digital will drive the merging of traditional goods, services and experiences into new forms of product. We also foresee that - just as today's social media services are co-created by consumers who provide content and data - so will be these new data-driven products. At the same time, we are also witnessing a crisis of trust concerning the commercial use of personal data that threatens to undermine this vision of data-driven products. Hence, it is vitally important to build trust with consumers and operate within an increasingly complex regulatory environment from the earliest stages of innovating future products. Our user-centred approach involves external partners and the public in "research-in-the-wild", grounding our fundamental research in real world challenges. Our delivery programme combines a bottom-up approach in which researchers are given the opportunity (and provided with the skills) to follow new impact opportunities in collaboration with partners as they arise (our Agile programme), with a top-down approach that strategically coordinates how these activities are targeted at wider communities (our Campaigns programme, with successive focus on Consumables, Co-production and Welfare), and reflective processes that allow us to draw out broader conclusions for the widest possible impact (our Cross-Cutting programme). Throughout we aim to continue to develop the capacity in our researchers, the wider DE research community and more broadly within society, to engage in responsible innovation using personal data within the Digital Economy.

Materials both enable the technologies we rely on today and drive advances in scientific understanding. The new scientific phenomena produced by novel materials (for example, lithium transition metal oxides) enable the creation of technologies (electric vehicles), emphasising the connection between the capability to create new materials and economic prosperity. New materials offer a route to clean growth that is essential for the future of society in the face of climate change and resource scarcity. To harness the power of functional materials for a sustainable future, we must improve our ability to identify them. This is a daunting task, because materials are assembled from the vast and largely unknown coupled chemical and structural spaces. As a result, we are forced to work mostly by analogy with known materials to identify new ones. This necessarily incremental approach restricts the diversity of outcome from both scientific and technological perspectives. We need to be able to design materials beyond this "paradigm of analogues" if we are to exploit their potential to tackle societal challenges. This project will transform our ability to access functional materials with unprecedented chemical and structural diversity by fusing physical and computer science. We will develop a digital discovery platform that will advance the frontier of knowledge by creating new materials classes with novel structure and bonding and tackle key application challenges, thus focussing the developed capability on well-defined targets of scientific novelty and application performance. The discovery platform will be shaped by the need to identify new materials and by the performance needed in applications. This performance is both enabled by and creates the need for the new materials classes, emphasising the interdependent nature of the project strands. We will strengthen cutting-edge physical science (PS) capability and thinking by exploiting the extensive synergies with computer science (CS), to boost the ability of the physical scientist to navigate the space of possible materials. Computers can assimilate large databases and handle multivariate complexity in a complementary way to human experts, so we will develop models that fuse the knowledge and needs from PS with the insights from CS on how to balance precision and efficiency in the quest for promising regions in chemical space. The development of mixed techniques that use explainable symbolic AI-based automated reasoning and model construction approaches coupled with machine learning is just one example that illustrates how this opportunity goes far beyond interpolative machine learning, itself valuable as a baseline evaluation of our current knowledge. By working collaboratively across the CS/PS interface, we can digitally explore the unknown space, informed and guided by PS expertise, to transform our ability to harvest disruptive functional materials. Only testing against the hard constraints of PS novelty and functional value will drive the discovery platform to the level needed to deliver this aim. As we are navigating uncharted space, the tools and models that we develop will be compass-like guides, rather than satellite navigation-like directors, for the expert PS team. The magnitude of the opportunity to transform materials discovery produces intense international competition with significant investments at pace from industry (e.g., Toyota Research Institute $1bn) and government (e.g., DoE $27m; a new centre at NIMS, Japan, both in 2019). Our transformative vision exploits recent UK advances in autonomous robotic researchers and artificial intelligence-guided identification of outperforming functional materials that are not based on analogues. The scale and flexibility of this PG will ensure the UK is at the forefront of this vital area.

One Bin to Rule Them All is an innovative, interdisciplinary research project focused on developing a streamlined standard for plastics recycling which can be rolled out across UK homes, businesses and urban infrastructures. Working with stakeholders from across the plastics supply chain, including manufacturers, retailers and consumers, the project prioritises the value in plastic waste materials to ensure more effective and efficient pathways for recycling. Thus, reducing overall plastic waste and ensuring that future plastics are produced from higher recycled content. David Attenborough's Blue Planet II has highlighted the urgent global need to address plastic waste, pushing the issue into the forefront of the public mind. Whilst retailers and manufacturers are focused on improving the recycled content of their packaging, there is simply a lack of quality recyclable material available in the UK. Inadequate recycling infrastructure causes 60% of single use packaging to be exported, much of which is then incinerated. Not only is this a waste of valuable recyclable materials but there are significant environmental impacts involved in moving such waste across the globe and then burning it. One Bin will develop and integrate modern recycling technologies and processes in order to eliminate plastic release into the environment. This will be achieved through three interdisciplinary and interrelated work packages: Work package 1, led by material science, will create a hierarchy of plastic packaging to determine the optimal route for capturing and retaining value in plastic waste through re-use, mechanical recycling or chemical recycling. Work package 2, led by management science and economics, will design and then trial innovations for One Bin business models along the plastic packaging supply chain, identifying new business opportunities and pathways to design out waste. Work package 3, led by social science, will examine consumer engagement with One Bin and potential barriers to adoption through a consumer trial of the One Bin system, pre and post trial consumer interviews and a focus group with key stakeholders. By recognising and releasing the value in plastic waste, and standardising the current UK plastic waste management system, One Bin will overcome the current complexities surrounding plastic recycling and contribute to the UK Plastic Pact goals. The potential benefits from the project are significant, including: a) Reducing plastic release into the environment through enabling the creation of a truly circular plastics economy and a long-term elimination of plastic release. b) Creating an easy-to-use, standardised waste system for consumers that can be rolled out across the UK and incorporated into households, work places and leisure settings. c) Releasing and achieving economic value by identifying the most efficient recycling pathways and business models for different types of plastic.