NPL Scientist Awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship

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UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) recently announced 75 new Future Leaders Fellowships (FLF), funding research projects across a huge range of disciplines to tackle major global issues. The FLF programme is designed to support talented researchers in universities, businesses and other research and innovation environments to develop and tackle ambitious, challenging, and important research. 

Dr Rory Steven, a Senior Scientist at NPL, works across a variety of applied and fundamental areas within mass spectrometry imaging (MSI). These topics range from studying the influence of laser parameters to applying MSI for the study of colorectal cancer.  

MSI is a powerful emerging technology that enables scientists to map thousands of molecules, which can be used to provide insights into how diseases such as cancer grow and evolve. However, MSI data contain poorly understood biases in signal which can lead to misleading observations. This can have significant implications for uncertainty, reproducibility, and the wider adoption of this technology.   

With this fellowship, Dr Steven aims to study these ionization biases as well as model and correct for them, whilst developing standard samples to help assess related phenomena. His project will be carried out at NPL within the National Centre of Excellence for Mass Spectrometry Imaging; with the support of researchers at the CRUK Scotland Institute, AstraZeneca, the University of Surrey and Waters Corporation.  

Dr Steven said: “This fellowship award is a fantastic honour and great opportunity to advance our understanding of ionisation biases, improving reproducibility in mass spectrometry imaging. These developments will underpin accurate MSI data acquisition and interpretation, ultimately leading to improvements in our study of diseases such as cancer.” 

Professor JT Janssen, NPL Chief Scientist, said: ‘Many congratulations to Rory for winning this fellowship. It's an incredibly competitive and prestigious scheme and demonstrates the world class research we undertake and the quality of the candidate.’ 

Find out more about Rory Steven