Three new Future Leaders Fellowships are empowering Manchester researchers to tackle very different scientific challenges – from predicting extreme ocean waves to designing miniature biological factories to wearable health technology that transcends health inequalities – with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Backed by a combined £5.4 million from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Dr Samuel Draycott, Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer and Dr Richard Obexer are among the recipients of its 2026 Future Leaders Fellowships (FLF) awards. The funding will support four years of ambitious research in fields spanning ocean engineering, biotechnology and digital enabled health.

The Future Leaders Fellowships: at a glance

• How well we understand the ocean matters increasingly for the infrastructure we build, the energy we generate and our response to climate change. Dr Samuel Draycott is investigating what happens when waves break in the complex conditions found in the ocean, with real implications for how we design offshore wind farms and other marine infrastructure, and for improving the accuracy of climate and ocean models that predict how the sea absorbs and releases carbon dioxide and other gases.
• Across Manchester's communities, Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer is taking research directly into patients’ homes – creating a real-world test environment to help make wearable health technologies a routine part of cancer care. He's working to discover whether continuous data from wearable devices can help NHS clinical teams support patients through cancer surgery, and how to make sure this new model of care reaches everyone, including those at risk of digital exclusion.

• Meanwhile, in another laboratory in Manchester, Dr Richard Obexer has been looking at the world on a different scale – exploring how nature packages enzymes inside tiny structures in living cells. He’s working to discover whether those same principles can be engineered to manufacture medicines, recycle carbon and produce valuable chemicals more efficiently.

Dr Samuel Draycott: Wavebreak

Offshore wind farms, ships and other marine structures all need to withstand the most powerful waves the ocean can produce, but many engineering models simplify the sea in ways that don’t fully reflect real-world conditions. This potentially affects how accurately we can predict the forces these structures will face. 

Recent work by Dr Draycott and collaborators, published in Nature, showed that realistic multi-directional waves can grow to around twice the height at which they were assumed to break. Through this fellowship, Dr Draycott and his colleagues will build on this research to recreate even more realistic ocean conditions in their laboratory, combining waves travelling in different directions with currents that change speed with depth, as they do in the real ocean. 

The team will study what happens when waves break and what happens in the seconds afterwards, including how they move particles such as microplastics and phytoplankton, draw air into the ocean and transfer gases such as CO2 between the sea and atmosphere. This could improve our understanding of everything from pollution and marine ecosystems to the ocean’s role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. 

Dr Draycott, Senior Lecturer in Ocean Engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering and Management, University of Manchester, said: 
“We’ve long relied on simplified models to understand how waves behave, but the real ocean is much more complex.

“This matters because engineers use estimates of extreme waves when designing offshore wind turbines, ships and platforms, so a better understanding of wave breaking could help us improve the safety and efficiency of this infrastructure. These are crucial industries, with the UK aiming to increase its offshore wind capacity to at least 43 gigawatts by 2030 and a sector already employing tens of thousands of people .” 

The research, funded with £1.67m from UKRI, will take place in the University’s new Hydrodynamics Laboratory, using high-performance computer simulations and laboratory experiments to measure how waves break, how much air they draw into the water, and how they move particles.

Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer: Manchester Digital Health Living Lab

Wearable devices can monitor vital signs such as heart rate, activity and sleep, providing clinicians with valuable data to inform on-going patient care. The NHS 10 Year Health Plan identifies them as one of its “5 Big Bets” for transforming healthcare, but their use across the health service remains patchy, with benefits not reaching all communities equally. Through his fellowship, Dr Lukas Hughes-Noehrer will establish the Manchester Digital Health Living Lab, a real-world testbed where patients, families, community organisations, clinicians, researchers, industry partners, and local government work together to design and evaluate wearable-enabled care.

The £2.4m-UKRI funded programme is built around three strands. The first will work with communities to understand what helps or hinders people in adopting wearables, with a focus on accessibility, trust, usability and digital inclusion. The second will develop secure systems that connect wearable data to electronic health records and explore how continuous streams of patient-generated data can be transformed into clinically meaningful real-time information to support care. The third will embed a wearable-enabled clinical trial, working with approximately 800 patients undergoing lung and hepato-pancreato-biliary surgery to trial adoption and evaluate their potential to improve health outcomes.

Findings will help shape the future use of wearable technologies across healthcare and inform the development of digitally enabled hospitals and care pathways in Greater Manchester and beyond.

Dr Hughes-Noehrer, Lecturer in Mobile and Wearable Health Technology in the Division of Informatics, Imaging, and Data Sciences, and Lead for Computational Medicine at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust said:

“As someone who works at the intersection of healthcare and research, I see first-hand how health inequalities can affect who benefits from new models of care and emerging technologies. Wearables have huge potential to provide more personalised, proactive support, but only if everyone can access, use and trust them. By working directly with our communities in Manchester, I want to build a model for wearable-enabled care that is fair, safe and trusted, and that other places in the UK and beyond can follow.”

Dr Richard Obexer: De Novo Biomolecular Condensates for Programmable Assembly of Enzyme Cascades

Inside our cells are tiny droplets that act a little like miniature factories. Without being surrounded by a membrane, they can bring particular proteins and enzymes together, allowing chemical reactions to happen faster and more efficiently.

These structures known as ‘biomolecular condensates’, occur widely inside living cells, and Dr Richard Obexer is exploring whether we can recreate this natural trick, then engineer it to make useful products more efficiently.

His new fellowship, funded by £1.3m from UKRI, will enable him to combine AI-powered protein design with a laboratory process inspired by natural evolution, to rapidly test thousands of protein variations. The aim is to create molecules that can encourage these droplets to form around a much wider range of enzymes, while controlling what happens inside them. This could give researchers unprecedented control over the conditions inside each biological factory.

The team will initially test their approach by building a five-enzyme system to manufacture islatravir, an anti-HIV drug that’s currently made using conventional chemical synthesis. Next, they will explore whether a ten-enzyme system could turn CO2 and methanol into starch, potentially creating a route for converting captured carbon into useful materials. Finally, they’ll rebuild a biosynthetic pathway in bacteria to produce trunkamide, an anti-cancer compound that has proven difficult to manufacture at a useful scale.

Dr Obexer, BBSRC Discovery Fellow in Chemical Biology and Biological Chemistry, in the Department of Chemistry, University of Manchester, said:

“Nature has already evolved incredibly efficient ways of organising chemistry inside cells, and we’re now asking whether we can recreate and engineer these to build tiny biological factories for ourselves. If we can combine that with AI-designed proteins, we could make entirely new manufacturing processes possible, from medicines to ways of turning captured carbon into useful products.”

Visiting from the University is a cross-faculty delegation, including Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice-President for Social Responsibility, Professor Keith Brennan, Vice Dean for Internationalisation, Professor Samuel Hickey, Head of the Global Development Institute, and Professor Susanne Shultz, Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Biology.

At Kisii University, one of The University of Manchester’s partners, the delegation will learn more about the medical education, emergency medicine and breast cancer screening research taking place before attending an event hosted by HE Simba Arati, Governor of Kisii County. They will also hear more about the new cancer hospital being built in Kisii County.

The academics will also tour Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral & Research Hospital’s cancer and imaging facilities, with aspects of the visit to be focused on genomics, cervical cancer and mental health. A visit to Kitengela is planned, where discussions will centre on clean water, air quality, zoonotic disease and disease transmission.

The University is also collaborating with the Akiba Mashinani Trust (AMT) to reduce food poverty among school children in Kenya by providing meals during the school day.

An event marking the launch of The University of Manchester's Africa Strategy will be attended by key stakeholders in Kenya, including Cabinet Secretary Dr Deborah Barasa and Cabinet Secretary Mr Julius Ogamba.

Africa has a long-standing and growing importance for all three of The University of Manchester’s faculties, with the continent being a key focus for its core objectives in teaching, research and social responsibility.

Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice President for Social Responsibility at The University of Manchester said: “This visit to Kenya reinforces our aim to build long-term, durable partnerships that are equitable and lead to the co-creation of solutions to shared research questions that are important to people in all countries.

“Our Africa Strategy looks to develop resource, capacity sharing and knowledge production, with investment in people and facilities that is impactful on the ground in this region. We stand to learn so much from our partners in Africa, and we look forward to the breakthroughs the partnership will bring over the coming years.”

Through this renewed strategy, the University hopes to strengthen its links with Africa and increase collaboration between researchers and educational institutions. Manchester academics are already involved in a broad range of research projects across Africa, in areas such as poverty reduction, improving health outcomes, mitigating the impacts of climate change and advancing conditions for sustainable development. The University wants to see many more co-created projects addressing the breadth of the UN SDGs.

Professor Margaret Hutchinson, Vice Chancellor of the University of Nairobi said: “We will only be able to address many of the shared questions for humanity, as described in the UN SDGs, by working together. The University of Manchester’s strategy clearly lays out their approach to co-developing and co-creating research and we are delighted to be one of their partners.”

Dr James Mwangi, Executive Chairman of the Equity Group Foundation said: “Philanthropy’s important role in supporting the development of people with highly specialised training and generating transformative leaders, can be seen in our partnership with The University of Manchester. It is a natural progression of our highly successful Wings to Fly and Equity Leaders programmes”.

The University of Manchester celebrated 200 years in 2024, and the launch of its Africa Strategy aims to place the continent at the heart of the University’s move into its third century.

Find out more about Global Futures here.

Cervical cancer screening rates have fallen in the UK in recent years. While swathes of women and people with a cervix aged 25 to 64 in England attend their cervical cancer screening appointments on a routine basis, only 69% of those eligible attended their screening in the 2023-24 year.

While cervical cancer screening is carried out by healthcare professionals under the current UK programme, there is potential for patients to test themselves using self-sampling methods such as vaginal swabbing and urine sampling.

Recent evidence finds that self-sampling is similarly effective as clinician obtained samples, and the UK government’s National Screening Committee is also investigating self-sampling. However, evidence is limited on whether these self-sampling methods will help tackle the barriers many face in accessing cervical screening, prompting researchers from The University of Manchester to address this research gap in their study, published in BMC Health Services Research.

The current UK screening programme has been hugely successful in detecting and preventing cervical cancer, but disparities in uptake of the screening programme are prevalent. The study found that self-sampling alternatives may be useful where barriers prohibit access and may help to reduce a health inequity for some under-served groups.

Qualitative data was collected from 46 participants via interviews and focus groups, mindful of three theoretical frameworks: access to primary care services, intersectional and feminist perspectives.

Results showed a number of individuals had a good experience throughout the screening process. With regards to healthcare professionals, both positive and negative experiences were reported by participants, while negative experiences were also associated with the use of the speculum to carry out the screening.

Ultimately, the study found that examples of good practice in the current cervical screening programme are prevalent, but barriers to screening remain for under-served groups. Consistency is needed to ensure patient experience is high across the board, and the introduction of self-sampling alongside the current screening programme could be beneficial for boosting rates among under-screened groups.

However, it is important to note that if self-sampling is rolled out alongside the screening programme, effective communication and the appropriate information must be given to patients. The absence of such provisions could threaten the benefits of introducing self-sampling.

Stephanie Gillibrand, Research Fellow in the Division of Population Health, Health Services Research & Primary Care at The University of Manchester said: “It was heartening to conclude that many patients think their needs are being met through the current cervical cancer screening programme, and that there were so many examples of good practice reported relating to the standard of care received from healthcare professionals. However, the barriers we know have existed for years are obviously still blocking some patients from attending their appointments.

“Overall, attitudes towards the urine sampling and vaginal swab methods were very positive and these self-sampling tests give women more choice around how they are screened for cervical cancer, increasing their confidence around the process. If implemented alongside the current screening option, self-sampling methods could help the healthcare system reach under-screened groups if implemented effectively.”

Certain patients are less likely to attend their routine cervical cancer screening, including people from some ethnic minority communities and those in older and younger groups. Others less likely to attend include those living in socially deprived areas, those with lower education levels and people with intellectual disabilities.

Cervical cancer screening can also be an issue for people who have experienced sexual violence and homelessness. A barrier presented by the current screening programme is the invasive nature of the speculum procedure, which for many prompts fear due to the possibility of discomfort or pain.

An individual may decline a cervical cancer screening appointment due to a lack of knowledge and awareness, embarrassment, or because of logistical barriers such as childcare responsibilities and an inflexible working arrangement. The study found that self-sampling methods may help to address some of these practical barriers, as they could potentially be done at home.

The study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)’s School for Primary Care Research award, supported by NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Greater Manchester.

About cancer research at The University of Manchester

Our world leading experimental laboratories and clinical facilities, including a state-of-the-art £150 million research centre, facilitates our ground-breaking cancer research to deliver impact across the whole cancer pathway.  

Our multidisciplinary specialists are focused on reducing inequalities and developing solutions to improve access to prevention, detection and treatment strategies in the UK and globally. Find out more about our cancer research.