UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship awarded to leading academic

Dr Daphné Lemasquerier, a Lecturer in fluid dynamics from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, has been awarded £1.4m by UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowship for a project entitled ‘Fluid dynamics of deep interiors in the outer solar system’.

Dr Lemasquerier’s project received funding to model flows in the atmospheres and liquid hydrogen interiors of gas giants, as well as in the global salty ocean harbours beneath the ice crust of icy moons.

UKRI’s flagship Future Leaders Fellowship allows universities and businesses to develop their most talented early career researchers and innovators. Dr Lemasquerier is one of 68 research leaders from across the UK who received funding to lead research into global issues and to commercialise their innovations in the UK.

Further to the ongoing NASA Juno mission, which observed Jupiter in unprecedented detail, two future missions, Europa Clipper (NASA) and JUICE (ESA), will also arrive on Jupiter in the 2030s to explore its icy satellites, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. These missions require accurate forward models to target strategic observables and interpret observations, and Dr Lemasquerier’s research will contribute to this work.

Upon receiving news of the funding, Dr Lemasquerier said: “This is a tremendous interdisciplinary challenge at the intersection of fluid dynamics and planetary science requiring an understanding of extreme dynamical regimes with multiple physical processes at play, at scales well beyond our day-to-day experience.

“The UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship is a unique 4+3-year fellowship that will give me protected time to concentrate solely on my research, a team of two postdoctoral researchers and three PhD students, funding for equipment and travel, and training opportunities for me and my team.

“The long-term and flexible support of the Future Leaders Fellowship will be crucial to develop experimental fluid mechanics at St Andrews through inter-School collaborations. The rotating tank experiments will be built in the aquarium facility of the Scottish Oceans Institute and complemented by numerical and theoretical models developed in the School of Mathematics and Statistics in order to cross-validate results and strengthen extrapolation to planetary regimes.

“Beyond St Andrews, the team will work in connection with world-leading experts in giant planets and icy moon observations and computational fluid dynamics.”

UKRI Chief Executive, Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, said: “UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowships provide researchers and innovators with long-term support and training to develop ambitious, transformative ideas. The programme supports the research and innovation leaders of the future to transcend disciplinary and sector boundaries, bridging the gap between academia and business.”