Works in Progress x ARIA: Lightning talks

​Join the Works in Progress team for an evening with ARIA, a UK R&D funding agency created to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs.

​ARIA Programme Directors have unique independence to shape and lead high-impact R&D programs with a budget of ≈£50M each. You can learn more about ARIA’s opportunity spaces here.

​We'll hear lightning talks from four ARIA Programme Directors, sharing scientific developments which they’re particularly excited about:

• ​Angie Burnett is a plant biologist. She's running a programme on creating synthetic plants to catalyse a new generation of major crops that are more productive, resilient and sustainable.

• ​Nicole Wheeler developed the UK's first software for screening synthetic DNA for potential biohazards. Nicole is exploring proactive biodefence: a programme to build a planetary-scale 'immune system' that can detect and neutralise novel biological threats before they have a chance to cause a pandemic.

• ​Nathan Wolfe previously founded initiatives to quantify epidemic and pandemic risk, and served on DARPA’s Defense Sciences Research Council. He's developing a programme on precision mitochondria: a platform for engineering the mitochondrial genome.

• ​Brian Wang co-founded a non-profit to pre-develop medicine for the next pandemic, and was Head of R&D at a vaccine development start-up. He's working on sculpting innate immunity, an effort to unlock new therapeutic strategies by modulating the body’s first line of defence against disease.

​Works in Progress is a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world.

​ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency) is an R&D funding agency built to unlock scientific and technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.