About 30 of these prizes are awarded annually by the Leverhulme Trust to recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers who are at an early stage in their careers but who have already acquired an international reputation for their work.
Dr Grace Brockington of the Department of History of Art will use her prize fund to advance her future research. She intends to develop a major collaborative project about art and internationalism at the fin de siècle, and to pursue a book and exhibition project about the artist, Vanessa Bell.
Dr Brockington came to Bristol in 2007 from the University of Cambridge, where she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, followed by a Masters in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and a DPhil at the University of Oxford. She leads the international research network ICE (‘Internationalism and the Arts, 1870-1920’), and is General Editor of the Peter Lang series Internationalism and the Arts at the Fin de Siècle.
The Philip Leverhulme Prize comes close on the heels of the publication of Dr Brockington's first book, Above the battlefield: British modernism and the peace movement, 1900–1918 (Yale).
Dr Tim Browning of the Department of Mathematics plans to use his prize fund to organise a number of high profile international meetings focusing on areas that border his research. An emphasis will be placed on funding the attendance of younger participants, together with those from developing countries, in order to seed exciting future progress in the field.
Dr Browning came to Bristol in 2005 from the University of Oxford, where he was an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Assistant. He completed an MSci in Mathematics at King’s College, London followed by a D.Phil at Magdalen College, Oxford. His major fields of interest are analytic number theory and Diophantine geometry.
His book Quantitative aspects of the arithmetic of projective algebraic varieties was awarded the 2009 Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize.
Dr Dan Lunt of the School of Geographical Sciences will use his prize to further his work into understanding the causes of dramatic natural changes in climate that have occurred over the last 50 million years, and build on this understanding of the past to improve predictions of future climate change.
He arrived at Bristol in 2003, after working as a postdoc at the LSCE in Paris. Previous to that he completed an MPhys at the University of Oxford followed by a PhD in Meteorology at the University of Reading. He is Chief Editor of the journal Geoscientific Model Development which was founded to improve traceability, reproducibility, clarity, and rigour in climate model development.
In October 2011, he will be leading a Royal Society Discussion Meeting entitled Warm Climates of the Past: A lesson for the future?
Dr Nicholas Teanby of the School of Earth Sciences will use his prize to further develop and broaden his research in planetary sciences - especially in the areas of planetary atmospheres and interiors. His prize coincides with an especially exciting time, as large scale seasonal changes are now occurring in the Saturn system, which Dr Teanby plans to investigate in detail over the next few years.
Dr Teanby arrived in Bristol in 2010, after working for seven years in the Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Planetary Physics department at the University of Oxford. Prior the this Dr Teanby obtained an MA/MSci in Natural Sciences (Physics) from the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD in geomagnetic secular variation at the University of Leeds. Dr Teanby is a member of the data analysis team for the NASA Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn and has observations of both Saturn and its giant moon Titan planned until 2017.
Dr Teanby is an STFC advanced research fellow and has published many papers on Titan and Saturn.
The Leverhulme Trust was established in 1925 under the Will of the first Viscount Leverhulme. It is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing funds of some £50 million every year.