Rising star Dr Hatef Sadeghi has been awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship by UK Research and Innovation as part of a £900 million initiative.

The Future Leaders Fellowships provides early career researchers and innovators with the flexibility and time they need to make progress on challenging questions. Researchers are encouraged to pursue interdisciplinary and business-linked research.

Science and Innovation Minister Chris Skidmore said: “Our investment in these Future Leaders Fellows will enable the brightest and best of our scientists and researchers to work with leading lights in industry, to help their research move from the laboratory to the commercial market. This support to the next generation of scientists and researchers is a key part of our modern Industrial Strategy, and our commitment to raise R&D spend to 2.4% of GDP by 2027 will maintain the UK’s position as a world-leader in science and innovation and build on our historic legacy.”

UK Research and Innovation Chief Executive, Professor Sir Mark Walport, said: “The Fellowships offer opportunities to move across disciplinary boundaries and between academia and industry. These Fellowships will enable us to grow the strong supply of talented individuals needed to ensure that UK research and innovation continues to be world leading.”

Dr. Sadeghi said: “I am honoured to have received the UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. This award provides the flexibility, stability and resources needed to undertake an ambitious research program with significant academic and industrial impact. I would like to thank the UKRI for selecting me.”

He studies quantum, phonon and spin transport in nanoscale devices.

His UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship proposal entitled “Exploiting quantum and phonon interference for molecular thermoelectricity and Seebeck sensing (MoQPI)” aims to exploit room-temperature quantum and phonon interference in radically-new cross-plane nanodevice architectures to design new high-efficiency thermoelectric materials and devices for converting waste heat in consumer electronics and server farms into electricity and cooling of CMOS-based devices. His proposal would also open encouraging perspectives for the realization of fast and portable devices for biomolecular sensing.

Building on his development of new theoretical concepts, tools and methodologies, Dr Sadeghi has pushed the boundaries in his research area and published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, several of which are in Nature, Nature Materials, Nano Letters, PNAS, JACS, Nature Communications, ACSNano, Advanced Functional Materials and Angewandte.

Between 2012 and 2016, he was a Marie-Curie Early Stage Researcher at Lancaster University to study nanoscale electronics and was awarded the 2015 best international PhD student prize.

In June 2017, he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to study electrons and heat flow through molecular devices.

He collaborates at the interface between Physics, Chemistry and Electronic Engineering with more than 10 leading experimental groups from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, Durham, Lancaster, Imperial College London, Madrid, Basel and Bern and research laboratories in IBM-Zurich and EMPA.