Guidance

Turing Artificial Intelligence Fellowships

Updated 12 January 2024

1. About the Turing AI Fellowships

Turing Artificial Intelligence Fellowships

The Turing AI Fellowships are a £46 million initiative created as part of the AI Sector Deal’s ambitious skills and talent package aimed at retaining, attracting and developing the best and brightest AI international researchers. Turing Fellows will undertake world leading creative and innovative AI research, working in collaboration with partners from other sectors to accelerate the impact of their research.

The initiative consists of:

  • an initial Turing AI Fellowships programme delivered by The Alan Turing Institute in 2019
  • Turing AI Acceleration Fellowships aimed at accelerating the careers of high potential researchers developing next generation AI technologies, towards a world leading position by the end of the fellowship. Fellows were announced by UKRI in November 2020
  • Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships intended to retain and recruit the best international researchers in AI to build new capability and capacity in the UK.

The Turing AI Fellowships are being delivered in partnership by UK Research and Innovation, The Office for Artificial Intelligence, and The Alan Turing Institute.

How Turing AI Fellowships grow and develop the UK AI community and economy

A further £20 million investment to double the number of Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellows was announced by the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak, following the success of the first five fellows announced in 2021.

This investment is being delivered in a further two rounds, the first of which has been recently awarded to two new fellows in October 2023, and the second of which is now being delivered through a funding call open to applicants who were successful at the outline stage.

Awards for the Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships round three funding opportunity, are expected to be made in October 2024.

These prestigious fellowships will help to retain and attract some of the best international research talent in AI, as outlined in the National AI Strategy.

The Turing AI World-Leading Researcher fellows are able to apply for a Global Talent visa.

2. The Turing AI Fellows

The AI Fellows

The table lists the Turing AI Fellows supported by funding from the UK Government.

Name University Fellowship Project Research area Website
Professor Michael Bronstein University of Oxford Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow Geometric and Topological ML for Next-generation Drugs and Food - Geometric deep learning; graph neural networks; 3D shape analysis; Protein and drug discovery; Food-based therapies https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.bronstein/
Professor Damien Coyle University of Bath Turing AI Acceleration Fellow AI for Intelligent Neurotechnology and Human-Machine Symbiosis AI Neurotechnology; Brain-computer interface (BCI); Electroencephalography (EEG); Rehabilitation https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/persons/damien-coyle
Dr Jeff Dalton University of Edinburgh Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Neural Conversational Information Seeking Assistant Conversational search; Neural-symbolic methods; Representation learning; Natural language understanding; Virtual personal assistants https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/jeff-dalton
Dr Theodoros Damoulas University of Warwick Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Machine Learning Foundations of Digital Twins Machine learning; Bayesian nonparametric; Causality; Distributed digital twins; Urban and environmental digital twins https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/theo_damoulas
Timothy Dodwell University of Exeter Turing AI Fellow Intelligent Virtual Test Pyramids for High Value Manufacturing Uncertainty Quantification; Probabilistic Machine Learning; Multiscale Modelling; Digital Twins; Data-centric Engineering https://emps.exeter.ac.uk/engineering/staff/td336
Professor Aldo Faisal Imperial College London Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Reinforcement Learning for Healthcare Machine Learning; Reinforcement Learning; Digital twins; Digital Healthcare; AI for Medicine www.imperial.ac.uk/people/a.faisal
Professor Yarin Gal University of Oxford Turing AI Fellow Democratizing safe and robust AI through public challenges in Bayesian Deep Learning Democratizing Safe; Robust AI https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/yarin.gal/website/
Professor Zoubin Ghahramani University of Cambridge Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow Advancing Modern Data-Driven Robust AI Bayesian machine learning; Understanding deep learning; Scalable probabilistic programming; Simulation Cambridge Machine Learning Group
Professor Yulan He King’s College London Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Event-Centric Framework for Natural Language Understanding Natural language understanding; Machine reading comprehension; Event graph learning, Biomedical QA; conversational QA https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/yulan-he
Dr Antonio Hurtado University of Strathclyde Turing AI Acceleration Fellow PHOTONics for ultrafast Artificial Intelligence Neuromorphic Photonic Computing Ultrafast AI Hardware; Energy efficiency; Defence & Security; Finance www.strath.ac.uk/staff/hurtadoantoniodr
Professor Samuel Kaski The University of Manchester Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow Human-AI Research Teams - Steering AI in Experimental Design and Decision-Making Probabilistic machine learning; User modelling; Automatic experimental design; AI-assisted decision making and design https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/samuel.kaski.html
Dr Jose Miguel Hernandez Lobato University of Cambridge Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Machine Learning for Molecular Design Deep generative models of molecules; Molecule generation via chemical reactions; Data-efficient molecular optimization, Robust machine learning for molecule data; Accelerate drug and material design https://jmhl.org
Professor Mirella Lapata University of Edinburgh Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow TEAMER – Teaching Machines To Reason Like Humans Reasoning, Modularity, Generalization, Language understanding and generation https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/mirella-lapata
Neil Lawrence University of Cambridge Senior Turing AI Fellow Innovation to Deployment - Machine Learning Systems Design Deployed AI; Systems design; Data governance: AutoML: MLOps https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/ndl21
Dr Per Kristian Lehre University of Birmingham Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Rigorous Time-Complexity Analysis of Co-Evolutionary Algorithms Co-evolutionary algorithms; Algorithmic game theory; Analysis of algorithms; Combinatorial optimisation; Robust optimisation www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~lehrepk
Professor Maria Liakata Queen Mary University of London Turing AI Fellow Creating time sensors from language and heterogeneous user generated content Natural language processing; Longitudinal methods; Change detection; Learning from heterogeneous data; Mental health http://eecs.qmul.ac.uk/profiles/liakatamaria.html
Professor Giovanni Montana University of Warwick Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Advancing Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Decision Making in Real-World Applications Reinforcement learning; Decision making; Multi-agent systems; Digital healthcare; Manufacturing https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg/people/profile/?wmgid=1567
Dr Christopher Nemeth Lancaster University Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Probabilistic Algorithms for Scalable and Computable Approaches to Learning (PASCAL) Statistical machine learning; Probabilistic uncertainty; Scalable computing; Cybersecurity, Autonomous vehicles www.lancs.ac.uk/~nemeth
Professor Alison Noble University of Oxford Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow Ultra Sound  Multi-Modal Video-based Human-Machine Collaboration Trustworthy AI; Human-machine collaboration; Principled federated learning; Medical imaging and vision computing https://eng.ox.ac.uk/people/alison-noble/
Professor Raul Santos-Rodriguez University of Bristol Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Interactive Annotations in AI Human-centric machine learning; Annotations; Labels; Explainability; Digital health www.raulsantosrodriguez.com
Anna Scaife The University of Manchester Turing AI Fellow AI4Astro - AI for Discovery for Data Intensive Astrophysics Bayesian Deep Learning; Data Intensive Astrophysics; Variational Inference; Uncertainty calibration; Reproducible AI https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/anna.scaife.html
Dr Sebastian Stein University of Southampton Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Citizen-Centric AI Systems Responsible AI Multi-agent systems; Smart energy; Smart transportation; Disaster response www.southampton.ac.uk/~ss1y07/ccais
Professor Philip Torr University of Oxford Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow Robust, Efficient and Trustworthy Learning Computer vision; Deep learning; Robustness https://eng.ox.ac.uk/people/philip-torr
Professor Ivan Tyukin King’s College London Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Adaptive, Robust, and Resilient AI Systems for the FuturE Robust, Stable, and Trustworthy AI and Machine Learning; Adaptive AI; Provably Certifiable AI; AI Error Correction; Learning and Generalisation in High Dimension kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ivan.tyukin.html
Dr Adrian Weller University of Cambridge Turing AI Acceleration Fellow Trustworthy Machine Learning Fairness; Explainability; Robustness; Health; Justice http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/adrian
Professor Michael Wooldridge University of Oxford Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow The Large Agent Collider – robust agent-based modelling at scale Agent-based modelling; Multi-agent systems; Model verification; Model validation; Model calibration https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge
Professor Christopher Yau University of Oxford Turing AI Acceleration Fellow clinAIcan - Developing clinical applications of artificial intelligence for cancer Probabilistic modelling; Deep learning; Causal inference; Cancer; Genomics https://www.bdi.ox.ac.uk/Team/christoper-yau

3. Connect with a Turing AI Fellow

Connect

The Turing AI Fellowships are intended to enhance connections between academia and industry through supporting cross-sector collaborations and enabling the two-way flow of knowledge and people. This will accelerate the impact of the world-leading AI research being carried out by the fellows and benefit UK industry through the creation of new academic-industry collaborations and partnerships.

Please contact the fellows directly if you’re interested in finding out more about their research programmes.

General enquiries about the Turing AI Fellowships investment may be sent to AI.robotics@epsrc.ukri.org.

4. The Turing AI Acceleration Fellowships

The Turing AI Acceleration Fellowships

The Turing AI Acceleration Fellowships were awarded with the aim of accelerating the careers of fifteen high potential mid-career researchers towards a world-leading position by the end of the five year award. They are all delivering a high quality programme of ambitious, novel and creative research, in an area of AI of opportunity for the UK, with world leading results.

The Turing AI Acceleration Fellowships will:

  • position the UK Internationally in AI Research and Innovation, attracting further talent and inward investment by signalling the UK’s ambition to be a global leader in the development of AI and enhance our research power in the field
  • build new UK capability and maintaining the resilience of the academic research base by investing in the recruitment and retention of world-leading and high-potential researchers, enabling blue skies research and training of future talent
  • support a diverse research community in the high profile growing area of AI thereby ensuring a diverse and sustainable ecosystem of AI leaders, with a strong future pipeline of talent
  • enable new models of collaboration and career paths across sectors in AI — greater porosity between academia and industry will retain researchers in academia, create collaborations and enable the two-way flow of knowledge and people between sectors
  • integrate consideration of AI adoption into AI research activities by embedding high expectations of the development of safe, ethical and responsible AI technologies at all stages of research

5. Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships

Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships

The prestigious Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships have been awarded to seven world-leading AI researchers, with significant packages of support to enable the building of centres of excellence in key areas of AI research. The awards will allow some of the brightest minds in AI to move to (or remain in) the UK, whilst maintaining the momentum of their research programmes thereby building and growing the UK’s international competitiveness and reputation in AI. The Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellows will conduct ground-breaking work on AI’s biggest challenges.

The initial five recipients of Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships awarded in October 2021 are:

  • Professor Zoubin Ghahramani, University of Cambridge
  • Professor Samuel Kaski, The University of Manchester
  • Professor Mirella Lapata, The University of Edinburgh
  • Professor Philip Torr, University of Oxford
  • Professor Michael Wooldridge, University of Oxford

In October 2023, awards were made to two new Turing AI World-Leading Researcher fellows, and they are:

  • Professor Michael Bronstein, University of Oxford
  • Professor Alison Noble, University of Oxford

The Turing AI World-Leading Researcher fellows will:

  • establish a world leading centre of excellence in a strategically important area of AI research
  • lead a major programme of AI research, translation and innovation
  • build strong relationships and collaborations with academia, industry and broader stakeholders in the UK and internationally
  • act as a leader in the community and as an ambassador and advocate for it, driving forward the UK and international research agenda
  • develop the skills and careers of their teams, developing the independent researchers and innovators of the future
  • actively engage with the questions around AI and ethics, and responsible research and innovation (RRI) throughout their activities
  • deliver research with a high likelihood of impact on UK society and the economy
  • build a broader portfolio of funding and activities beyond the fellowship, moving towards a position of sustainability at the end of the fellowship