Congratulations to the three outstanding teams selected to receive funding as part of the inaugural Small Grants for Big Ideas competition. Launched this year, the initiative will provide grants of up to three innovative projects each year to enable them to pilot new ideas and test promising solutions to global challenges.
Seventeen competing applications were received, in an extraordinary display of Darwinian ingenuity. Thank you to everyone who took the time to apply, and to the judges who gave up their time to assess the entries.
We are delighted to be able to announce that, following a meeting of the judging panel on 28 May, the following projects will be funded.
- HydroSTAR: An Active Multi-Responsive Smart Hydrogel Platform for Effective yet Affordable Chronic Wound Dressings
Dick Ferieno Fidarus (Darwin student), Dr Lakshimi Balasubramaniam (Darwin Fellow), Dr Tiffany Lai (Darwin alum), Dr Sebastian Werner Krauss (Darwin Fellow), Hamza Khattak (external team member)Chronic wounds, including diabetic foot ulcers, represent a major clinical burden, leading to infection, repeat hospitalisation, and amputation. Existing treatments, such as negative pressure wound therapy and advanced dressings, are costly, infrastructure-dependent, and largely passive, causing inefficient tissue regeneration. This creates a need for affordable, scalable therapies that directly stimulate healing.
The hydroSTAR project focuses on developing a bioactive hydrogel dressing for wound repair. It uses a tunable, 3D printable and bioresorbable bilayer hydrogel, originally designed for soft robotics. This hydrogel responds to infrared light by undergoing controlled, cyclic microscale motion that mimics gentle mechanical massage. These mechanical stimuli are expected to replicate natural repair cues, enhancing epithelial cell migration, proliferation, and wound closure.Unlike passive dressings, the system acts as an active therapeutic platform that delivers controlled mechanical stimulation to drive tissue regeneration, establishing a new paradigm for tissue repair with a simple, manufacturable design.
- EntoUAV: first validation of Weather Surveillance Radar, a new low-cost standard for continental-scale insect population monitoring.
Reuben O’Connell-Booth (Darwin student), Professor Euan G. Nisbet (visiting Fellow at Darwin), Neil Mahon (Darwin student), Tommy Matthews (external team member – PhD student at University of Leeds and NCAS), Sofia Dartnell (Darwin student), Lucia Della-Savina (Darwin student)Insects comprise ca.90% of animal species and carry out essential ecological functions, from pollination and nutrient cycling to herbivory and pest control. Yet we known surprisingly little about how most insects are faring, with monitoring conducted only for a small section of this hyperdiverse group.Weather Surveillance Radar (WSR), typically used to monitor meteorological phenomena, also detects insects. However, this potentially rich new source of entomological data remains unvalidated: no study has collected aerial insects within the range of a WSR. WSR’s capacity to accurately measure insects is unknown.
Our Small Grants for Big Ideas project, EntoUAV, bridges this gap. We will build a specialised drone attachment to collect aerial insects at altitude while they are simultaneously measured by radar. We hope to find out how accurately WSR can estimate insect abundance and biomass, unlocking this exciting new data source.
- RedRoot: Growing trust in sustainable agriculture by quantifying soil biology
Matthew Macleod (Darwin student), Dr Alan Wanke (Darwin Fellow), Pjotr van de Jagt (Darwin student), Nicolas Garcia-Hernandez (external team member)Healthy crops rely on invisible partnerships with microbial communities in the soil. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi colonise plant roots, supplying phosphate in exchange for sugars, forming a symbiosis important for sustainable agriculture and reducing dependence on synthetic fertilisers. Despite its crucial role, farmers have no practical way to measure whether this biology is working in their soils at its full potential.
With support from the Darwin Small Grants for Big Ideas, our team at the Sainsbury Laboratory is changing that. We use bioengineered reporter plants to give the first scalable and functional readout of mycorrhizal activity and thus soil biological health.Over the next four months, we will deploy the diagnostic across UK farms, working directly with farmers and bridge the gap between Cambridge research and real-world agriculture. Our long-term aim is to build a national-scale platform supporting the transition to sustainable and data-driven agriculture.
