RAEng Green Future Fellowships

Ten year funding award to support exceptional scientists, researchers and innovators developing pioneering engineering innovations with the potential to have a real-world impact on climate change.

The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the UK’s national engineering body responsible for developing and promoting engineering excellence and technology innovation in the engineering sector in the UK and abroad. RAEng works to train, support and mentor talented engineers, fund cutting edge research, give independent advice to government and foster collaboration between industry, academia and business in every sector of engineering.

The Green Future Fellowship is a new award to support pioneering engineering innovations with the potential to deliver climate solutions with real-world impact.

The programme is open to scientists, researchers and innovators, from the UK and abroad, who are seeking to develop and scale up a transformative engineering innovation idea that has the potential to make a significant and lasting impact on global climate resilience. The fellowship includes up to £3million in funding over ten years, plus a bespoke support package and training opportunities.

The novel technologies supported by the Green Future Fellowships will:

• Be practical and scalable.
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• Help the UK adapt sustainably to the impacts of climate change.

Applicants are not required to have a PhD or come from an engineering background, provided they can clearly evidence how their research or innovation promotes engineering excellence and supports engineering outcomes.

Innovations at all stages of development are eligible, from basic principles to proof of concept, demonstration, and application. There is no restriction on the current Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of the new technology. Fellowship projects must be centred around enabling and driving scalability of the proposed research or innovation. Through the Fellowship, the innovation should advance to the point where scalable real-world impact becomes achievable.

Example innovation areas that Green Future Fellowships may explore are:

• Generating 24-hour, 365-day a year electricity without burning fossil fuels.
• Reducing the energy usage of vital infrastructure like telecoms networks, data centres and sewage processing.
• Recovering and using energy that would otherwise be wasted – such as the heating of roads in the sun, or heat lost from industrial processes.
• Building electronic memory that uses much less energy.
• Recycling and reusing metals and plastics more efficiently.
• Making future electronic devices without relying on mining of rare and expensive minerals.
• Creating new bacteria that will clean up pollution and waste faster.
• Developing robots to keep offshore wind turbines running more reliably, whatever the weather.
• Making vehicles lighter so that they use less energy and accelerate faster without costing more.