Successful Seedcorn Awardees 2024-2025

The Jean Golding Institute Seedcorn Funding is a fantastic opportunity to develop multi and interdisciplinary ideas while promoting collaboration in data science and AI.  We are delighted that a new cohort of multidisciplinary researchers has been supported through this funding.

Leighan Renaud – Building a Folk Map of St Lucia

Leighan Renaud

Dr. Leighan Renaud is a lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures in the Department of English. Her research interests include twenty-first century Caribbean fiction, mothering and motherhood in the Caribbean, folk and oral traditions in the Anglophone Caribbean, and creative practices of neo-archiving. 

Louise AC Millard – Using digital health data for tracking menstrual cycles

Dr. Louise Millard is a Senior Lecturer in Health Data Science in the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU) at the University of Bristol. Following an undergraduate Computer Science degree and MSc in Machine Learning and Data Mining, they completed an interdisciplinary PhD at the interface of Computer Science and Epidemiology. Their research interests lie in the development and application of computational methods for population health research, including using digital health and phenotypic data, and statistical and machine learning approaches. 

Photo of Louise AC MIllard on the right

Laura Fryer – Visualisation tool for Enhancing Public Engagement Using Supermarket Loyalty Card Data

Photo of Laura Fryer on the left

Laura is a senior research associate in the Digital Footprints Lab based within the Bristol Medical School. Their aim is to use novel data to unlock insights into behavioural science for the purposes of public good. Laura is particularly passionate about broadening the public’s understanding of digital footprint data (e.g. from loyalty cards, bank transactions or wearable technology such as a smart watch) and demonstrating how vital it can be in developing our understanding of population health within the UK and beyond.  Laura’s project is focused on developing a data-visualisation tool that will support public engagement activities and provide a tangible representation of the types of data that we use – building further trust between the public and scientific researchers.  

Nicola A Wiseman – Cellular to Global Assessment of Phytoplankton Stoichiometry (C-GAPS)

Dr. Nicola Wiseman is a Research Associate in the School of Geographical Sciences. They received their PhD in Earth System Science from the University of California, Irvine, where they specialized in using ocean biogeochemical models to investigate the impacts of phytoplankton nutrient uptake flexibility on ocean carbon uptake. They also are interested in using statistical methods and machine learning to better understand the interactions between marine nutrient and carbon cycles, and the role of these interactions in regulating global climate. 

Photo of Nicola A Wiseman on the right

George Sains – Collecting & Analysing Multilingual EEG Data

Photo of George Sains on the left

George Sains is a Doctoral Teaching Associate in the Neural Computation research group at the School of Computer Science. Their research is focused on the overlap between Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Linguistics. George has worked on developing models to help understand how linguistic traits have evolved. More recently, they have been using Bayesian modelling to find patterns between grammar and neurological response and are now focused on using Electroencephalography experimentation to explore the relationship between linguistic upbringing and how the brain processes language. 

Alex Tasker – Building a Strategic Critical Rapid Integrated Biothreat Evaluation (SCRIBE) data tool for research, policy, and practice

Dr. Tasker is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, a Research Associate at the KCL Conflict Health Research Group and Oxford Climate Change & (In)Security (CCI) project, and a recent ESRC Policy Fellow in National Security and International Relations. Dr. Tasker is an interdisciplinary researcher working across social and natural sciences to understand human-animal-environmental health in situations of conflict, criminality, and displacement using One Health approaches. Alongside this core focus, Dr. Tasker’s work also explores emerging areas of relevance to biosecurity and biothreat including engineering biology, antimicrobial resistance, subterranean spaces, and the use of new forms of evidence and expertise in a rapidly changing world for climate, security, and defense.

Photo of Alex Tasker on the right