Two EPSRC Open Fellowships awarded to Oxford engineers

Associate Professor James Kwan received an Open Fellowship of just over £2.1m to support his work in engineering reactors to convert waste CO2 from the chemicals industry into useful chemicals, over the next 5 years. He explains, “The chemicals industry underpinning food, transportation, shelter, and energy sectors emits up to 3 BtCO2eq each year, driving climate change. My fellowship (SonoNetZero) will help me realise my vision to engineer scalable catalytic sonochemical reactors that convert this waste CO₂ into useful chemicals such as syngas (CO + H2), hydrocarbons, and alcohols to reduce atmospheric CO2 and improve the UK’s resilience and sustainability”.

The funding will enable Professor Kwan to provide a net negative CO₂ conversion technology by advancing catalytic sonochemistry, to demonstrate its potential application, and to assess its economic feasibility and environmental impact. Professor Kwan’s fellowship will also support two Postdoctoral Research Assistants (PDRAs), each for 2 years, and one DPhil student. One PDRA will focus on the development of the scalable sonochemical reactors and cavitation monitoring techniques. The other PDRA will focus on developing novel catalytic cavitation agents and understanding the sonochemical reaction kinetics and impact of process conditions. Finally, the DPhil student will bridge gaps across all research efforts, stress testing the scalable reactor, conducting performance benchmarking, and studying economic and financial feasibility of our technology.

Dr Christian Schroeder de Witt has also been awarded an EPSRC Open Fellowship of approximately £2.3m for his project Foundations of Systemic Alignment and Introspection for Trustworthy Multi-Agent AI. The award follows his recent success in securing both a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship and the Schmidt AI2050 Early Career Fellowship earlier this summer, with these awards - together with additional grant funding - collectively supporting distinct and complementary aspects of his research programme in agentic safety and security, centred on multi-agent security and interfacing with broader work in AI safety.

The EPSRC Open Fellowship supports a research agenda spanning foundational information-theoretic security through to rigorous multi-agent evaluation science. The work addresses key challenges in multi-agent security as AI systems become more autonomous and widely deployed, including robustness and assurance under uncertainty, hidden or emergent capabilities, and system-level vulnerabilities. By combining secure-by-design architectures with scalable evaluation and testing frameworks, the research aims to advance the safe and trustworthy deployment of agentic and multi-agent AI in real-world settings.

As Principal Investigator of the Oxford Witt Lab, Dr Schroeder de Witt leads an internationally recognised research agenda on multi-agent security - a field he has helped define and formalise - focused on safeguarding complex ecosystems of AI agents, humans, and institutions across design, evaluation, and deployment. Across these awards, the programme will support the recruitment of four postdoctoral researchers, significantly strengthening Oxford’s capacity in agentic safety and security.    

Postdoctoral researcher in AI + Security

Postdoctoral researcher in AI + Security (Early Career Fellowship)