The Leverhulme Trust recognises 30 exceptional researchers with £3 million in 2025 Philip Leverhulme Prizes

The Leverhulme Trust recognises 30 exceptional researchers with £3 million in 2025 Philip Leverhulme Prizes

(IN BRIEF) The Leverhulme Trust has announced the 2025 Philip Leverhulme Prize winners, awarding £3 million across 30 exceptional researchers from universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Southampton, and Liverpool. Each prize, worth £100,000, supports researchers in Archaeology, Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, Geography, and Languages and Literatures, recognising their international impact and potential for future achievement. Professor Anna Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, highlighted the remarkable breadth of research, which ranges from sustainable chemistry and robotics to feminist geography and language studies. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the prize continues to honour the legacy of Philip, Third Viscount Leverhulme. The next round of nominations, opening in 2026, will focus on fields such as Biological Sciences, History, and Law.

(PRESS RELEASE) LONDON, 21-Oct-2025 — /EuropaWire/ — The Leverhulme Trust has named the 2025 recipients of the Philip Leverhulme Prizes, honouring 30 distinguished researchers across six academic disciplines. Chosen from over 350 nominations, each prize is valued at £100,000 and celebrates early- to mid-career researchers whose work demonstrates both international excellence and exceptional future promise. Awards were presented in the fields of Archaeology, Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, Geography, and Languages and Literatures.

Now in its twenty-fourth year, the Philip Leverhulme Prizes commemorate the legacy of Philip, Third Viscount Leverhulme, the grandson of the Trust’s founder William Lever. The awards aim to empower pioneering scholars to further advance their fields through unrestricted research support.

Professor Anna Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, expressed the Trust’s pride in supporting this new cohort of researchers, noting the remarkable range of their work: “From landscape archaeology and biomolecular mass spectrometry to applied microeconomics and adaptable wearable robotics, the depth and diversity of research this year are truly outstanding. Selecting winners has become increasingly challenging, reflecting the extraordinary calibre of nominations we receive. We remain deeply grateful to our reviewers and panel members for their thoughtful contributions to the selection process.”

Among this year’s winners are leading academics from prestigious institutions such as the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of Southampton, University of Liverpool, and London School of Economics. Their research spans a wide intellectual spectrum, from examining human-environmental interactions in prehistory to exploring sustainable materials in chemistry, feminist political geography, and language and social justice.

Each of the 30 awardees receives £100,000 to further their innovative research, which can be used flexibly to support any activity that advances their academic pursuits. The Trust will release detailed citations for each winner on its official website in the coming weeks.

Archaeology 

Dr Georgia Andreou, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, for their work on landscape archaeology, heritage, sustainability and climate change, archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa, and the intellectual history of archaeology.
Dr Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, for their work on historical archaeology, indigenous archaeology, archaeology of colonialism, early colonial Americas, and subaltern studies.
Dr Elisabeth Niklasson, Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, for their work on archaeology and political polarisation, heritage policy and governance, and archaeological funding mechanisms.
Dr Philip Riris, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Bournemouth University, for their work on human-environmental interaction, South American prehistory, computational modelling, resilience, historical ecology, and rock art.
Dr John Rowan, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, for their work on palaeoanthropology, hominin evolution, hominin palaeobiology and palaeoecology, faunal analysis, zooarchaeology, and anthropogenic impacts.

Chemistry

Dr Rebecca Beveridge, Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry, University of Strathclyde, for their work on biomolecular mass spectrometry.
Professor Emily Draper, School of Chemistry, University of Glasgow, for their work on the self-assembly of small organic molecules into supramolecular materials for use in metal-free organic electronics and responsive materials.
Professor Alexander Forse, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, for their work on electrochemical energy storage and carbon dioxide capture.
Professor Meera Mehta, Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, for their work on the fundamental chemistry of earth-abundant non-toxic elements and their application in synthetic and materials science.
Dr Mattia Silvi, School of Chemistry, University of Nottingham, for their work on the development of novel synthetic chemistry reactions and methods with particular emphasis in photochemical methods.

Economics

Dr Clare Balboni, Department of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science, for their work on environmental economics, trade, development economics and spatial economics.
Professor Felipe González, Department of Economics, King’s College London, for their work on political economy, economic history, development economics and public economics.
Professor Attila Lindner, Department of Economics, University College London, for their work on applied microeconomics, specialising in labour markets and public finance.
Dr Ludvig Sinander, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, for their work on economic theory.
Professor Constantine Yannelis, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, for their work on financial economics, human capital investment, corporate finance, applied microeconomics and student loans.

Engineering

Dr Soroush Abolfathi, School of Engineering, University of Warwick, for their work on environmental and predictive modelling, machine learning, AI, environmental fluid dynamics, climate resilience and pollution transport.
Dr Letizia Gionfrida, Department of Informatics, King’s College London, for their work on vision-guided control models for adaptable wearable robotics, integrating vision to enhance real-time adaptability, personalisation and safety in assistive technologies.
Dr Jun Jiang, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London, for their work on sustainable metal manufacturing, solid-state dissimilar-metal bonding, and interfacial micromechanical engineering.
Professor Emilio Martínez-Pañeda, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, for their work on solid mechanics.
Professor Noa Zilberman, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, for their work on computing infrastructure: digital chip architectures for large-scale

Geography

Dr Sydney Calkin, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Queen Mary University of London, for their work on feminist political geography, political geography, health geography.
Dr Thomas Cowan, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, for their work on post-colonial urbanisation, digital urbanism, political economy of land.
Dr Joshua Dean, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, for their work on hydrological and biogeochemical processes within the global carbon cycle.
Dr Matthew Jones, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, for their work on pyrogeography, extreme fires, earth system science, and climate change impacts, including mitigation and adaptation.
Dr Kasia Paprocki, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, for their work on political ecology of climate change adaptation, development and agrarian change.

Languages and Literatures

Dr Ian Cushing, School of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, for their work on critical applied linguistics, educational linguistics, language and social justice.
Dr Callan Davies, Department of English, University of Southampton, for their work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing, drama, and spaces of entertainment and performance.
Dr Noreen Masud, Department of English, University of Bristol, for their work on modernist and contemporary literatures in English, affect theory, landscape and rhetoric.
Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi, School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College London, for their work on Romanticism, the Black Atlantic, cultural impacts, and legacies of the transatlantic slave economy.
Dr Ed Pulford, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, for their work on language-based area studies of East Asia and the former-Soviet Union.

Looking ahead, the Leverhulme Trust announced that the 2026 Philip Leverhulme Prizes will invite nominations in Biological Sciences, History, Law, Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy and Theology, and Sociology and Social Policy, continuing its long-standing commitment to recognising groundbreaking research across disciplines. Further information regarding the nomination process is available here.

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Tel: 020 7042 9888
email: grants@leverhulme.ac.uk

SOURCE:  Leverhulme Trust