Professor Arend Bayer awarded £6M Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship

Professor Bayer is one of nine researchers to be awarded the prestigious Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship – a flagship grant for exceptional curiosity-driven research.

Arend Bayer, Professor of Algebraic Geometry in the University of Edinburgh School fo Mathematics, has been awarded a £6 million Faraday Discovery Fellowship to advance the mathematical foundations that help classify and describe geometric shapes. Such geometric shapes underly applications of mathematics in robotics, data analysis, and evolutionary biology.

This unique Fellowship, which launched in 2024, runs for 10 years and aims to cultivate future scientific leaders. Arend is the only Faraday Discovery Fellow in mathematics thus far.

I am thrilled and honoured to receive a Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship. It is an immense vote of trust by fellow scientists, in myself and my collaborators at The University of Sheffield and Queen Mary University London, and in the power and potential of algebraic geometry and more broadly mathematics.
It is also, most importantly, a call to take maximum advantage of such a unique opportunity.

Arend’s work will develop new methods that connect different areas of mathematics.

The Fellowship is named after the English scientist, inventor and electrical pioneer, Michael Faraday FRS, who is celebrated for his contributions to experimental discovery and public science education.

The 2026 cohort of Fellows will investigate fundamental questions ranging from how human embryo cells develop into specialised cells and tissues to what happened in the moments after the Big Bang, helping to shed light on the secrets of the Universe's formation.

The nine fellows in this year’s cohort were selected from more than 280 applications. Arend joins researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Lancaster, Oxford, Strathclyde, and York, making him one of the first two Fellows to be based at a university in Scotland.

This impressive new cohort of Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellows is exploring some of the most exciting questions in science.
Backing exceptional researchers at our world-leading institutions is essential to advancing science and these ten-year fellowships provide the time and support needed to pursue bold, curiosity-driven research, build world leading groups and establish global research partnerships. Together, they will help secure the UK's position at the forefront of scientific discovery and inspire the next generation of research talent.

The Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship is supported through a £250 million fund from the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade.

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