Air pollution researcher receives early career fellowship from the Royal Society

Dr Steven Campbell, an air pollution researcher based in the Environmental Research Group, has been awarded a prestigious University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society. The fellowship provides £1.85 million over eight years, enabling Dr Campbell to develop his independent research programme.

Air pollution is one of the world’s most serious environmental health threats, causing millions of premature deaths every year. The tiny particles in polluted air, known as particulate matter (PM), are especially harmful because they can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Yet researchers still do not fully understand which chemical components or emission sources of PM are most damaging to human health.

Dr Campbell’s research focuses on the oxidative potential (OP) of particles, which is essentially their ability to trigger harmful chemical reactions in the lung that can lead to oxidative stress, inflammation, and disease. OP is emerging as a promising new metric to assess the relative hazard of different particle sources, but current measurement methods are slow, labour-intensive, and often inaccurate.

To overcome this, Dr Campbell has developed a novel instrument that measures OP in real time, providing continuous, automated, highly time resolved data which provides new insights into the relative hazard of different PM components and emission sources.

During the fellowship, Dr Campbell will build the next-generation version of this instrument, making it more sensitive, robust, and user-friendly, and ready for wider deployment across the UK and internationally. It will be tested in controlled laboratory conditions and then installed at major air quality monitoring sites in London and Manchester, delivering real-time OP data alongside detailed particle composition and source information. This unique dataset will help identify which pollution sources  such as traffic, wood burning, or tyre and brake wear are potentially most harmful to health.

Supporting outstanding science

The Royal Society URF is one of the UK’s most prestigious early-career awards, supporting outstanding scientists to establish world-leading research careers.

Speaking about the award, Dr Campbell said: “I’m thrilled to receive this fellowship from the Royal Society. It provides an incredible opportunity to build my independent research career and advance our understanding of the most hazardous sources of particulate pollution to human health. I’m excited to begin this next chapter and deeply grateful to the colleagues and mentors whose support has helped shape my career.”

The Royal Society is awarding £83 million to 79 researchers across the UK in total, and €5 million to researchers in the Republic of Ireland in partnership through Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland.

Funding for the fellowships comes from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the K.C. Wong Education Foundation.