Surrey researchers awarded £2.7m Future Leaders Fellowships to advance quantum and language research

Dr Priya Sharma, a Daphne Jackson Fellow in Hybrid Quantum Systems, has received £1.3 million to explore the potential of a new type of superfluid-based quantum bit (qubit), while Dr Sacha Beniamine, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in linguistics research at the Surrey Morphology Group, has received £1.4 million to investigate our ability to predict and produce words we have never heard before. 

Dr Sharma’s Fellowship builds on her recently published conceptual design for the Superfluid Helium Oscillator Quantum (SHOQ) device – the first reported design for a superfluid-based qubit. Using charge-neutral superfluid helium-3, the technology could be naturally less vulnerable to some of the electromagnetic noise that causes errors in conventional superconducting qubits – an issue hindering the scaling up of quantum computers. 

The Future Leaders Fellowship will provide the means to further explore the potential of SHOQ technology and progress towards commercialisation, with longer-term ambitions to secure patents and attract investment for a quantum hardware start-up. 

Dr Sharma joined Surrey as a Daphne Jackson Fellow in 2023 and has since been named Researcher of the Year in the School of Mathematics and Physics in 2024 and received the University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Career Returner Award in 2025. Alongside her research, she advocates for more diverse career pathways into science and greater inclusion within the quantum community.

Dr Beniamine’s Fellowship will investigate one of the unique abilities that makes human language possible – how we use patterns to predict and produce forms of words we have never come across before. For example, an English speaker could reasonably guess that the past tense of an invented word such as ‘glorp’ would be ‘glorped’. However, the rules become more complex for other languages, some of which use thousands of different forms of a single verb.  

The project will create new computational tools and high-quality digital datasets to investigate how these predictions work and why some language systems are more predictable than others. Many of the languages studied will be under-documented or endangered, with the resulting datasets also used to develop educational resources that support language teaching, preservation and revitalisation. 

Dr Beniamine joined Surrey in 2021 through a British Academy Newton International Fellowship and later secured a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2023, before becoming a permanent Research Fellow. He is an advocate for Open Science, leading the creation of a data standard in his field and was shortlisted for the UKRI Dorothy Bishop Prize 2025 for his contributions to open data and research software.