New Members' Induction | 2025

Amy Fry is the Programme Manager for the UK Young Academy, and has been in the role since 2021, supporting in the planning and launch of the organisation in 2022 and operational running since. She manages the Staff team, and is the main point of contact for the Executive Group, Partner Academies and other stakeholders involved in the initiative. Her background is in public engagement with science and project management, and she has been involved with running science festivals, delivering engagement initiatives such as book prizes and interdisciplinary grant funding as well as managing a range of small and large scale events and trainings. She is passionate about advocating for the voices of early-career individuals and is an avid theatre-goer in her spare time.

Chief Officer – Programmes, Partnerships and Engagement – at the Royal Society, having joined in 2013 as the Chief Strategy Officer. Her role includes responsibility for major strands of work including grants, public, schools and industry engagement and the Royal Society’s focus on diversity and inclusion in STEM. She is the staff lead for the UK Young Academy at the Royal Society. Before joining the Royal Society, Lesley was the Marketing and Communications Director of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Most of her career was spent working in the private sector, including six years as Marketing Director of Waterstones Booksellers.

Dr Sandeep Sandhu is a research and innovation expert with experience across government, academia, and international partnerships. She currently leads a 50-strong directorate at Innovate UK Business Connect, spanning global partnerships, policy and insight, strategic stakeholder engagement, and private investment across the UK and Africa. Sandeep has built impactful collaborations with governments, industry, investors, and universities worldwide, and previously led IUK’s international programmes, brokering bilateral innovation partnerships with key global economies. Earlier, Sandeep served as Senior International Policy Manager at UK Research and Innovation, where she developed UKRI’s international strategy, advanced European science policy, and represented the UK on the Global Research Council. At the Medical Research Council, she managed global health programmes including the Newton Fund and GCRF, and acted as National Contact Point for Health for Horizon 2020. She holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

Linda Oyama is a microbiologist and lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences and Institute for Global Food Security, Queen’s University Belfast, with a First-class Microbiology degree and a PhD in Biological Sciences. Linda’s research interests center around understanding antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in microbiomes from a One Health perspective through surveillance and epidemiological studies using meta-omics approaches. She aims to tackle AMR through the discovery and development of novel treatment options for various clinical and veterinary multidrug resistant (MDR) infections.

Sophie Meekings is a neuroscientist whose work focuses on understanding speech production in typical speakers and people with communication disabilities (like stuttering). Studying voices was an unusual choice, as Sophie is profoundly deaf—but she believes her lived experience of communication disability makes her a better researcher as she has a deep personal understanding of the complexity of spoken communication and the challenges it can pose for disabled people. Sophie is currently a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Postdoctoral fellow, with previous work funded by the British Academy and the ESRC. In her spare time, she volunteers for a national outdoor education charity and can teach you how to light a fire, read a map, or whittle a spoon.

Denis Newman-Griffis (they/them) is a transdisciplinary leader working at the intersection of academic research and policy to shape responsible AI, AI-enabled research, and the intersection of AI and disability. Their research integrates perspectives from AI and machine learning, critical data studies, and health informatics to understand how AI and research systems can be ethically designed and managed to improve human flourishing. Denis has developed some of the first natural language processing methods for analysing information about the lived experience of disability, and is pioneering methods for examining the AI design process from a critical disability perspective. They are working to develop best practices for responsible AI design and growing the international community around disability informatics. Denis is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield and AI for Health Lead in the Centre for Machine Intelligence. They received the AMIA Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2021.

Alistair McConnell is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University whose research focuses primarily on soft robots, human-robot interaction, and healthcare robotics. Alistair is enthusiastic about public engagement and outreach both within the university and all around the country. He leads the Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh Centre for Robotics public engagement activities and works closely with the National Robotarium engagement team. He is driven to take research and work out of the lab and into the real world, often through the entrepreneurial route, where he has experience creating both spinouts and start-ups. During his post-doctoral role, he co-founded a start-up Mask Logic Ltd as a way of addressing the problems of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sophie Meekings is a neuroscientist whose work focuses on understanding speech production in typical speakers and people with communication disabilities (like stuttering). Studying voices was an unusual choice, as Sophie is profoundly deaf—but she believes her lived experience of communication disability makes her a better researcher as she has a deep personal understanding of the complexity of spoken communication and the challenges it can pose for disabled people. Sophie is currently a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Postdoctoral fellow, with previous work funded by the British Academy and the ESRC. In her spare time, she volunteers for a national outdoor education charity and can teach you how to light a fire, read a map, or whittle a spoon.

Denis Newman-Griffis (they/them) is a transdisciplinary leader working at the intersection of academic research and policy to shape responsible AI, AI-enabled research, and the intersection of AI and disability. Their research integrates perspectives from AI and machine learning, critical data studies, and health informatics to understand how AI and research systems can be ethically designed and managed to improve human flourishing. Denis has developed some of the first natural language processing methods for analysing information about the lived experience of disability, and is pioneering methods for examining the AI design process from a critical disability perspective. They are working to develop best practices for responsible AI design and growing the international community around disability informatics. Denis is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield and AI for Health Lead in the Centre for Machine Intelligence. They received the AMIA Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2021.