1 August 2025
Maximising impact and new frontiers
CTO, Ant Rowstron and Frontier Specialist, Alice Pettitt on surfacing and speeding up hidden possibilities.
The biggest science breakthroughs happen when we spot opportunities others miss – whether it's unexplored territories between disciplines or overlooked talent working outside traditional academia. With our first programmes now in full swing and new opportunity spaces being built, we’re focused on surfacing and speeding up hidden possibilities.
You both joined us a few weeks ago and your roles are the first of their kind at ARIA – what are you both here to do?
Ant: My core focus is maximising the impact of our programmes, working across the organisation to ensure our efforts are translating into real-world results. So that’s everything from helping Programme Directors think strategically about their research direction, to reimagining how ARIA operates. Alice, Frontier Specialists are central to that vision – how would you describe your role?
Alice: We’re a new technical role that works across our opportunity spaces, and beyond them. There are four of us and in terms of our role, we often talk about trying to increase the ‘entropy’ at ARIA.
What does increasing entropy look like in practice?
Alice: It means we provide multidisciplinary technical expertise to help PDs accelerate, decelerate or pivot research directions – it's been incredibly exciting working with the new cohort of PDs on their discovery process, helping them scope out their opportunity spaces. We’re also thinking about potential new research directions that sit completely outside of our existing and developing opportunity spaces.
Ant: Yes, the sheer breadth of areas we cover and have expertise in, plus the under-explored territories between them, has been amazing to see already. I come from deep tech, so when you taught me about fungus-based computing it blew my mind.
Alice: Those are exactly the moments we’re trying to create more of – we want to spot these synergies, or chances for further exploration, that could otherwise get missed.
Ant: And the scaffolding of ARIA also means we can fund amazing Creators who wouldn’t typically surface through traditional routes. You don't need 50 years of academic experience to be working at the cutting edge. You could be working in a startup, or even on your own – we're breaking down silos and really tapping into unexpected places.
Ant, something you’re passionate about is how AI can reshape the way we work at ARIA – can you tell us a bit more about that?
Ant: Absolutely. The impact of AI is going to be transformational over the next decade and I see ARIA not only riding the wave, but also creating it. I genuinely think ARIA could be the first funding agency to have AI-agent Programme Directors identifying and coordinating funding towards breakthrough technology alongside our cohort of human PDs. We're a young organisation and it's in our DNA to experiment with ideas that could enable us to scale up in that kind of way.
What about you, Alice – what do you think is going to ensure we’re maximising our impact?
Alice: I want to keep up the optimism around ARIA. People both inside and outside the organisation are genuinely energised by what we're building and where we might go next. That optimism is essential for working at the frontier of science and catalysing the breakthroughs we're after, and I can’t wait to see what the future of our work will be.