Friday, 19 September 2025
Dr Sabrina Li, of the School of Geography, has been awarded a prestigious UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. The flagship fellowships support outstanding early career researchers and allow them to tackle complex challenges and develop as innovation leaders of the future.
Dr Li is a quantitative medical geographer, whose research is addressing how infectious diseases and pandemics such as Covid-19 disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations with limited socioeconomic resources and access to healthcare.
Her vision as a Future Leaders Fellow is to strengthen global health security by factoring in socio-environmental and individual vulnerabilities in the development of an equitable, intelligent mapping platform (EI2) to accelerate the real-time detection of emerging infectious disease risk in the UK and beyond.
I am super-excited and grateful for this opportunity. This fellowship will help embed equity into health surveillance and improve our understand of how individual and socio-environmental vulnerabilities shape infectious disease risk. It will help to promote fairer health outcomes, starting with the UK.”
She added: “A huge thank you to my colleagues, mentors, and partners for their generous support along the way. I also look forward to building new partnerships and collaborations as this fellowship begins.”
Her fellowship, starting in January 2026, is worth £1.5m over four years and this long-term support will enable Dr Li to recruit a research team, including doctoral and post-doctoral researchers.
Dr Li’s Future Leaders Fellowship recognises the potential impact of her work extends beyond the UK and mapping of infectious diseases in humans, to refining disease monitoring and enabling earlier detection. This work will reduce strain on healthcare systems and promote equitable health outcomes.
She explained: “Despite the ongoing threat of infectious diseases to global health security, the world remains unprepared. Epidemics and the Covid-19 pandemic amplify existing health disparities in society, by disproportionately affecting disadvantaged populations with limited socioeconomic resources and access to healthcare.
“Integrating health equity determinants enhances risk distribution understanding, improving resource allocation and epidemic preparedness. My EI2 platform uniquely accounts for this, unlike existing mapping platforms that focus solely on pathogen-specific vulnerabilities from case counts during outbreaks in near real-time. They do not consider individual-level vulnerabilities which shape differential risk to disadvantaged and hidden populations, which are often underrepresented in surveillance.”
Dr Li's research, through intelligent and equitable mapping of emerging infectious diseases, will help better prepare health systems against the continuing threat of epidemics. This UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship is a tremendous achievement and will allow Dr Li to assemble a team with the potential to improve health security in the UK and globally."
UKRI’s latest round of Future Leaders Fellowships is supporting 77 outstanding early career researchers. The £120m funding up to seven years fellowship support and provides specialised leadership training, one-to-one coaching, mentorship and opportunities for additional seed-funding for collaborative projects.
UKRI Chief Executive Professor Sir Ian Chapman said: “UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowships offer long-term support to outstanding researchers, helping them turn bold ideas into innovations that improve lives and livelihoods in the UK and beyond. These fellowships continue to drive excellence and accelerate the journey from discovery to public benefit.”
Notes to editors:
About the University of Nottingham
Ranked 97 in the world and 17th in the UK by the QS World University Rankings, the University of Nottingham is a founding member of Russell Group of research-intensive universities. Studying at the University of Nottingham is a life-changing experience, and we pride ourselves on unlocking the potential of our students. We have a pioneering spirit, expressed in the vision of our founder Sir Jesse Boot, which has seen us lead the way in establishing campuses in China and Malaysia - part of a globally connected network of education, research and industrial engagement.
Nottingham was crowned Sports University of the Year by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024 – the third time it has been given the honour since 2018 – and by the Daily Mail University Guide 2024.
The university is among the best universities in the UK for the strength of our research, positioned seventh for research power in the UK according to REF 2021. The birthplace of discoveries such as MRI and ibuprofen, our innovations transform lives and tackle global problems such as sustainable food supplies, ending modern slavery, developing greener transport, and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
The university is a major employer and industry partner - locally and globally - and our graduates are the third most targeted by the UK's top employers, according to The Graduate Market in 2024 report by High Fliers Research.
We lead the Universities for Nottingham initiative, in partnership with Nottingham Trent University, a pioneering collaboration between the city’s two world-class institutions to improve levels of prosperity, opportunity, sustainability, health and wellbeing for residents in the city and region we are proud to call home.
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