Join for this meetup in The Node to hear directly from the leadership team at ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency), the UK's breakthrough R&D funding agency. Meet the ARIA team including Programme Directors (those who design a R&D thesis and dole out grants to researchers in that area), and leave with new pathways to scale your research. Open to the Harvard community.

11a - 12p ~ Introduction to the Programme Director role and program focus areas for funding

12p - 1p ~ lunch and mingle

1p - 2p ~ roundtable breakouts with ARIA Program Directors

The ARIA team will cover:

• How ARIA funds speculative, interdisciplinary research (with seed funding up to £500k and program budgets up to £100M).

• Currently open funding calls in climate, trust infrastructure, robotics, and AI.

• The upcoming cohort of Programme Director roles, which entrust individuals with a £50M budget to design and lead frontier R&D.

• How US-based researchers, startups, and labs can successfully apply and collaborate.

💰 Active Funding Opportunities

ARIA welcomes applications from universities, startups, and individual researchers. Three currently open seed with funding up to £500K per project:

• Trust Everything, Everywhere (Opportunity Seeds): High-potential proposals bridging digital and physical trust (cryptography, robotics, synthetic biology, hardware security). Deadline: 27 July 2026

• Future Proofing Our Climate and Weather (Opportunity Seeds): Early-stage research in climate adaptation, resilience, and carbon dioxide removal. Deadline: 31 July 2026

• Rolling Opportunity Seeds: Projects ranging from early-stage to near-commercial tech across core spaces like Mathematics for Safe AI, Scoping Our Planet, Scalable Neural Interfaces, Smarter Robot Bodies, and Manufacturing Abundance. Deadline: 31 July 2026

  
  

🚀 Programme Director Roles (Cohort 3)

ARIA is recruiting eight Programme Directors to join in May 2027 (applications open August 2026). If you are a deeply technical leader, academic, or entrepreneur with a vision to solve a monumental problem, this role gives you the freedom and a £50 million budget to build and steer a research portfolio from scratch.

ARIA Leadership visiting Harvard:

Muji Ahmedi

Muji Ahmedi is the Product Operations Lead at ARIA. Muji develops the operational mechanisms and experiences that enable ARIA’s Programme Directors to pursue scientific and technological breakthroughs. His work includes finding and supporting Programme Directors as they develop and deliver their programmes, and bringing together researchers from different disciplines to build strong, mission-driven communities.

Pranay Shah

Pranay Shah is the Head of Special Projects at ARIA. Pranay leads special projects focused on expanding ARIA’s impact beyond its direct research funding. His work includes developing partnerships and initiatives that activate scientific and entrepreneurial talent, strengthen frontier R&D ecosystems, and help translate breakthrough research into new capabilities, organisations, and ventures.

Alex Obadia

Alex Obadia is the Programme Director for Scaling Trust at ARIA. Alex leads ARIA’s Scaling Trust programme, which is developing new infrastructure to enable AI agents and other emerging technologies to coordinate securely across digital and physical environments. The programme combines open-source coordination tools, fundamental research, and an adversarial arena designed to test multi-agent systems. Before joining ARIA, Alex co-founded Flashbots, a frontier technology company focused on protecting the decentralisation of the Ethereum blockchain. He is an entrepreneur and early-stage technology investor with a particular interest in cryptography and secure coordination systems.

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