It is a great pleasure to welcome Dr Gengxiang Wang, who will start a 24-month Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship entitled “WORMS: When micro-robots encounter metastatic cancer in the adjacent capillaries” in the Exeter Small-Scale Robotics Laboratory at the University of Exeter from October 2023.

Funded by UKRI (€236,748), WORMS seeks to develop a new mathematical tool for analysing the sensing capability of micro-robots based on the flexible multibody system and fluid mechanics, to aid the detection of hard-to-visualise cancer metastasis in the adjacent capillaries of the primary bowel cancer site. This work attempts to initiate a new modality for metastatic cancer diagnosis, delivering an efficient, minimally invasive procedure for early cancer patients. The unique research approach of this fellowship, a joint effort of numerical and experimental studies, will be hosted by Prof. Yang Liu from the University of Exeter with the secondment supervisor, Prof. Antoine Ferreira from INSA Centre Val de Loire, and the consulting gastroenterologist, Dr Shyam Prasad, from the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.