Britsh Academy Grant Awarded

The British Academy has awarded a Talent Development Grant (see here) to Adam Brandt and Spencer Hazel as Co-Principal Investigators for Building Bridges: Training Applied Linguists in AI Conversation Design and Prompt Engineering to Enhance Human-Centric Conversational Agents. The grant funds the development of a training programme that equips applied linguists to contribute directly to industry-grade conversational AI development.

The grant translates the Newcastle–Ufonia partnership into a formal training pathway for the next generation of researchers and conversation designers. It responds to repeated industry feedback that conversation-analytic insights are valuable to commercial Conversation User Interface development but require a bridge between academic methods and product engineering practice. The award follows the British Academy Innovation Fellowship and is the team’s third major external grant supporting this research strand.