The Synthetic Society Lab is funded by a £2M Future Leaders Fellowship, UKRI’s flagship scheme designed to enable universities and businesses to develop their most talented early career researchers and innovators and to attract new people to their organisations, including from overseas.

The fellowship aims to improve how we research, access, and use sensitive human data. To address privacy threats, researchers and regulators have advocated for the use of modern privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as synthetic data or differential privacy. Dr Rocher’s team aims to make these technologies more transparent and accountable. The fellowship will advance an evidence-based science of privacy engineering to make research using digital traces safe and reliable; support data-driven policy interventions that rely on personal data; and inform the regulation of underlying AI technologies such as generative AI for synthetic data.