Stephen Gourley has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the 2014-2015 academic year.  The Fellowship frees up Stephen from teaching and administration for the year and provides travel funds for research interaction with colleagues in North America.  The title of the project is”Larval competition and its intriguing role in malaria spread“.   A summary follows. Larval and adult mosquitoes have very different characteristics. Adults are mobile and may spread malaria, but larvae live in confined aquatic environments and do not spread malaria. Competitive pressure between different mosquito strains, some insecticide-resistant, affects larvae and adults in completely different ways. This has important implications for malaria spread. However, larval competition is difficult to model mathematically and generates very non-standard types of models that can only be tackled indirectly using current techniques. More readily applicable techniques will be developed that will enable a study of the sensitive dependence of malaria spread on competition between different mosquito strains.