In this project we will develop supergravity tools to study the strong coupled sectors of High Energy and Condensed Matter systems using the gauge gravity duality. We will first find, via consistent truncation, new large classes of lower-dimensional supergravity models that admit an exact string theory embedding, and will fully characterise and classify them. We will use these theories to propose, on the one hand, novel models of holographic superconductors and quantum critical points, and draw concrete string theory predictions about their properties. We will also use these model to pursue an all-time novel, holographic description of (quantum) turbulence. On the other hand, we will build supergravity models dual to large classes of field theories displaying phenomenologically realistic features like confinement and chiral symmetry breaking, thus considerably expanding the currently available string-derived QCD-like models.