Yearly Archives / 2020

Implications of Covid-19 on researcher development | Survey

Centre for Excellence in Learning, PG research

As part of our case study exploring the achievements, challenges and opportunities of Covid-19 on researcher development we are recruiting participants to complete our online survey sharing their experiences during this time.

Survey 1: For postgraduate researchers who have engaged in the Doctoral College: Researcher Development Programme over the past 12 months.

Survey 2: For Doctoral College: Researcher Development Programme workshop facilitators.

 

Closing date: Monday 30 November 2020.

 

If you have any questions about the research, please contact a member of the research team:

Natalie Stewart, Dr Martyn Polkinghorne, Dr Camila Devis-Rozental

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research Professional – all you need to know

Funding opportunities

Every BU academic has a Research Professional account which delivers weekly emails detailing funding opportunities in their broad subject area. To really make the most of your Research Professional account, you should tailor it further by establishing additional alerts based on your specific area of expertise. The Funding Development Team Officers can assist you with this, if required.

Research Professional have created several guides to help introduce users to Research Professional. These can be downloaded here.

Quick Start Guide: Explains to users their first steps with the website, from creating an account to searching for content and setting up email alerts, all in the space of a single page.

User Guide: More detailed information covering all the key aspects of using Research Professional.

Administrator Guide: A detailed description of the administrator functionality.

In addition to the above, there are a set of 2-3 minute videos online, designed to take a user through all the key features of Research Professional. To access the videos, please use the following link: http://www.youtube.com/researchprofessional

Research Professional are running a series of online training broadcasts aimed at introducing users to the basics of creating and configuring their accounts on Research Professional. They are holding monthly sessions, covering everything you need to get started with Research Professional. The broadcast sessions will run for no more than 60 minutes, with the opportunity to ask questions via text chat. Each session will cover:

  • Self registration and logging in
  • Building searches
  • Setting personalised alerts
  • Saving and bookmarking items
  • Subscribing to news alerts
  • Configuring your personal profile

Each session will run between 10.00am and 11.00am (UK) on the fourth Tuesday of each month. You can register here for your preferred date:

10th November 2020

These are free and comprehensive training sessions and so this is a good opportunity to get to grips with how Research Professional can work for you.

Have you noticed the pink box on the BU Research Blog homepage?

By clicking on this box, on the left of the Research Blog home page just under the text ‘Funding Opportunities‘, you access a Research Professional real-time search of the calls announced by the Major UK Funders. Use this feature to stay up to date with funding calls. Please note that you will have to be on campus or connecting to your desktop via our VPN to fully access this service.

Discussion on Gender-based Violence in Tourism – Links to Zoom presentations

A month ago, Dr Paola Vizcaino (Bournemouth University), along with co-editors Dr Heather Jeffrey (Middlesex University – Dubai) and Dr Claudia Eger (Copenhagen Business School) welcomed attendees to the virtual launch of the edited collection Tourism and Gender-Based Violence: Challenging Inequalities (CABI – find the book here). Nearly 30 academics, students and general public joined the discussion on the multiple and interconnected forms of gender-based violence against women and girls in tourism production and consumption. Please find below the links to the Zoom presentations by the book editors, chapter contributors and grassroots organisations.

Tourism and Gender-based Violence, Challenging Inequalities. Edited by Paola Vizcaino, Heather Jeffrey, Claudia Eger

Tourism and Gender-Based Violence Book Launch 30th Sept. 2020, Introduction by Dr Paola Vizcaino – https://youtu.be/P_eRv-adlpI

The relevance of the book and the need to continue examining GBV in tourism research by Dr Stroma Cole – https://youtu.be/8ZCV0h0ev6s

Chapter discussion: Critical debates on Gender-based Violence by Dr Claudia Eger – https://youtu.be/8ewG4Y_YyQE

Chapter discussion: Trafficking in human beings in the tourism industry by Dr Tenia Kyriazi – https://youtu.be/e4zNSHoidWo

Chapter discussion: The double-bind of a female traveller in Morocco by Dr Siân Stephens – https://youtu.be/Brf4XkBQB1k

Chapter discussion: Embodying Gender and Risk: Mountain Bike Tourism in Mexico by Dr Isis Arlene Díaz-Carrión – https://youtu.be/7o20Wsl5Cv4

Profiles of grassroots organisations working to tackle GBV in tourism and beyond by Sara Ali Abdelghani – https://youtu.be/r_U9eOD5OvM

Las Kellys representing hotel workers in Spain, presentation by Myriam Barros (in Spanish with English translation) – https://youtu.be/MBBDSPT879Q

Tourism and Gender-Based Violence – Q&A segment – https://youtu.be/BJc4ATDBO7Y

Closing remarks by Dr Heather Jeffrey – https://youtu.be/VBo2Gyrsb3s

 

Smart technology and the Future of Hospitality and Tourism after COVID-19

BU Challenges

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis contributed a presentation entitled
Smart technology and the Future of Hospitality and Tourism after COVID-19
to the School of Hotel and Tourism Management, PolyU, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

#IMPACT2020 Conference today.

https://youtu.be/YTqnN27khic

#CrisisManagement #Recovery #Strategy #TourismRecovery #RecoveryStrategy #Future #Hospitality #Tourism #Technology #COVID19 #PostCOVID19 

 

Interested in cancer research and impacts on patients and professionals?

 

 

If so, sign-up to the National Cancer Research Institute’s Virtual Show case on 2-3 November 2020 https://www.ncri.org.uk/

 

Prof Jane Murphy from the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre will be presenting findings from  the largest national survey of health care professionals on their  provision of nutritional care on behalf of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Cancer and Nutrition. Collaboration. The survey of 610 health care professionals working with cancer patients found that only 39% were aware of nutritional guidelines and just 20% felt completely confident in providing nutritional advice, despite 94% of respondents stating that they discuss nutrition with their patients.

Making your research count: how research impact is measured and what it means for you.

BRIAN, Knowledge Exchange, staff profile pages, Training

 

The library is offering a workshop on 16th November on Enhancing your Research Impact: understanding and navigating bibliometrics. 

This will provide an opportunity to understand both what bibliometrics are, and how research impact is measured. We will also discuss how to look after your researcher profile and the various ways impact is measured across different disciplines, as well as exploring Altmetrics and how your research can be viewed through social media posts and downloads.  

You can sign up for this workshop on the staff intranet, and you can explore the information in the guide below to find out more. 

Image sourced from:

Altmetric 2015. Altmetric logo with black text [png]. London: Altmetric. Available from: https://www.altmetric.com/about-us/logos [accessed 29th October 2020].

 

 

Recording of Dr. Pirtle’s talk on COVID-19 and Racial Capitalism now available

On October 27th we were honoured to host Dr. Whitney Pirtle, whose ground-breaking work on health inequalities and COVID-19 has helped set the agenda for debate and discussion on the impacts of the pandemic on BAME communities. In her presentation Dr. Pirtle introduced key concepts for better addressing health inequities in both our research and practice. Insights from this talk will be brought forward into our research activity discussion around Health, Science and Data Communications, being coordinated by Dr. Lyle Skains here at BU.

You can listen to Dr. Pirtle’s presentation recorded on zoom.

To learn more about Dr. Pirtle and her work you can visit her website and read a copy of her paper on which this presentation is based.

Academic Targeted Research Scheme (Data Science for Medical Imaging and Visualisation): Medical Image Analysis

My name is Adrian Galdran, and I was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Data Science for Medical Imaging last November, in the context of BU’s Academic Targeted Research Scheme. Although I am particularly interested in medical image analysis, I have a broad interest in medical data taking any shape and nature, be it text, imaging, video, or even big tables filled with numbers!

I have been working on computer vision with medical applications for a while now. After earning my PhD in the Basque Country University (northern Spain), I headed to the beautiful Porto, where I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at INESC-TEC. In those years I focused a lot on the automatic analysis of images of the eye fundus. These are images acquired by projecting light into the back of the eye and capturing a picture of the retina, and they are useful for the early detection of diseases like Diabetic Retinopathy or Age-Related Diabetic Maculopathy.

An image of the eye fundus – the retina

When a person suffers from this kind of diabetes, retinal vessels start to hemorrhage and leak blood into the retina, which at first starts as micro-aneurysms, but later develops into larger lesions and leads to sight-threatening situations. I find it fascinating that we can diagnose diseases like diabetes by looking into the human retina.

After my stay in Portugal, I moved for a second postdoctoral experience to Montréal, Canada, where I worked on deep learning for medical image classification and segmentation, again with a focus on retinal imaging. I spent one year in Canada, with its rough winter and a wonderful summer. It was then that I received the offer to pursue my research within BU, in the context of the new Medical Imaging and Visualisation Institute (IMIV). I am very excited to collaborate with this new institution, which houses an MRI scanner and ultrasound devices. I expect that the privilege of having access to these advanced facilities will trigger research in medical image analysis at BU, and I am hoping to be part of it.

If you are interested in collaborating in any aspect of medical image analysis, please contact me to discuss any common project we may build.

Conversation article: Expanding marine protected areas by 5% could boost fish yields by 20% – but there’s a catch

Sweetlips shoal in the Raja Ampat marine protected area, Indonesia.
SergeUWPhoto/Shutterstock

Peter JS Jones, UCL and Rick Stafford, Bournemouth University

Marine protected areas, or MPAs as they’re more commonly called, are very simple. Areas of the sea are set aside where certain activities – usually fishing – are banned or restricted. Ideally, these MPAs might be placed around particularly vibrant habitats that support lots of different species, like seagrass beds or coral reefs. By preventing fishing gear such as towed seabed trawls from sweeping through these environments, the hope is that marine life will be allowed to recover.

When used well, they can be very effective. MPAs have been shown to increase the diversity of species and habitats, and even produce bigger fish within their bounds. A new study argues that by expanding the world’s MPAs by just 5%, we could boost future fish catches by at least 20%. This could generate an extra nine to 12 million tonnes of seafood per year, worth between USD$15-19 billion. It would also significantly increase how much nutritious fish protein is available for a growing human population to eat.

So what’s the catch?

Spillover versus blowback

The scientific rationale is sound. We already know that MPAs can increase the numbers of fish living inside them, which grow to be bigger and lay more eggs. The larvae that hatch can help seed fish populations in the wider ocean as they drift outside the MPA, leading to bigger catches in the areas where fishing is still permitted. We know fish can swim large distances as adults too. While some find protection and breed inside MPAs, others will move into less crowded waters outside where they can then be caught. Together, these effects are known as the spillover benefits of MPAs.

The study is the first to predict, through mathematical modelling, that a modest increase in the size of the world’s MPAs could swell global seafood yields as a result of this spillover. But while the predictions sound good, we have to understand what pulling this off would entail.

The study maintains that the new MPAs would need to be carefully located to protect areas that are particularly productive. Locating MPAs in remote areas offshore, which are hard to access and typically unproductive, would have much smaller benefits for marine life than smaller, inshore MPAs that local fishing vessels can reach. Just 20 large sites in the remote open ocean account for the majority of the world’s MPAs. As the low hanging fruit of marine conservation, these MPAs are often placed where little fishing has occurred.

A world map showing the locations of marine protected areas.
A minority of the world’s MPAs are strict no-take zones.
Marine Conservation Institute/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

The MPAs themselves would also need to be highly protected, meaning no fishing. Only 2.4% of the world’s ocean area has this status. Increasing this by a further 5% would mean roughly trebling the coverage of highly protected MPAs, and that’s likely to provoke a great deal of resistance. Many fishers are sceptical that spillover can boost catches enough to compensate for losing the right to fish within MPAs and tend to oppose proposals to designate more of them.

People in the UK are often surprised to learn that fishing is allowed in most of the country’s MPAs. While 36% of the waters around the UK are covered by them, only 0.0024% ban fishing outright. Increasing the number and size of highly protected MPAs from just these four small sites to 5% of the UK’s sea area would represent more than a 2,000-fold increase. This would be strongly resisted by the fishing industry, snatching the wind from the sails of any political effort ambitious enough to attempt it.

Keeping fishers on board

Gaining the support of local fishers is crucial for ensuring fishing restrictions are successful. That support depends on fishers being able to influence decisions about MPAs, including where they’ll be located and what the degree of protection will be. Assuming that designing highly protected MPA networks is mostly a matter of modelling is a mistake, and implies that fishers currently operating in an area would have little say in whether their fishing grounds will close.

A fisher on a wooden boat casts a net into tropical water at dusk.
Ensuring fishers buy into a new MPA is crucial for its success.
Sutipond Somnam/Shutterstock

But this study is valuable. It provides further evidence for how MPAs can serve as important tools to conserve marine habitats, manage fisheries sustainably and make food supplies more secure. It’s important to stress the political challenges of implementing them, but most scientists agree that more MPAs are needed. Some scientists are pushing to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030.

As evidence of the benefits of MPAs continues to emerge, the people and organisations governing them at local, national and international scales need to learn and evolve. If we can start implementing some highly protected MPAs, we can gather more evidence of their spillover benefits. This could convince more fishers of their vital role in boosting catches, as well as keeping people fed and restoring ocean ecosystems.

Peter JS Jones, Reader in Environmental Governance, UCL and Rick Stafford, Professor of Marine Biology and Conservation, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre informal event

BU Challenges, REF Subjects

We would like to invite you to the informal online opening event of BU’s Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre on Monday 2 November from 10am – 12pm, in Zoom.

The centre is designed to foster collaborative research in applied, translational and theoretical neuroscience within the university and with our external partners to enable us to bid for external funding. We also seek to promote education in neurosciences in graduate and post-graduate programs. The centre offers a range of experimental and theoretical expertise and we are interested in collaborating with internal and external colleagues.

During the event we will provide a very brief overview of the techniques, recording modalities and facilities that we have available. Then we would welcome discussion around potential collaborations and projects.

Add this event to your diary and join us on Zoom. 

Meeting ID: 885 0146 7009
Passcode: BE@hTx^1

Thank you very much and we are looking forward to seeing you there.

If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact any of us (Ellen Seiss, eseiss@bournemouth.ac.uk  Emili Balaguer-Ballester eb-ballester@bournemouth.ac.uk or Peter Abaraci Hills phills@bournemouth.ac.uk).

Upcoming Funding Information Sessions – November 2020

Funding opportunities

We have three great RKEDF information sessions about Research Funding coming up in November. These sessions are the first of several planned for this academic year targeted at specific funding calls.

Wednesday 11th November 2020, 10am

British Academy Newton International Fellowships Information Session

This workshop will provide important information for potential applicants applying to this external funding call, including tips on applying that will increase the likelihood of success. BU mentors and international candidates welcomed.

By the end of this workshop you will:

  • Have a basic knowledge of the Newton International Fellowship Scheme
  • Understand the aims and objectives of the scheme
  • Be aware whether this funding call is the right one for you

Please book your place here.

 

Thursday 19th November, 10am

 Royal Society Overview

This workshop will provide important information for potential applicants applying to the Royal Society, including tips to increase the likelihood of success.

By the end of this workshop you will:

  • Have a basic knowledge of funding offered by the Royal Society
  • Understand the aims and objectives of the main schemes
  • Understand whether the Royal Society is applicable for your research

Please book your place here.

 

Wednesday 25th November, 10am

 Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships Information Session

 This workshop will provide important information for potential applicants applying to this external funding call, including tips on applying that will increase the likelihood of success. BU mentors and candidates welcomed.

By the end of this workshop you will:

  • Have a basic knowledge of the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships Scheme
  • Understand the aims and objectives of the scheme
  • Be aware whether this funding call is the right one for you

Please book your place here.

These sessions are part of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework (RKEDF).

HRA UPDATE: guidance on undergraduate and master’s research projects

Guidance, NHS, Research Ethics, student research

At the beginning of August an update was released by the Health Research Authority with regard to the review of clinical research by undergraduate and master’s students.

The HRA have released a further update – please see below. If you have any queries or concerns please contact Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor in Research Development & Support.

‘Back in March the Health Research Authority and devolved administrations announced the decision to stop reviewing applications for individual undergraduate and master’s student projects until further notice while we prioritised the urgent review of COVID-19 studies. This was also due to the significant pressure on the NHS/HSC, limiting its ability to participate in research studies unrelated to COVID-19.

The pause on health and social care research projects for educational purposes has now been extended until September 2021. This decision is in line with national priorities for NHS/HSC to support COVID-19 studies and the restart of clinical trials and studies as well as the continuing pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. This decision has been taken in collaboration with partners in the devolved administrations.

We are not reviewing applications for individual undergraduate and master’s student research projects until September 2021.

Any students with approved studies are reminded to check with the relevant NHS/HSC organisations locally about whether or not their projects may continue.

We have published information about other ways in which students can gain experience of health and social care research and have tips on our website.

We are committed to engaging our stakeholders as part of the development of ongoing guidelines for student research.

To receive updates about student research, please email communications@hra.nhs.uk to sign up.‘

UN Special Rapporteur commends Bournemouth University Mass Grave Research

Dr Agnes Callamard, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions suggests ‘technical standards are needed to help strengthen protection and preservation of mass grave sites’ and goes on to commend the efforts currently underway at Bournemouth University to produce such Guidelines [para 65]. Her report, presented to the UN on 27 October 2020, adopts the definition of mass graves offered by Klinkner and Smith in the forthcoming Bournemouth Protocol on Mass Grave Protection and Investigation [para 12].

In her report Dr Callamard stresses the importance of respectful, indiscriminate and dignified handling of human remains from mass grave sites. The AHRC funded Mass Grave Protection for Truth & Justice Project investigates how best to safeguard, protect and investigate mass graves to ensure truth and justice for survivor populations. Research by BU scholars Klinkner, Davis and Smith in relation to mass graves, international criminal investigations, and the right to the truth is referenced seven times in the report.

Mass grave investigation research has a tradition at Bournemouth University. In 2008, a publication directed by scholars at Bournemouth University presented a first compilation of the experiences and lessons learned from the scientific investigation of mass graves. The Bournemouth Protocol, due to be published before the end of 2020, will offer a much needed, original instrument combining international law (international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law) governing the protection and investigation of mass graves with practical consideration and ramifications for stakeholders on the ground that seek to protect, manage and, where possible, investigate those sites.