BU Research Blog

Last week I attended Bournemouth University’s Research Conference which focused on collaboration and participation.  One the many issues discussed that day include international research teams, especially differences in culture and expectations as well as the very practical time differences across the globe.  I was reminded of the latter this morning when I woke up at five AM to start a two-hour online training workshop on academic writing for our research colleagues in Bangladesh.  This is one of the sessions we run as part of our internal research capacity building strategy on the Sonamoni project. Due to the time difference it was as 11.00 AM start in Bangladesh which meant sixteen people from CIPRB could attend, opening up the session to not jest those staff working on the Sonamoni project.

This project is an interdisciplinary study of nearly £1.7 million funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Sonamoni (meaning ‘golden pearl’ in Bangla) aims to reduce the deaths of newly-mobile toddlers (those aged under two) from drowning in rural Bangladesh. This multidisciplinary project is a collaboration of BU’s Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH), BU’s Department in Accounting, Finance & Economics and Department of Design & Engineering, and external partners, namely the University of the West of England, the University of Southampton, the Poole-based Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and the Bangladesh-based research organisation CIPRB (Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh) and Design Without Borders (based in Uganda).

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMWH