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Launched | Doctoral College Researcher Development Programme

PG research, Student Engagement, Training


I am delighted to share with you all that sessions as part of the 2021-22 Doctoral College Researcher Development Programme for Postgraduate Researchers are now available to book.

PGRs can book onto sessions via the Doctoral College Researcher Development Programme on Brightspace. All sessions between October-December are delivered online.

If you are a PGR or PGR Supervisor and unable to access the Researcher Development Programme on Brightspace, please let us know and we will get you added.

Email Natalie and Debbie at: pgrskillsdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk.

 

NERC standard grants NEW internal competition launched

Funding opportunities

NERC introduced demand management measures in 2012. These were revised in 2015 to reduce the number and size of applications from research organisations for NERC’s discovery science standard grant scheme. Full details can be found in the BU policy document for NERC demand management measures available here: I:\RDS\Public\NERC Demand Management.

As at January 2021, BU has been capped at one application per standard grant round. The measures only apply to NERC standard grants (including new investigators). An application counts towards an organisation, where the organisation is applying as the grant holding organisation (of the lead or component grant). This will be the organisation of the Principal Investigator of the lead or component grant.

BU process

BU has a new and improved process for determining which application will be submitted to each NERC Standard Grant round. This takes the form of an internal competition, which will include peer review. The next available standard grant round is January 2022. The deadline for internal Expressions of Interest (EoI) which will be used to determine which application will be submitted is 24 September 2021.  The EoI form, BU policy for NERC Demand Management Measures and process for selecting an application can be found here: I:\RDS\Public\NERC Demand Management.

Following the internal competition, the Principal Investigator will have access to support from RDS, and will work closely with Research Facilitators and Funding Development Officers to develop the application. Access to external bid writers will also be available.

RDS Contacts

Please contact Ehren Milner, RDS Research Facilitator – emilner@bournemouth.ac.uk if you wish to submit an expression of interest.

BU hosting Free Webinar on VR Games for Stroke Rehabilitation

As a part of EU Interreg Project AiBle, Bournemouth University is running this workshop webinar on VR Games for Stroke Rehabilitation on Thursday 16th September 2021 from 1-4.30 pm, see further details below:

https://www.euaible.com/event/vr-games-for-stroke-rehabilitation-workshop-webinar/

The workshop objective is to create a discussion platform on intersections between the fields of rehabilitation, robotics, and human-computer/robot interaction. We have host of international experts as speakers for this event. Please register for this Webinar at the link below if you are interested to attend.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/eu-interreg-aible-vr-games-for-stroke-rehabilitation-workshop-webinar-registration-163487905727

Discovery of the minesweeper HMS MERCURY

A shipwreck in the middle of the Southern Irish Sea, previously thought to be that of a submarine, has now been identified as the minesweeper, HMS Mercury.

The discovery has been made as part of a joint project between Maritime Archaeologists at Bournemouth University and scientists at Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences, who have been combining marine archives with high-resolution multibeam sonar data to try and identify many of the unknown wreck sites located off our coast.

Originally built as a Clyde-based ferry, HMS Mercury was requisitioned by the Admiralty in 1939 to serve as minesweeper. It sank in 1940 after being damaged by a mine that it was attempting to clear and was reported lost off Southern Ireland.

As part of the ongoing research programme Dr Innes McCartney of Bournemouth University has been compiling detailed lists of all ships lost in the Irish Sea:

“The wreck site was assumed to be the final resting place of a submarine. Once the sonar data had been processed, the wreck resembled a paddle wheeled vessel with its paddles boxed into the vessel’s superstructure, rather than the characteristic tube-like profile associated with submarine wrecks. Within our database of shipping losses there was only one possible candidate which featured boxed in paddle wheels; the minesweeper HMS Mercury”

Originally named Mercury II the ship was built in 1934 for the London Midland Scottish Railway and was an excursion passenger steamer which primarily worked the Greenock, Gourock and Wemyss Bay route. The ship was a 223ft long paddle steamer and recognisable by having newer innovations such as its boxed in paddles and a cruiser stern, with its sister Caledonia II, it gave good service up 1939, when it was subsequently requisitioned for war service as a minesweeper.

The official list of losses of naval vessels in WW2 states that HMS Mercury was “sunk after damage by own mine south of Ireland”. In fact, research at the National Archives revealed that the incident initially occurred off the Saltee Islands, Southern Ireland when at 4.30 in the afternoon on Christmas Day 1940, HMS Mercury was sweeping up an older British minefield. Initially unknown to Mercury, a mine was snagged in its sweeping gear and whilst trying to clear it, the mine was drawn too close to the ship, where it exploded under the stern. Still afloat and with hopes high of saving the ship, HMS Mercury was then towed towards Milford Haven but unfortunately after around 2 hours, the cable parted under the strain of the slowly flooding ship. Despite the determined efforts of the crew to save her, the vessel sank vertically, stern first at around 8.30 in the evening, thankfully the entire crew were subsequently rescued.

Temporary Lieutenant Bertrand Palmer who was in command of HMS Mercury was eventually reprimanded after a court martial which found that he had acted contrary to standing orders in stopping the ship and not immediately making headway once the mine had been sighted.

Mercury’s sister ship Caledonia II served throughout WW2 as HMS Goatfell, after which it returned to service. When sold in 1971, it was bought by the Bass Charrington Group and served as a popular floating pub on the river Thames before suffering a fire in 1980.

HMS Mercury is just one of over 300 shipwrecks in the Irish Sea which have been surveyed by Bangor University’s research vessel Prince Madog using their state-of-the-art mutibeam sonar system and through this unique collaboration with Bournemouth University, the identification of each site and subsequent link to a specific historic event continues to evolve and will be published when complete as Dr McCartney’s Leverhulme Trust funded fellowship “Echoes from the Deep: Modern Reflections on our Maritime Past”.

Dr Innes McCartney: ‘This highly innovative research project has resulted in many new discoveries dating from both world wars, of which HMS Mercury is just one example. This new collaboration with Bangor University demonstrates the substantial benefits that can be obtained through combining scientific survey with maritime archives and illustrates how this can be used as a powerful and effective research tool that can significantly enhance our understanding of the historic maritime environment by allowing us to identify unknown wrecks, refine existing attributes and confirm vessel identities.’

Dr Michael Roberts from Bangor University who led the multibeam surveys: ‘Having access to our research vessel Prince Madog and use of one of the most advanced multibeam sonar systems available has enabled us to very efficiently and accurately survey almost every wreck site in the central Irish Sea. Obtaining high-resolution sonar data from all these sites has been crucial to the research process and we hope this work and collaboration with Bournemouth demonstrates the importance of having these valuable assets available to us here at Bangor. These sunken vessels represent the sacrifices and efforts of citizens who were the ‘key’ and ‘essential’ workers of their time and it’s important that the final resting place of the vessels they were associated with are identified before it’s too late.  We hope to secure additional funding to expand on this work and examine wrecks in other UK coastal regions before their remnants become unidentifiable due to degradation through natural marine processes.’

For more information about archaeology at Bournemouth University, visit the course pages of the BU website. 

Funding Development Briefing – Spotlight on the new Wellcome Trust funding programmes

Funding opportunities

The RDS Funding Development Briefings occur weekly, on a Wednesday at 12 noon.

Each session covers the latest major funding opportunities, followed by a brief Q&A session. Some sessions also include a spotlight on a particular funding opportunity of strategic importance to BU.

Wednesday 8th September 2021, there will be a spotlight on Wellcome Trust’s new funding schemes.

We will cover:

  • Overview of the new schemes
  • How to apply
  • Q & A

For those unable to attend, the session will be recorded and shared on Brightspace here.

Invites for these sessions have been disseminated via your Heads of Department.

Funding Development Briefings are back!

Funding opportunities

Funding Development Briefings are back from 8th September 2021.

What are Funding Development Briefings?

Each session will cover the latest major funding opportunities, followed by a brief Q&A session. Sessions will also include a spotlight on a particular funding opportunity of strategic importance to BU. The timetable for the next eleven weeks is below.
Date Spotlight Funding Opportunity
08/09/21 Wellcome Trust
15/09/21 ERC Starting Grants
22/09/21 Innovate UK SMART Grants
29/09/21 BA Small Grants
06/10/21 NERC Knowledge Exchanged Fellowships (subject to change)
13/10/21 NIHR RfPB
20/10/21 Ideas session
27/10/21 UKRO (tentative option)
03/11/21 BA Newton Advanced Fellowships
10/11/21 NIHR Fellowships
17/11/21 UKRO (tentative option)

Sessions will be recorded and made available after the session for those who cannot attend.

Dr. Ann Luce to present at Public Health/NHS South West Regional Summit

conferences, Knowledge Exchange, NHS

Dr. Ann Luce, Associate Professor in Journalism and Communication in FMC will present at the Public Health England and NHS England South West Regional Suicide Prevention Summit tomorrow, 3rd September in honour of World Suicide Prevention Day which is on 10th September.

Dr. Luce will be presenting with Kirsty Hillier, Head of Communications for Dorset’s Integrated Care System on the communication and media strategy she created for the Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group, Public Health Dorset and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council to de-escalate a cluster of suicides at a local railway station in Bournemouth in 2019-2020.

The paper, “Online and Social Media: supporting communities to respond to suspected clusters” will cover how the strategy contributed to the saving of 20 lives between October and December 2019, led to the creation of five active working groups within the multi-agency partnership: 1. Real Time Surveillance and Suicide Attempts group, 2. Communication and Media group, 3. Suicide Bereavement group, 4. High Intensity Presenters group and 5. Training group, and also de-escalated the cluster by June 2020. The paper will also discuss the importance of educating and training local MPs, Councillors, Media and Community on the responsible way to discuss suicide in face-to-face conversations as well as online.

The work is being hailed as best practice by Public Health England and NHS England and is being disseminated across the country via Integrated Care Systems and the regional summits.

Final call for participants: Leverhulme Trust face recognition study

In the first week of the March 2019 COVID-19 lockdown, I found out that I had been awarded a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust. The core research project on the grant seeks to understand how humans learn facial identities over time, and why some people (who have a condition known as “face blindness” or “prosopagnosia”) struggle with this task.

The project is particularly novel and ambitious because it seeks to emulate real-world face learning, which occurs during multiple social interactions with a person, extended over time. In contrast, most work to date has looked at face learning during a single session. Further, our methodology is necessarily laboratory-based, using eye-movement technology to track the progression of learning over time. Both repeat-testing and face-to-face testing are by no means conducive to the onset of a pandemic!

After several obvious delays to the project, we finally began testing at the beginning of July this year. With some novel obstacles to overcome amid the new COVID-19 risk assessments, it has nevertheless been an absolute pleasure to be back in the labs, meeting and testing participants. In fact, the new regulations pushed me back into the lab and the more hands-on aspects of research – not only have I enjoyed every minute of it but it has also made me reflect on the benefits of being more involved in this phase of the research cycle.

Because the project requires participants to visit the lab on five consecutive days (for approximately 50 minutes per day), there were moments where I thought the ambition in this project was too great for the current climate. We have certainly been interrupted by COVID and test and trace on several occasions! But thanks to the generosity and resilience of our participants and two exceptional student research assistants, we are coming close to our target sample size. This is in no small part thanks to the BU community, where we sourced the vast majority of our participants, and to whom we are extremely grateful.

We are now entering our last few weeks of data collection, before it is time to analyse the data and deliver the project outcomes to the Leverhulme Trust. If you can help us achieve this goal and are happy to take part in the study we would be delighted to hear from you. We are seeking Caucasian participants aged 30-59 years who can visit us on five consecutive days (evenings and weekends are available) in Poole House (Talbot Campus). We also award a £50 Amazon voucher to thank you for your time! We would be delighted to hear from anyone regardless of their face recognition ability – we still need a few more control participants, those with face blindness, and super-recognisers! You can contact me by email (sbate@bournemouth.ac.uk) if you are willing to take part, and please do feel free to share the opportunity both within and outside of BU.

Many thanks for reading this post, and I look forward to reporting the findings of the study in due course.

NIHR Research Design Service – Starting Research Workshop

Guidance, NHS, Training

Please see below for the following training opportunity:

Date: 15 September 2021
Time: 09:15-13:30
Location: Online

Funded and hosted by the NIHR Research Design Service (RDS) South Central, discover how to move from thinking about doing research to taking your first steps in the getting support, dedicated time and funding to actually do it. Sign up to the workshop on Eventbrite.

Health Research Authority’s new student research eligibility criteria – live from today

Guidance, NHS, Research Ethics, student research

New eligibility criteria for standalone student research go live today (1 September 2021). These changes are designed to ensure that students’ experience of research reflects how modern health and social care research is conducted.

This new criteria encourages innovative approaches to student research like group research, mock Research Ethics Committees (REC) or shadowing a range of people in an existing project.

The changes mean some master’s students will now be eligible to apply for approval to carry out their research.

To help students plan their research we have created a new student research toolkit. The toolkit has been designed to pull together the resources a student will need to understand what approvals are required and whether they are eligible to carry out their research in the UK.  It contains links to existing decision tools as well as some new ones developed especially for students. It uses a simple question and answer format and will provide answers to the following questions:

  • Is my study research?
  • Is my research taking place in the NHS and will it need NHS approval?
  • Do I need NHS REC review?
  • What type of NHS ethics review do I need?
  • Can I carry out my research?

Completing the tool will provide students with an understanding of what activities they can do and ensures that they do not waste time applying for approval for research that they are not able to carry out under the new student eligibility criteria. Through completion of the toolkit, students can access supplementary declarations that need to be completed by their academic supervisor, confirming that they meet the criteria for the type of approvals they need for their research. There are three separate declarations depending on the approvals needed – the toolkit guides the student to the right one based on their responses.

Please share this update and new resource with colleagues and students who might benefit. Further details about the new eligibility criteria can be found on the HRA website.

Please see our question and answer section for further information. If you have any other queries about the eligibility criteria, please contact queries@hra.nhs.uk.

Please contact Suzy Wignall, Clinical Governance Advisor in RDS if you have any queries or concerns.

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 second Tuesday of each month. You can register here for your preferred date:

14th September 2021

9th November 2021

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.

Risk of kidney problems in migrant workers

international, open access, writing

Congratulations to Dr. Pramod Regmi, Lecturer in International Health & Global Engagement Lead, Department of Nursing Sciences, and Dr. Nirmal Aryal, formerly of the Centre of Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), whose editorial “Kidney health risk of migrant workers: An issue we can no longer overlook” has been published today in Health Prospect [1].  Further co-authors (Arun Sedhain, Radheshyam Krishna KC, Erwin Martinez Faller, Aney Rijal, and Edwin van Teijlingen) work in India, Nepal, the Philippines and at BU.  The study was funded by GCRF.

This editorial highlights that low-skilled migrant workers in the countries of the Gulf and Malaysia are at a disproportionately higher risk of kidney health problems. The working conditions are often Dirty, Dangerous and Difficult (referred at as the 3Ds) include physically demanding work, exposure to a hot environment, dehydration, chemical exposures, excessive use of pain killers, and lifestyle factors (such as restricted water intake and a high intake of alcohol/sugary drinks) which may precipitate them to acute kidney injuries and subsequent chronic kidney disease.  

References

  1. Aryal, N., Regmi, P.R., Sedhain, A., KC, R.K., Martinez Faller, E., Rijal, A., van Teijlingen, E., (2021) Kidney health risk of migrant workers: An issue we can no longer overlook. Health Prospect 21(1): 15-17.

Join the event: Care and support at home in the time of Covid

conferences

An event exploring the experiences of volunteers, carers and care workers during the Covid-19 pandemic in BCP and Dorset

About this event

The Covid-19 pandemic has concentrated much care and support within peoples homes. The closure of schools, day centres, shops and non-essential services during lockdowns, alongside prohibitions on household mixing, have meant that caring work has been much more spatially concentrated and contained within households than in normal times.

This has placed increasing demands on carers and home care workers. It has also expanded initiatives of volunteer-provided support to people at home. This event presents the early findings of a research project exploring the activities and experiences of carers, care workers and volunteers in Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole and Dorset over the past 18 months. It also includes a round table discussion in which experts and leaders from the voluntary and community sector, carers’ groups, home care providers and local government will reflect on current and future challenges for their respective fields, and the role of academic research in addressing these.

Date 

Wed, 8 September 2021

Time

13:00 – 15:30 BST

Price

This event is free and open to all. Book your place at Care and support at home in the time of Covid Tickets, Wed 8 Sep 2021 at 13:00 | Eventbrite

Location

Join Zoom Meeting

https://bournemouth-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/85863758884?pwd=S05FYWlzWUFoWWRpS2lnWnk0alZPZz09

Meeting ID: 858 6375 8884

Passcode: i98CDv8@

Questions

For further information on this event please contact

Dr Rosie Read, email: rread@bournemouth.ac.uk

AT4SEND Training Package developed from HEIF Small Fund

HEIF

The Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) Small Fund has resulted in the development of the Assistive Technology for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (AT4SEND) Training Package as an add-on to the existing AT4SEND Android Application developed by Dr Paul Whittington, Dr Huseyin Dogan (Department of Computing & Informatics) and Professor Keith Phalp through Quality Research Funding.

The HEIF project (Principal Investigator: Dr Paul Whittington and Co-Investigators: Dr Huseyin Dogan, Dr Nan Jiang and Professor Keith Phalp) commenced in May 2021 and completed on 31st July 2021. Vers Creative UK, a Bournemouth application development company, were sub-contracted to develop the AT4SEND Training Package as an Android Application. As Vers Creative UK previously developed the Assistive Technology Recommendation section of AT4SEND, they were able to integrate the new Training Package. The AT4SEND Training Package was designed by Dr Paul Whittington, based on semi-structured interviews held with the assistive technology domain, including the Department for Education, Dorset Council and London Grid for Learning. These formed the basis of a requirements specification provided to Vers Creative UK to guide the development.

The AT4SEND Training Package consists of 3 sections: Training, Learn and Videos. The Training section consists of information focusing on popular categories of assistive technology hardware and software. The information is based on literature obtained from online sources and separated into descriptions, benefits and limitations. Based on the discussions with the assistive technology domain, it became evident that these were the most important aspects to focus on for a training package. Each category has a 5 question multiple-choice Quiz, which tests the user’s understanding of the assistive technology information. The questions were devised by Dr Paul Whittington and there is a defined pass mark of 80% for each Quiz. There is also a general Quiz of 20 questions to test the user’s understanding of all the assistive technology categories. The training results will be stored in the user’s AT4SEND profile.

The Learn section consists of online assistive technology articles, so that users can find out more information about the general use of assistive technologies. This is supported by the Videos section where a selection of YouTube videos is provided to illustrate real world examples.

To assess the suitability of the AT4SEND Training Package, usability evaluations will be conducted during the autumn, involving mainstream and special educational needs schools, assistive technology industries, Department for Education and Policy Connect, who operate the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Assistive Technology. The HEIF funding has also been used for incentive Amazon vouchers that will be provided to the evaluation participants. The usability of the AT4SEND Training Package will be assessed by techniques, including the System Usability Scale and NASA Task Load Index. Dr Paul Whittington will be responsible for conducting these evaluations and analysing the results. We anticipate these being published in a future journal or conference publication, to be submitted later in the year.

We have received further funding towards the AT4SEND project from the Mazars Charitable Trust, which will be used to further develop the functionality of the Training Package based on the usability evaluation findings.  The Training Package does not currently have images of assistive technologies due to the copyright issues of using online sources. In the future we will approach assistive technology manufacturers to obtain approval to use images of their products in AT4SEND. We will post updates on the development of the Training Package on our HCI Research Group website: https://hci.bournemouth.ac.uk/project/at4send/. We plan to disseminate AT4SEND as an Android Application on the Google Play Store.

We are very grateful for the funding from HEIF that has enabled development of the Training Package, increasing the functionality of AT4SEND from a recommendation system to an application that also provides assistive technology training. It is anticipated that this will raise awareness of assistive technologies to teachers, teaching assistants and support staff, which has been highlighted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Assistive Technology as an important area of development.

Further information on AT4SEND Training Package