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Nominate your outputs now for the BU REF Mock exercise 2020

BRIAN, BU Challenges, open access, Research assessment

The BU REF Mock Exercise 2020 has just been launched on BRIAN.

Please select up to 5 of your research outputs for inclusion in the exercise by 8th March. Instructions on how to do this would have been disseminated to you via email.

Selected outputs should:

  • Embody original research. For the purposes of the REF, research is defined as a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared. See Guidance on Submissions – Annex C, p.90;
  • Have been published after 1 January 2014;
  • Have been accepted for publication as a minimum and due to be published before 31 December 2020.

In some cases, additional supporting information will be needed to accompany your submission. Supporting information can be supplied either via the relevant textbox in BRIAN or, if preferred, uploaded as an attachment to your output, e.g. Word document or PDF. UOA-specific details of the REF requirements for supporting information are included in the guidance attached. See also Panel Criteria and Working Methods, Annex B, pp.90-92 and the related sections indicated.

For information on the REF2021 Submission process at Bournemouth University, please refer to the REF 2021 Code of Practice.

If you have queries about selecting outputs please feel free to contact ref@bournemouth.ac.uk (especially if it is a technical/BRIAN query) or a member of the UOA team who will be happy to help.

See your spine move in real-time motion at the AECC

innovation

The Centre for Biomechanics Research (CBR) of the AECC University College, Bournemouth are seeking volunteers for their latest research study, investigating spine biomechanics in near real time.

CBR are currently looking for volunteers to help us with our latest piece of research into understanding the back in motion. We need over 100 volunteers to come forward to take part to ensure the project is a success so we can establish a database of spine mechanics in healthy adults. This is the biggest study of its kind and those who volunteer for this research study will get the chance to see their spine move in real-time.

Currently we focusing our recruitment for a sub-study comparing a commonly used skin based marker system, for measuring the spine in motion, to the gold standard of bone tracking using low dose video x-rays. For this study 15 females volunteers are needed to take part.

To find out more about this study please visit the study web-page here.

Who are we looking for?

For this research study, we are looking for people who:

  • Are over 30 and under 70 years of age
  • Have not had low back pain that has prevented normal activity for at least 1 day in the past year
  • Have not had an abdominal/pelvic/lumbar spine surgery in the past 2 years
  • Have not had any medical radiation exposure in the past year or exposure in the past 2 years with a
    dose of greater than 8mSv (defined as CT scan of Chest, Abdomen or Pelvis or Interventional procedures under radiological control i.e. angiography).
  • Have a body mass index (BMI) of less than 30
  • Are not pregnant
  • Willing to participate and able to freely give informed consent.

Next steps

If you are interested in being involved in this project please visit the study web-page here or you can also learn more about this project through the participant information booklet here.
If you would like to register your interest please download the pre-study form here.
For any questions, or to send us your completed pre-study form, please contact us at cbrstudies@aecc.ac.uk

This study has received a favourable ethical opinion from HRA South West - Central Bristol Research Ethics Committee. 
REC reference: 10/H0106/65.

RDS Academic and Researcher Induction

The Research Development and Support (RDS) invite all ‘new to BU’ academics and researchers to an induction.

Signpost with the words Help, Support, Advice, Guidance and Assistance on the direction arrows, against a bright blue cloudy sky.This event provides an overview of all the practical information staff need to begin developing their research plans at BU, using both internal and external networks; to develop and disseminate research outcomes; and maximising the available funding opportunities.Objectives

  • The primary aim of this event is to raise participants’ awareness of how to get started in research at BU or, for more established staff, how to take their research to the next level
  • To provide participants with essential, practical information and orientation in key stages and processes of research and knowledge exchange at BU

Indicative content

  • An overview of research at BU and how RDS can help/support academic staff
  • The importance of horizon-scanning, signposting relevant internal and external funding opportunities and clarifying the applications process
  • How to grow a R&KE portfolio, including academic development schemes
  • How to develop internal and external research networks
  • Key points on research ethics and developing research outputs
  • Getting started with Knowledge Exchange and business engagement

For more information about the event, please see the following link.  The twelfth induction will be held on Wednesday, 25th March 2020 in Melbury House, 5th Floor, Garden Room.

Title Date Time Location
Research Development & Support (RDS) Research Induction Wednesday 25th March 2020 9.00 – 12.00 Lansdowne Campus

9.00-9.15 – Coffee/tea and cake/fruit will be available on arrival

9.15 – RDS academic induction (with a break at 10.45)

11.25 – Organisational Development upcoming development opportunities

11.30 – Opportunity for one to one interaction with RDS staff

12.00 – Close

There will also be literature and information packs available.

If you would like to attend the induction then please book your place through Organisational Development and you can also visit their pages here.

We hope you can make it and look forward to seeing you.

Regards,

The RDS team

Expressions of Interest invited from senior academics to join the BU REF Appeals Panel

Research assessment

Our BU REF 2021 Code of Practice states that in the event of an appeal the Vice-Chancellor will convene and chair the BU REF Appeals Panel to undertake a review of each case. The role of the Panel is to:

• Review and consider all appeals submitted by appraising all documentation pertaining to the REF Steering Group decision and the case for appeal.

• Decide on whether or not an individual should be referred back to the REF Steering Group and/or the REF Circumstances Board for further consideration.

• Ensure final decisions are communicated to the Head of RDS who will report to the REF Steering Group and notify the individual of the outcome of the appeal.

The Panel is chaired by the Vice-Chancellor with support from a member of Research Development & Support (RDS). Membership will include at least three senior academics.

We are now seeking expressions of interest from senior academic colleagues (G10+) who are interested in joining the REF Appeals Panel. Successful applicants will be required to attend one or more meetings of the REF Appeals Panel (to be held in late September 2020), have a thorough knowledge of the REF guidance and the BU REF Code of Practice, and undertake REF-focussed equality and diversity training. We therefore ask for your commitment, active contribution and, most importantly, confidentiality due to the sensitive work of the Panel. In return you will be involved in an important cross-University committee, gain an insight into the REF and equality and diversity (both highly topical issues in the sector), and be engaged in academic citizenship.

Nomination procedure:

We are seeking to recruit a diverse group of at least six senior academics to potentially be called upon in the event of an appeal. Colleagues who are interested should submit an expression of interest stating your interest in being a member of the BU REF Appeals Panel and summarising the experience, skills and attributes you could bring to the Panel (max 250 words).  Your nomination should state your name, job title, Faculty and Department.

The deadline for expressions of interest is Friday 6th March 2020. Nominations should be emailed to ref@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Expressions of interest will be reviewed by a panel of reviewers who are responsible for agreeing on which applicants to invite to serve on the BU REF Appeals Panel.

Eligibility:

Applications are invited from senior BU academic staff (Grade 10+). You must be independent from REF preparations (for example, applicants cannot be UOA Leaders, impact champions or output champions and cannot be members of the REF Steering Group, REF Committee or REF Circumstances Board).

If you have any queries, please speak with Julie Northam (Head of RDS)  in the first instance.

Corrosion Condition Monitoring

innovation, international, Publishing

Collaborative research with The Tank Museum in terms of experimental investigations to evaluate and analyse corrosion induced damage to high value assets led to further collaborations with NASA Materials & Corrosion Control Branch and BAE Systems. The experimental research provided valuable data to develop precision based mathematical models in collaboration with Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL) Ministry of Defence (MOD) to predict and prognose fracture, electrochemical and coating failures in military vehicles. Further work was conducted to develop in-situ and remote sensing, prediction and prognosis models incorporating advanced sensing techniques to predict and prognose corrosion, coating and fracture led failures.

Subject of this study

Subject of this study

In a separate research additional work has led to state-of-the-art novel sensor design and has been recently patented (GB2018/053368). A framework of remote sensing techniques have been developed and has been adopted by Analatom Inc. USA which are successfully applied in several key installations in the US.

Telescopic Electrochemical Cell (TEC) for Non-Destructive Corrosion Testing of Coated Substrate. Patent number GB2018/053368

Since 2009 a suite of numerical models – and published algorithms and methodologies that have enabled other researchers to reproduce the methods – have been developed at NanoCorr, Energy & Modelling (NCEM) Research Group (previously SDRC[1]) to simulate corrosion failures in large complex engineering structures and to predict averaged material properties, typically measured in laboratory experiments, such as hardness and corrosion resistance.

Experimental work at NCEM was started in 2009 with a focus on corrosion issues and expanded to multidisciplinary research with new grants from several key stakeholders into wear-corrosion, nanocoating failure, fracture mechanics, in-situ and remote sensing techniques. This research was led and conducted by Professor Zulfiqar A Khan and his team including Dr Adil Saeed, Dr Mian Hammad Nazir, Dr Jawwad Latif and several other PGRs and Post Docs.

At the start of project, research was conducted to analyse corrosion and tribological failures in The Tank Museum Bovington military tanks. Based on collected data, (3.5 years of live data, over 153k data points) numerical models were developed for simulating corrosion failures in nonconductive polymeric coatings applied to large engineering structures such as automotive and aerospace applications. These models represented the failing structure as bending cantilever beam subjected to mechanical and/or thermal loading which produces both residual and diffusion-induced stresses in beam. These numerical models were later extended to include nano-composite metal and sea water resistant coatings.

These structures are affected by corrosion

This numerical modelling technology developed at NCEM was combined with remote sensing techniques, which enabled predictions in static structures and high value mobile assets substituting conventional methods which require expensive & time consuming experimental setup and laborious while often unreliable visual inspection. The technology allowed faster structural analyses with greater reliability and precision compared to experiments in turn saving money, labour and time. Further developments included the performance enhancement of coatings under extreme temperatures and pressures. Recent plans are to extend the model capabilities to simulate the effects of deep zone residual stresses on corrosion failures.

Coating delamination issues due to corrosion

This research has developed state of the art cells fabricated by using a special magnetic aluminium compound, which is highly electrically conductive and resistant to corrosion. The research has commissioned for deploying this novel sensing technology for micro-defects detection, corrosion rate measurement and condition assessment of defective coatings. This technology has been successfully tested and commissioned in automotive, hazardous compartments with polymeric coatings and bridges to assess their coating condition in terms of their structural integrity. Post design testing involved the installation of these cells, running diagnostics, data acquisition, and macro-graphs to predict structural defects and the resulting corrosion rate. Taking above research further, an NDT apparatus for use in sensing the electromechanical state of an object was invented to monitor the health/condition of coatings.

Further details can be found in [1, 2, and 3]. If you have interest in the above subjects or have questions and would like to discuss then contact Professor Zulfiqar A Khan.

[1] Sustainable Design Research Centre

New Paper Published:  Buhalis, D., Parra López, E.,  Martinez-Gonzalez, J.A., 2020, Influence of young consumers’ external and internal variables on their eloyalty to tourism sites

New Paper Published:

Buhalis, D., Parra López, E.,  Martinez-Gonzalez, J.A., 2020, Influence of young consumers’ external and internal variables on their eloyalty to tourism sites, Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, Vol. 15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2020.100409

Download FREE before April 11, 2020 https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1acJm_,51~BCpGT

Highlights

  • Demonstrates the high use of electronic commerce by young people.
  • Discovers the great potential of online influence of young people.
  • Verifies the greater causal influence of internal variables on e-loyalty.
  • Shows the positive influence of online purchase intention on e-loyalty.
  • Presents a practical causal model of purchase intent and e-loyalty.

Abstract

This study analyzes, in a generational context, the influence of young consumers’ external and internal variables on their e-loyalty to tourism sites. Using a large sample and employing structural equations (PLS), a new model is generated that includes two external variables (site design and eWOM) and two internal variables (trust and satisfaction), to which the intention to purchase online is added. These variables are very important in e-commerce and tourism, and they have not previously been studied jointly. The results show that the impact of consumers’ internal variables is greater than the impact from external ones. Moreover, the proposed causal model is practical and can be easily applied by tourism companies to improve site e-loyalty in the context of market orientation. The Importance-Performance Analysis (IPMA) carried out shows the importance of satisfaction over other variables.

https://www.academia.edu/42033437/Buhalis_D._Parra_L%C3%B3pez_E._Martinez-Gonzalez_J.A._2020_Influence_of_young_consumers_external_and_internal_variables_on_their_eloyalty_to_tourism_sites_Journal_of_Destination_Marketing_and_Management_Vol._15_https_doi.org_10.1016_j.jdmm.2020.100409

New publication on essential fatty acids in donor human milk in the UK

PG research

Congratulations to FHSS PhD student Isabell Nessel who published part of her integrated PhD thesis in the Journal for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition last week.

The paper “Long‐Chain Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids and Lipid Peroxidation Products in Donor Human Milk in the United Kingdom: Results From the LIMIT 2-Centre Cross-Sectional Study” resulted from a collaboration between BU (Isabell Nessel, Prof Jane Murphy, Dr Simon Dyall – now at the University of Roehampton), Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (Prof Minesh Khashu), and St. George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (Dr Laura De Rooy) (1). Full text can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jpen.1773

This paper shows for the first time that donor human milk in the UK has very low levels of essential fatty acids, which are important for brain and eye development. Furthermore, donor human milk has higher lipid degradation than preterm and term breast milk. This could have important implications for preterm infant nutrition as exclusive unfortified donor human milk feeding might not be suitable long term and may contribute to the development of major neonatal morbidities.

This study followed from a narrative review Isabell and her supervisors Prof Minesh Khashu and Dr Simon Dyall published last year, which suggested that current human milk banking practices might have detrimental effects on essential fatty acid quality and quantity in donor human milk (2).

Isabell

inessel@bournemouth.ac.uk

Reference

  • Nessel, Isabell, et al. “Long‐Chain Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids and Lipid Peroxidation Products in Donor Human Milk in the United Kingdom: Results From the LIMIT 2‐Centre Cross‐Sectional Study.” Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition(2020).
  • Nessel, Isabell, Minesh Khashu, and Simon C. Dyall. “The effects of storage conditions on long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, lipid mediators, and antioxidants in donor human milk–a review.” Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids(2019).

NERC standard grants (July 2020 deadline) – 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.

As at January 2020, 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

As a result, BU has introduced a process for determining which application will be submitted to each NERC Standard Grant round. This will take the form of an internal competition, which will include peer review. The next available standard grant round is July 2020. The deadline for internal Expressions of Interest (EoI) which will be used to determine which application will be submitted is 27th March 2020.  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 2020.

NERC have advised that where a research organisation submits more applications to any round than allowed under the cap, NERC will office-reject any excess applications, based purely on the time of submission through the Je-S system (last submitted = first rejected). However, as RDS submit applications through Je-S on behalf of applicants, RDS will not submit any applications that do not have prior agreement from the internal competition.

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.

Appeals process

If an EoI is not selected to be submitted as an application, the Principal Investigator can appeal to Professor Tim McIntyre-Bhatty, Deputy Vice-Chancellor. Any appeals must be submitted within ten working days of the original decision. All appeals will be considered within ten working days of receipt.

RDS Contacts

Please contact Lisa Andrews, RDS Research Facilitator – andrewsl@bournemouth.ac.uk if you wish to submit an expression of interest.

 

We Need Your Help | PGR & Supervisor Views | Postgraduate Researcher Development Needs

PG research

We Need Your Help

PGR & Supervisor Views

Postgraduate Researcher Development Needs

The Postgraduate Researcher Development Steering Group aims to support Faculty enhancement in postgraduate researcher development opportunities.

In order to do this effectively, we need to gain an understanding of what is required.

We would greatly appreciate it if you could take the time to fill in our surveys to obtain this information.

Postgraduate Researcher: bournemouth.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/pgr-development-pgr

Supervisor: bournemouth.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/pgr-development-supervisorv2

Closing date: Tuesday 10 March

Many thanks in advance.

What do you know about the new Coronavirus Regulations?

You are probably aware that State agencies have general powers to prevent and control specific communicable diseases.  However, you may not fully appreciate the full extent of these powers. The Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 were rushed into force in England without parliamentary scrutiny and limited publicity on 10 February 2020, to address the potential threat of  the Wuhan novel coronavirus (2019-nCOV).  This secondary legislation grants Public Health England (PHE) wide powers to detain, isolate, treat and quarantine both domestic nationals and international  visitors, and builds upon the wider public health powers available under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984.  Of particular note, is the ability of the Secretary of State to issue or withdraw a ‘serious and imminent threat declaration‘ by website notice (S3); and the wide powers that are subsequently afforded to registered public health consultants working within PHE.  These powers include the ability to force individuals to submit to medical investigation, treatment and isolation without consent.  It is a sober reminder of just how precious and vulnerable our freedoms are when there are perceived threats to the wider public interest.