The Destellos competition is one of the most well-established international competitions within the field of electroacoustic music, and has links with various institutions around the world. The 2nd prize was granted by GRM, France; Musiques & Recherches, Belgium; Motus, France; and Fundación Phonos, Spain. The awarded work, Traces of Play, is a 4-channel ‘surround sound’ composition, which received it’s premier in June 2017, and was performed here at BU in the Loudspeaker Orchestra Concert on 28th February 2018.
Project-based research taking part in the NHS requires Health Research Authority (HRA) approval, and BU will act as the ‘Sponsor‘ for studies undertaken by its students, postgraduate researchers, or staff.
The HRA realise that the process of applying for your approvals can be daunting, so they have created a working group, with the main goal of considering how best they can support student researchers, and ensure that the process is done correctly, the first time round.
Locally, you can email Suzy, Clinical Governance Advisor, on researchethics@bournemouth.ac.uk if you have any queries or need any advice.
Image from https://ec.europa.eu/culture/news/20170606-new-study-creative-value-chains_en
As part of the government’s commitment in the Industrial Strategy. towns and cities across the country will benefit from a new £20million fund for culture, heritage and creative industries, launched by Minister of Arts, Heritage and Tourism, Michael Ellis.
Areas will be able to bid for up to £7 million for a number of projects in a certain area to help regeneration, create jobs and maximise the impact of investment. This could be for new spaces for creative businesses, bringing historic buildings back into use or redeveloping museums and art galleries.
MRC announced yesterday their new grant application status to recognise research staff contributions.
To support the development of researchers across different career stages, the MRC will introduce a new status to recognise the contributions of research staff as researcher co-investigators on grant applications from July 2018.
Currently many research staff do not receive the formal recognition they deserve for their contributions to writing grant applications, designing and carrying out funded research. By introducing the new status of researcher co-investigator, we are aiming to help provide them with the recognition needed for career progression.
For the full announcement, please visit the following link.
I was recently fortunate enough to be given the unique opportunity to attend the 13th Congress for the International Society for Study of Fatty Acids (ISSFAL) and Lipids in Las Vegas Nevada. My experience started with an interesting satellite symposium entitled “An Update on the Role of EPA and DHA for Brain Health”. During this satellite experts such as Dr. Karin Yurko-Mauro gave an excellent insight into the current research on a topic which strongly relates to my PhD.
On the first day of the conference I was given the opportunity to present some of the work I have done during my PhD with an oral presentation entitled “Preliminary analysis suggests a high DHA multi-nutrient supplementation and aerobic exercise produce similar improvements in verbal memory in older females”. This was an amazing and rather surreal experience, as presenting research I had conducted at an international conference is not something I would have envisioned being able to achieve just a short time ago. As well as my oral presentation I also had a poster entitled “Circulating DHA levels as a predictor of gait performance under single and dual-task conditions in older females”.
During the conference there were a series of plenary lectures, as well as sessions covering a breadth of topics including general nutrition, aging and neurodegenerative diseases, brain fatty acid uptake, inflammation and allergy and clinical trial methodology. In between sessions leading pioneers within fatty acid research Professor Michael Crawford and Dr Maria Makrides were each given awards with Professor Crawford being given the omega-3 research award and Dr. Makrides the Alexander Leaf Award.
The ISSFAL committee were very accommodating of the younger researchers attending the event. organising a young investigators social to the mob museum and putting together a “meet the professors” breakfast to allow us to pick the minds of some of the leaders in the field. Furthermore I won a young investigators award by ISSFAL, which is given to recognise and encourage excellent abstract submissions, and in turn allowed me to register for the conference at no cost.
I would firstly like to the thank the ISSFAL organisers for allowing me the opportunity to present my work at such a respected conference and my PhD supervisors Dr. Simon Dyall and Dr. Fotini Tsofliou for supporting me through the research process. I am also grateful for being awarded a full Santander mobility award and for my BU studentship funding, which has allowed me to make the trip to Las Vegas possible.
If you would like to learn more about our research, please feel free to contact me at pfairbairn@bournemouthac.uk
If you are involved in, or wish to be involved in clinical research, then take a look at this link, where you will find useful resources to support colleagues in getting involved with research, to find out more for yourself, and to help you to encourage more patients to take part too.
If your study will recruit NHS patients or staff, then BU must ‘sponsor’ your project, so remember to involve the Research Ethics team within R&KEO on researchethics@bournemouth.ac.uk as early as possible in your study planning.
If you are interested in clinical research, or interested in working within this field, either on your own project, or as a future career, then take a look at the National Institute for Health Research’s short video about what clinical research is, and how to support it.
Watch the video to find out:
Why clinical research is at the core of the NHS
How to respond to patient questions about clinical research
How to help patients get involved in clinical research
Remember that the Research Ethics mailbox (researchethics@bournemouth.ac.uk) is available if you have any queries about your own plans to embark on clinical research within the NHS.
Dr Holly Crossen-White has had a conference paper accepted for National Programmes Conference: Museums and Digital Memory Conference to be held at the British Museum in September. The paper will be presented with Dr Trudie Cole, Head of Access and Participation, The National Museum of the Royal Navy. Trudie and Holly have previously worked on several research projects related to the use of digital archives and this gives them opportunity to apply their findings within the context of collections held by the National Museum of the Royal Navy. Holly’s research interest in digital archives arose through her PhD which explored the hidden history of illicit drug taking during the early twentieth century. Holly has published on the ethical issues of undertaking research using digital archives and has been awarded Faculty Seedcorn Funding with her colleague Dr. Angela Turner-Wilson for some of this research work.
Researchers from across Bournemouth University (BU) hosted the ‘Science Playground’ event on 16th July as part of this year’s Festival of Learning. The aim of the event was to showcase the diversity of research happening across BU, with fun activities for children (and adults) to start conversations about the different research projects.
This included simulation activities and virtual reality experiences putting people into the shoes of a person with dementia, as Dr Michelle Heward from the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre showcased the Dementia Education And Learning Through Simulation 2 (DEALTS 2) programme which has been developed for Health Education England.
Hunting for jelly ‘lamprey’ worms in plastic mud as Dr Miguel Baltazar Soares from the Faculty of Science and Technology discussed his sea lamprey monitoring campaign in the River Frome.
Whilst, Dr Huiwen Zhao from the Faculty of Media and Communications used arts and crafts to get feedback on her mass customization website design research.
Thanks to those who took part in the event which was organised by the BU Research Staff Association (RSA). To find out more about BU RSA please come along to our next coffee morning on Wednesday 25th July at 10am in F105, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus.
Application Deadline: Wednesday 12 September 2018 (17.00 UK Time)
The British Academy is providing mid-career to senior scholars – active in any discipline within the social sciences and the humanities and based in any country overseas – with the opportunity to work for four years in the UK and make a contribution to UK research and higher education. This new programme is supported under the UK Government’s National Productivity Investment Fund. It aims to demonstrate and further enhance the UK’s commitment to international research partnerships and collaboration as well as strengthen the UK’s research capacity and capability in the humanities and the social sciences.
Aims
Up to 10 Global Professorships each year will be offered during the course of the programme (which will run for three years in the first instance). Each award will provide funding for four years to an outstanding international researcher, not currently working in the United Kingdom, to bring their research experience to the UK. The purpose of the Global Professorships is to enable world-class scholars to further their individual research goals while strengthening the UK research base and advancing the research goals and strategies of their UK host universities. Each four-year appointment is intended to be a complete project in itself and is expected to involve a specific research focus, although the British Academy does not have a preferred model for the balance of time to be spent between research and teaching (which may vary over the course of the award and will depend on the UK host institution’s needs).
Eligibility Requirements
Suitable candidates for the Global Professorships include internationally-recognised mid-career to senior researchers active in any field within the social sciences or the humanities who are currently employed outside the UK. The applicant must either be in a permanent (full-time or part-time) position at their home institution overseas or have a fixed-term position for the duration of the Global Professorship. Applicants must be available to take up a long-term secondment or employment at an eligible UK university or research institution.
Value and Duration
Awards are expected to run for four years each. The British Academy will provide up to £250,000 per annum for the first three years, making a total contribution of £750,000 per award. The costs of the fourth year will be expected to be committed in full by the UK host institution. Successful applicants to the 2018 competition will be required to start their awards between 1 December 2018 and 31 May 2019.
Application Process
Applications must be submitted online using the British Academy’s Grant Management System, Flexi-Grant®
UK Host Institution Approval Deadline: Thursday 13 September 2018 (17.00 UK Time)
Contact Details
Please contact internationalgrants@britac.ac.uk or call 020 7969 5220 for further information.
In the first instance if you are interested in applying for the above please get in touch with a member of the RKEO Funding Development team.
Further to the Plastics Research and Innovation Fund details posted here yesterday, the following £8m call has been announced.
Up to £8m is available for institutional awards for up to 18 months to research organisations to bridge the gaps between UK Research and Innovation research disciplines and respond creatively to the challenge of creating new circular economy approaches to eliminating future plastic waste. The programme should focus on novel ideas and solutions that include consideration of sustainable feedstocks and materials, manufacturing and recycling processes, consumer behaviour and systems (for example legal, fiscal and policy systems) set within a context of environmental and health benefits. This competition is being run on behalf of all UK Research and Innovation Research Councils by EPSRC. UK Research and Innovation welcome applications that includes the remits of any of the UKRI Research Councils, and is not limited to the Engineering and Physical Sciences communities.
A stroll along a pier remains the most popular activity for visitors to the British seaside, with 70% of them enjoying a walk over the waves.
For many, the seaside pier is perhaps the most iconic symbol of the British seaside holiday and the epitome of excursions to the coast. Piers have always provided holidaymakers with entertainment, from the grand pavilions and theatres of the Victorian era, to the amusement arcades of the 1980s. For two centuries, piers have been the place to see and be seen at the seaside.
Victorian pleasure piers are unique to the UK, but they are under threat: in the early 20th century nearly 100 piers graced the UK coastline, but almost half of of these have now gone.
By their very nature, seaside piers are risky structures. When piers were constructed, British seaside resorts were at the height of their popularity. The Victorians wanted to demonstrate engineering prowess and their ability to master the force of the sea. Some lasted longer than others, with Aldeburgh pier in Suffolk lasting just less than a decade before it was swept away by a drifting vessel. At the other end of the spectrum is the Isle of Wight’s Ryde pier, which at over 200 years is the oldest pleasure pier in the UK.
Yet the longevity of such piers presents them with new risks: fire, maintenance issues, rising costs, and climate change. Piers face an uncertain future. The National Piers Society estimates that 20% of today’s piers are at risk of being lost.
Piers at risk
Over the last 40 years, many notable piers have succumbed to time and tide. Perhaps the most iconic of these losses is Brighton West Pier, which has suffered multiple storms and fires since closure in 1975, leaving an isolated skeleton as a haunting reminder. Now there is growing recognition that seaside piers are vital to coastal communities in terms of resort identity, heritage, employment, community pride, and tourism. In fact, the UK government now offers funding to enable the revival of piers and other seaside heritage.
Brighton West Pier. National Piers Society
Despite the sea change in the perceived importance of seaside piers, many remain derelict and in a state of decay. One such pier is Weston-Super-Mare’s Birnbeck Pier, on the west coast, which has been closed for over three decades. Birnbeck Pier is unusual in that it is the only pier which links to an island, but as time has passed, parts of the structure have crumbled into the sea. Despite the endeavours of the local community and groups such as The Birnbeck Regeneration Trust, the owner of the pier refuses to sell or regenerate the pier.
This is in stark contrast to nearby Clevedon Pier, which was deemed “the most beautiful pier in England” by the poet Sir John Betjeman. After partial collapse and subsequent closure of the pier in 1970 there were calls for its demolition. Clevedon Pier was saved and reopened in 1998, and is now the UK’s only Grade I listed seaside pier. Today it stands as a testament to The Clevedon Pier Heritage Trust who continue to develop the pier with a new visitor centre, wedding venue, and conferencing space. Recently, the pier gained a new group of fans as it featured as a backdrop to a One Direction music video.
Thriving piers
Despite their advancing years, since the turn of the 21st century many piers have found a new lease of life. The high-profile regeneration of Hastings Pier, led by a local community trust and backed by Heritage Lottery Funding, has spearheaded the revitalisation of many seaside piers (although the pier, controversially, was recently sold to a commercial investor). Nevertheless, a number of coastal communities have successfully regenerated their piers through the formation of pier trusts, including those at Swanage and Herne Bay. Other seaside towns are being even more ambitious and hoping to rebuild their piers or to build brand new piers.
Swanage Pier. National Piers Society
Local authorities within seaside resorts are also promoting their piers as flagship tourist attractions and investing in their refurbishment and new facilities. Southport Pier, which narrowly escaped demolition during the 1990s, is now at the heart of the resort’s development strategy and is currently undergoing a £2.9m refurbishment which includes the addition of new catering and retail facilities.
The piers that are thriving in the 21st century are those that provide a unique selling point. Bournemouth Pier now features the only pier-to-beach zip line, and its former theatre now houses adrenaline-packed activities such as climbing walls, an aerial assault course, and a vertical drop slide. In Folkestone, the Harbour Arm, which was redeveloped as a pleasure pier in 2016, provides a range of pop-up bars and restaurants and its very own champagne bar. Weston’s Grand Pier offers family fun with a modern twist and even boasts an indoor suspended go-kart track. Southwold Pier boasts a novelty automaton arcade.
Weston-Super Mare Grand Pier. National Piers Society
By staying tuned to modern desires as well as a sense of nostalgia, piers will continue to adapt to changing tastes and provide entertainment and pleasure for seaside visitors.
But perhaps the biggest threat they face today is climate change, and the attendant rising sea levels and increasingly frequent storm surges. Cromer, Saltburn, and Blackpool North Pier have all recently been significantly damaged by storms. The World Monuments Fund has recognised the threat of extreme weather events to seaside piers by adding Blackpool’s three piers to their 2018 Watch List. With seaside piers regaining their popularity, their next big challenge will literally be finding a way to weather the storm.
Your hair can say a lot about you. It doesn’t just give people clues about your personality or your taste in music. It can also record evidence of how much you drink, whether you smoke or take drugs, and perhaps even how stressed you are. My colleagues and I research how hair can be used to provide more accurate testing for these attributes. And a recent court case shows how far the technology has come.
In 2008, a mother who had been struggling with alcohol abuse was asked by a UK court judging a child custody case to abstain from drinking for one year. To assess whether she managed to do this, scientists used a hair analysis that can detect long-term drug or alcohol abuse (or abstinence) over a period of many months, from just one test. At HelpAddiction, we can discuss you the key stages of addiction treatment options and consider your preferences and requirements to find the best treatment plan for you.
This case turned out to be a landmark moment for toxicological hair analysis. The labs analysing the mother’s hair suggested that she may have been drinking during the time she was supposed to be abstinent. The case ended up in the High Court, where the scientific principles underlying hair testing and, crucially, the way the results are reported were thoroughly debated. The judge was critical of the interpretation of the hair analysis data and disagreed with the scientists, ruling that there was no evidence to support drinking during the defined time-period.
Fast forward to 2017 and hair analysis featured in the High Court again. Yet this time the reliability of hair testing was confirmed. A lot changed in the intervening years between these cases. Technology advanced but, importantly, so did our understanding of what hair analysis data actually means.
The traditional samples for drug and alcohol testing are blood and urine. These provide evidence for cases where we require an indication of exposure to drugs and alcohol in a very recent time frame. These samples have what is referred to as a “window of detection”. This is a timeframe over which that sample can demonstrate exposure to drugs or alcohol. The window of detection for blood is often measured in hours, and urine can show evidence over a few days, possibly a few weeks.
By contrast, hair can show a retrospective history of your drug or alcohol consumption (or abstinence) over many months. This level of information makes hair testing invaluable in a wide variety of legal scenarios. If you need to screen potential employees for a safety-critical role, you can use a hair test to check they are not regular drug users. What if you’re concerned your drink was spiked at a party, but too much time has passed for any drug to still be found in your blood or urine? The drugs can remain trapped in your hair, which gives you a longer window of detection and allows scientists to find traces of the drug long after the actual crime event.
Ready for my close up. Shutterstock
My research group is investigating factors that affect the hair concentration of certain chemicals produced when the body processes alcohol (metabolites). This sort of work is important to give confidence to the results of hair testing when presented in court. We need the utmost confidence in the data, when a court judgment may have life-changing consequences.
We recently showed that hair sprays and waxes can greatly increase the level of alcohol metabolites found in hair, giving a false positive result in an alcohol test. In one of our experiments, a volunteer who was strictly teetotal tested negative for fatty acid ethyl esters (metabolites of alcohol) in head hair untreated with hair spray, but tested positive after application of hair spray. Not just a little positive either. The volunteer tested significantly over the threshold for chronic excessive alcohol consumption after using hair spray.
This may sound alarming for a test that is used in court, but now that scientists are aware of these limitations, procedures can be put in place to mitigate against them and guidance can be updated. Ethyl glucuronide (a different alcohol metabolite) is not affected by hair sprays and waxes and so is a better target to test when someone uses cosmetic products.
Looking for the ideal facility for anyone who desires to overcome the challenges of addiction, then you may want to view Pacific Ridge website here to begin your first step!
Other ways of testing
Hair is not the only alternative to blood and urine testing. I’m currently investigating whether fingernails might be a better sample to test in cases where we need to prove abstinence from alcohol. It has been shown that fingernails may incorporate significantly more ethyl glucuronide (an alcohol metabolite) than hair samples. This means fingernails may be more sensitive than hair and could be better at distinguishing low levels of drinking and complete abstinence.
Toxicological hair analysis is not about catching criminals. It’s not about penalty or punishment. It’s about helping people. Results from hair testing can help support people struggling with addiction. In the future I hope we will also be using hair analysis as a diagnostic tool in healthcare.
The research I’m conducting at the moment is evaluating the potential for hair to be used as a diagnostic marker of chronic stress. Stress can lead to very serious healthcare issues. We are examining the stress hormone cortisol to see if we can identify people at risk from future healthcare issues from the concentration of this hormone in hair.
If successful, this work will take hair analysis into a new realm. I’d like to see a future where hair testing is used for a national screening programme for older adults who are most at risk from chronic stress. This could allow scientists to target interventions to lower stress at people who need them the most, which could significantly improve the health and well-being of older people in particular.
Dods (political monitoring consultants) have produced a series of short policy lookahead guides contemplating what is coming up politically in the following spheres over the next few months:
Innovate UK, as part of UK Research and Innovation, is investing up to £4 million in innovation projects to reduce the harm that plastics do to our environment and increase productivity and growth of the UK economy.
The aim is to support innovative activities that result in less persistent plastic waste in our environment through the development of new polymers, processes, designs, recycling regimes, value added recyclate or bio-alternatives.
A business or research and technology organisation (RTO) must lead the project.
Please see summary below:
Available funding: between £50,000 and £1 million
Project dates : between 1 December 2018 and 31 December 2020
Project duration : minimum 3 months; maximum 24 months
Science Minister announces £20 million Plastics Research and Innovation Fund to turn the tide on plastics production
A new £20 million fund that aims to explore new ideas and innovations that can bring changes in the UK’s plastics manufacturing and consumption patterns is announced today by Science Minister, Sam Gyimah.
The Plastics Research and Innovation Fund (PRIF) will engage Britain’s best scientists and innovators to help move the country towards more circular economic and sustainable approaches to plastics.
It will be managed by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and delivered via the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Innovate UK, and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
The last leg of the field work for the Media literacy for unaccompanied refugee youth project was undertaken in Milan, Italy, following the latest statistics report which highlighted that over 18,000 unaccompanied asylum-seekers were present in accommodation centers across the country. ‘Non c’è casa senza familia’, or ‘a house is not a home without family’, as the Italians would say; and in a country where food, family and music are deeply ingrained in their culture, it wasn’t clear how unaccompanied refugee children would cope there. With Italy’s proposed new government moving to cut off the flow of migrants from Africa, the question about whether unaccompanied minors will find a home in Italy without their families is still a difficult one.
In Milan, Marie Curie Fellow Dr Annamaria Neag met with refugee organisations and volunteers, including CivicoZero, a project of Save the Children Italy. CivicoZero offers a centre where young unaccompanied asylum-seekers can learn the language, attend IT classes, play sports together and, above all, have a safe place to spend time with their peers. The young people in the centre came from a range of countries such as Albania, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria, and although they spoke different languages and came from vastly different cultures, their love for football was one thing they had in common with Italians (and the Score Match app!).
Dr Neag also visited the Penny Wirton School which is a free Italian language school for new migrants, entirely managed by volunteers. This makes the school a meeting point between immigrants and locals, creating a common ground for integration that works beyond linguistic, social and cultural differences. These kinds of schools have opened up across Italy, offering a possibility for those new to the country to practice learning the language with a local (one-to-one tuition), learn about the customs and get to know the culture. Most of
the volunteers at the Penny Wirton School are seniors who return to a local parish to meet the young asylum-seekers every week.
“It was really impressive to see these seniors give a helping hand where it is most needed”, says Dr Neag. “In an ageing Europe, this initiative could be a good example for many other seniors who may be interested in offering their skills and time.”
Despite the political rhetoric, it seems that there are many people who are willing to offer some kind of support to those in need as the number of ‘volunteer guardians’ is on the rise, even though it means contributing on a voluntary and free basis. This support is very much needed since the refugee children showed very different levels of knowledge and understanding of concepts such as the use of technology and social media. From children who are experienced online gamers to children who have never owned a mobile phone, it seems that unaccompanied young refugees need very specific educational interventions.
The next step in the ‘Media literacy for unaccompanied refugee youth’ project will be to create these interventions with the help of refugee children themselves.
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I am very thankful to Laura from the Penny Wirton School and to Valentina and her team at CivicoZero Milan. – Dr Annamaria Neag, Project Researcher.
Photo credit: Save the Children, Score! Match
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The ISSFAL committee were very accommodating of the younger researchers attending the event. organising a young investigators social to the mob museum and putting together a “meet the professors” breakfast to allow us to pick the minds of some of the leaders in the field. Furthermore I won a young investigators award by ISSFAL, which is given to recognise and encourage excellent abstract submissions, and in turn allowed me to register for the conference at no cost.
Dr Holly Crossen-White has had a conference paper accepted for National Programmes Conference: Museums and Digital Memory Conference to be held at the British Museum in September. The paper will be presented with Dr Trudie Cole, Head of Access and Participation, The National Museum of the Royal Navy. Trudie and Holly have previously worked on several research projects related to the use of digital archives and this gives them opportunity to apply their findings within the context of collections held by the National Museum of the Royal Navy. Holly’s research interest in digital archives arose through her PhD which explored the hidden history of illicit drug taking during the early twentieth century. Holly has published on the ethical issues of undertaking research using digital archives and has been awarded Faculty Seedcorn Funding with her colleague Dr. Angela Turner-Wilson for some of this research work.
Application Deadline: Wednesday 12 September 2018 (17.00 UK Time)
Bournemouth University eHealth paper cited 40 times!
Nepal Family Cohort Study meeting in Bournemouth
Trans+ Research Conference on Lansdowne Campus!
Horizon Europe 2025 Work Programme pre-Published
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease