On Fri 15th June the University of Brighton will host an exciting event featuring over 29 talks, workshops, performances, installations and displays focused on arts and research for social change. Sessions will be delivered by over 40 academics, artists and community practitioners from around the world.
The event is open to everyone with an interest in the arts, research and social action, regardless of their experience in the arts or academia. The jam-packed, interactive daytime programme at Falmer Campus will be followed by an evening spoken word and music show at the Latest Music Bar in Manchester Street, featuring performances from Kate Fox, Joelle Taylor, Jacob Sam-La Rose and Quiet Loner.
Tickets are only £35, including lunch, refreshments and all events.
Supported by staff and undergraduates from Bournemouth University and sixth formers from the school, 20 Year 10 students from Bishop of Winchester Academy in Bournemouth, created 4 individual narratives.
The FMC staff involved in this project were Jim Pope, Jo Tyler, Brad Gyori, Simon Perkins and Rutherford. The undergraduates were Taisiia Vaskivska, Arianne Byers, Wesley Schulte, Vanita Patel, Jon Black.
The Centre of Postgraduate Medical Research & Education (CoPMRE) held its Spring Visiting Faculty Day at the Executive Business Centre. Fourteen posters (VF Programme Spring 2018) were presented showcasing the breadth of collaborative projects being undertaken by BU and local clinicians. The Best Poster prize was awarded to Dr Paul Whittington, Department of Computing & Informatics, Faculty of Science and Technology, for his presentation entitled Automatic Detection of User Abilities through the SmartAbility Framework. Professor Tamas Hickish, judge, felt that all the posters were excellent and address important health care issues. Paul’s poster was chosen as the research was generated by a deep understanding of disability, the use a mobile phone technology and generalisability to significant areas of health care need such as stroke and frailty. As such his work is scalable and feasible.
Visiting Faculty Days are a great opportunity to share innovative ideas and research. The event was very well received and links for possible further collaboration have already been formed as a result of networking. Our next Visiting Faculty Day will be held in December.
BSc (Hons) Nutrition students at Bournemouth University have been working with staff at Poole’s Alderney Hospital to produce new menus for hospital patients and staff, which are tasty, nutritious and full of locally-sourced ingredients.
Thanks to the students, Alderney Hospital also expects to see a reduction in its food wastage figures which could lead to significant savings.
Click here to find out more about how the BU students carried out this transformation.
The first review by a Bournemouth University academic in the prestigious journal American Anthropologist was published in its February issue. Dr. Sue Sudbury who is Principal Academic in Media Production reviewed the film ‘The Anthropologist’ [1]. She wrote in this Open Access review that this film raises many interesting issues about the role of the anthropologist and deftly illustrates the divide that exists when different cultures come together. Her conclusion of the review is that ‘The Anthropologist’ is an intriguing and memorable film about environmental anthropologists and the important work they do collecting and telling the stories of people whose lives are being reshaped by climate change. It is also about the relationship between female anthropologists and their daughters. As such, it does an important job of introducing the subject and will no doubt generate discussion, but it is not an anthropological film and doesn’t claim to be.
The second one, a book review this time, appeared this week in the June issue. Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in Bournemouth University’s Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) reviewed the book Midwives and Mothers: The Medicalization of Childbirth on a Guatemalan Plantation by the American anthropologist Sheila Cosminsky [2]. He reminds the reader that some of the work in this book work has previously been published in articles, as clearly stated in the acknowledgments (p. xii). He highlights that “on reading the book I remembered with joy snippets from some of the articles on Doña María I read nearly thirty years ago while working on my PhD thesis.” Cosminsky does a great job of bringing together a lifetime of anthropological (field)work in a comprehensive and easy‐to‐read book.
It is not often that we see reviews written by BU staff in this impressive journal, let alone two in subsequent issues.
References:
Sudbury S. (2018) The Anthropologist Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, and Jeremy Newberger, dirs. 81 mins. English, Russian, Sakha, Kiribati, Spanish, and Quechua with English subtitles. New York: Ironbound Films, 2015, American Anthropologist120(1): 169-170.
van Teijlingen E. (2018) Midwives and Mothers: The Medicalization of Childbirth on a Guatemalan Plantation by Sheila Cosminsky, American Anthropologist120(2): 369.
Clinical Research Network (CRN) Wessex is delighted to announce the date of its next Research Nurse, Research Midwife, Clinical Trial Practitioner and Research Allied Health Professional Forum forum, taking place at Hethfelton House, Wareham, Dorset, BH20 6HS on 5 July 2018.
Please see the draft agenda. Registration is now open.
If you would like to attend this forum please complete registration form.
The Research & Knowledge Exchange Office is pleased to confirm our arrangements for supporting this high profile call in 2018.
Support
There will be a two-day bid writing retreat on 10th and 11th July 2018, with bookings now open
Materials are already available within the International Pathway in the Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework Community on Brightspace. These will be extended as more materials are made available for the 2018 call
External Application Reviewers, where appropriate and subject to Faculty approval
As this is a highly popular call, RKEO need to manage carefully the flow of work within RKEO but also for all your colleagues, who work together to ensure that each application is approved and submitted correctly.
Please endeavour to submit your Intention to Bid to RKEO by 29/06/18. You can, of course, let us know earlier than this date that you intend to apply, so that we can provide you, and your potential fellow, with as much support as possible, right up to the closing date of 12/09/18. It is expected that early drafts should be made available for review and approval processes around the beginning of August, allowing time for all those involved to manage their workloads, including Faculty Quality Approvers, who may be on leave during this period, reducing the options that we have for approvals.
Communication
Once we know that you are thinking of applying, even before submitting the Intention to Bid, we can keep you up to date with announcements from the funder and other sources of help and support.
If you are considering applying and would like to receive updates, please contact Sara Mundy, Funding Development Officer, so that we can register your interest and provide useful information, such as the indicative timetable for actions prior to submission. If you are ready to submit your Intention to Bid, you can do this now, via Sara.
If you have any queries or comments about this scheme, please contact Emily Cieciura, RKEO’s Research Facilitator: EU & International.
Our next Photo of the Week is Alexandra Alberda‘s photo of her drawing of people engaging with Graphic Medicine comics at a museum exhibition. This weekly series features photo entries taken by our academics, students and professional staff for our annual Research Photography Competition, which gives a glimpse into some of the fantastic research undertaken across the BU community.
Alexandra’s work takes Medical Humanities and Graphic Medicine into non-clinical and public settings where health related works are being engaged with presently. Her research furthers Medical Humanities’ engagement with public perceptions of health by expanding the critical vocabulary available to scholars through Comics Studies and curatorial practice. The space of the museum holds a social identity as upholding and defining culture and has a history of exhibiting works that relate to healthcare and the “ill” other/body. How do these bodies and the experiences they illustrate reach our own interpretations of illness, flesh bodies, and lived experiences? Alexandra’s PhD research focuses on these experiences as they are tied to exhibitions and museums, which creates three groups of ‘people’ to the research.
The first group (green) are the people that exist in the museum: viewers, artists, curators, and other museum staff. The second group (pink) are the people represented in the exhibition artwork: both fictional and non-fiction characters in the case of memoirs. Her research focuses on the relationships and engagement that happens between the first and second groups. The third group (orange) involves the relationships between my supervisors, and their expertise, and Alexandra. These relationships will translate into her professional practices and research skills.
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Alexandra Alberda is a PhD researcher in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. Her supervisors are Dr. Sam Goodman, Dr. Julia Round and Professor Michael Wilmore. She received her MA in Art History minoring in Sculptural Painting/Studio Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and BA in English and Art minoring in Honours, Art History and Writing at Briar Cliff University.
Find out more about the role that comics can play in the study and delivery of healthcare on the Graphic Medicine website here.
Diagnosing autism is expensive and time consuming, so a screening tool is used to filter out those people who are unlikely to be diagnosed as autistic. This is all well and good, but our latest research suggests that a widely used screening tool may be biased towards diagnosing more men than women.
Earlier studies have cast doubt on the ability of one of the leading screening tools, called Autism-Spectrum Quotient, to accurately identify people with autism. Our study decided to look at another screening tool that hasn’t yet been investigated: the Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R), a widely used questionnaire for assessing autism in adults with average or above average intelligence.
We compiled the RAADS-R scores of over 200 people who had a formal diagnosis of autism. We compared scores between autistic men and autistic women on four different symptom areas: difficulties with social relationships, difficulties with language, unusual sensory experiences or motor problems, and “circumscribed interests” (a tendency to have very strong, fixed interests).
As there are known sex differences in these areas – for example, with women being better at hiding social and communicative difficulties, and men being more likely to show obvious, and hence easier to detect, circumscribed interests – we wanted to know whether RAADS-R was able to pick up these differences.
Our analysis showed that it didn’t: we found no sex differences in RAADS-R scores between autistic men and women in social relatedness, language and circumscribed interests.
A possible explanation for this result is that, since RAADS-R depends on people accurately judging and reporting their own symptoms, sex differences may only emerge when behaviour is diagnosed by an experienced clinician. Previous studies have shown that autistic people often lack insight into their own behaviour and find it difficult to report their own symptoms.
Another likely reason for finding no sex difference in autism traits is that this and most other studies only include autistic people who have received a formal diagnosis through assessment with the very tools and tests we are investigating. As diagnostic and screening tools (including RAADS-R) were developed with male samples, they are most likely to identify autistic women with the most male-like profiles.
This might explain why fewer women tend to be diagnosed. It could be, then, that the screening tests filter out all of the autistic women with more female-like autism traits, and the autistic women with more male-like traits go on to be diagnosed. Or it could be that the underlying sample is biased because the formal diagnostic tools select people with more male-like traits, and the screening tool merely reflects this underlying bias.
Our results could show that our sample didn’t represent a diverse range of autistic women, then. And this is a problem that affects all research on sex differences in autism.
As more males than females have received a diagnosis of autism, many of the theories we have about autism are based on these diagnosed cases, and, as a result, may only apply to males. Likewise, as we base our screening tools and diagnostic tools on males who have been diagnosed, we may only pick up women who show male-like symptoms.
We could be missing the women who have very different, more female presentations of autism, but who still show the core features that are central to the diagnosis. These include problems with social interaction, communication and restricted behaviour and interests.
Because screening and diagnostic tests focus on the most common, male manifestations of these core symptoms, females tend to be overlooked. Circumscribed interests in males, for example, are more likely to be based on unusual topics, whereas girls and women may centre their interests on things like celebrities or fashion, only the intensity of the interest sets them apart from non-autistic females.
One clear difference
There was only one prominent sex difference that emerged in our study: autistic women reported more sensory differences and motor problems than autistic men. Sensory and motor symptoms are common in autism. People may be over or under sensitive to sights, sounds, touches, smells and tastes, and are often clumsy and poorly coordinated.
Some autistic people are sensitive to certain fabrics. Purino/Shutterstock.com
This self-reported finding, that women have more sensory and motor symptoms than men, needs to be investigated more thoroughly. However, it appears to be consistent with a few studies that have found that autistic women do have more sensory and motor symptoms than men.
If these types of symptoms are especially problematic for autistic women, they could be important for providing a diagnosis. Although RAADS-R measures sensory and motor symptoms, they play a very minor role in gold-standard diagnostic tests, such as the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule.
Diagnosis is important for autistic people for many reasons. For example, it is the only way they can access support services, such as dedicated support workers to help them with activities at home or in daily life. They might also receive financial support if they need it. (Unemployment affects most of the autistic population and may in part be due to high levels of mental illness in this group.)
Other people have spoken about how having a diagnosis has helped them understand the struggles they’ve faced in their lives – that these things weren’t their fault. And it has helped them meet other people who accept them for who they are.
Innovate UK has announced a new competitive scheme that takes a place-based approach to research and innovation funding, to support significant regional economic growth.
To be successful, applications must build on existing research and innovation capability and present a valid plan of new research and innovation activities. These should have a demonstrable impact on local economic growth.
Project consortia must be based within the project’s geographical area and have the support of a local civic leadership.
Projects can be led by either a UK based business or a UK publicly funded research organisation.
This first competition stage is an expression of interest (EOI). Consortia will set out plans for large collaborative proposals. Following assessment, successful EOIs will be selected to receive up to £50,000 in ‘seedcorn funding’ to further develop a proposal for a gull stage project.
Please see summary below:
Competition opens: Monday, 28th May 2018
Competition closes: Wednesday, 25th July 2018 (noon)
Funding available: up to £50,000 seedcorn funding for successful EOIs; full stage proposals between £10million and £50million
Are you interested in conducting your research project in the NHS? Have you got plans to do so in the future? Or, are you simply interested in the prospect of doing this at some point during your academic or professional career?
If you are then there are additional requirements in order to make this a reality…however, don’t worry, because the R&KEO office can assist you in achieving these, helping to streamline the process. Get in touch with researchethics@bournemouth.ac.uk with any queries you may have.
Please note that BU is required to act as the Sponsor for clinical studies conducted in the NHS, by its students or staff members. The Sponsor is defined as ‘the person or body who takes on ultimate responsibility for the initiation, management and financing (or arranging the financing) of a clinical research study.’ Get in touch with researchethics@bournemouth.ac.uk as soon as feasible if you think that your study will require BU to act as Sponsor.
Professor Juliet Memery is presenting Food Waste project
(1) Food waste – this project has received a BA Leverhulme research grant to explore consumer-led strategies for combating the problem of overstocking food. It is astonishing to see some facts and figures around household food waste and learn that the UK is one of largest offenders in this domain. Led by Professor Juliet Memery this research project seeks to understand what consumers do and can do to minimise food waste.
Dr Julie Robson is discussing Trust Repair project
(2) Trust repair in the services context – this project, led by Dr Julie Robson, Associate Professor in Marketing, explores how consumers have reacted to recent transgressions that have affected different service providers, and how businesses in these cases have responded to scandals. Several outputs are in development with numerous conferencepresentations delivered and journal papers in the pipeline. Moreover this project, in addition to a substantial internal research funding, has secured external funding from the Academy of Marketing.
Dr Elvira Bolat introduces the B2B marketing challenges
(3) B2B marketing – is the research field led by Dr Kaouther Kooli. She, together with Dr Elvira Bolat, leads the B2B Special Interest Group of the Academy of Marketing. B2B businesses are the greatest contributors to economic prosperity and in fact the majority of businesses work within complex ecosystems of multiple business players. Interestingly B2B research is hardly covered by the majority of marketing journals and represents an area of enormous research potential that can generate much needed impact for practitioners. This particular project that discusses challenges faced by B2B firms due to digitalisation and ‘poor’ or non-existent branding practices has delivered two special issues with Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing and Journal of Customer Behaviour. Bournemouth University’s academics are now working closely with creative industries practitioners, Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing, and Regent’s University in London to initiate and drive change in B2B branding.
All three projects have attracted internal and external funding and have a series of outputs which will lead to impact case study conversions.
On 16th May ICB kicked off its small series of research sandpits to seek further expansion of the three research projects’ impact.
Academic attendees at the ICB 1st Research Sandpit
First an overview of the current projects was presented. Next, academics from the Faculties of Management, Science and Technology, Media and Communications together with a few local practitioners split into three roundtable (research teams) discussions – to elaborate on potential future research agendas across the three strategic projects. Two-three research directions and suitable external funding opportunities as well as research dissemination plans were identified by each roundtable research team. We are planning to monitor progress of each research team and communicate success stories.
At this point we are planning the second ICB research sandpit – please keep an eye on the Research Blog for further details.
You will no doubt have received the emails yourself: don’t forget to opt in, click here to stay in touch, we don’t want to lose you. The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, comes into force on May 25, and organisations and businesses large and small are racing to ensure the way they collect, store and use the personal data of their customers and clients meets the new, higher standards of this new European Union privacy law.
Compliance with GDPR can be costly, requiring organisations to analyse the way they work, the data they use, how it is handled and secured. Documenting how personal data is held and processed is tedious and time consuming, as is developing procedures for dealing with individuals’ requests to see the data held on them, security breaches that involve loss of data, or assessing the privacy impact of some new product or service.
To data protection authorities across the European Union, such as the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), this is just good practice – the cost of doing business in a free and open market. But what if yours is a non-profit organisation? Several UK charities have been fined for breaking existing data protection laws. Many others are acutely aware that a single penalty for non-compliance could put them out of business.
The ICO has produced guidance for charities, and reading it you might think that the challenges charities face are the same as those facing any small business. Both have limited resources, time and money to spend on ensuring compliance. Losing or misusing personal data leads to the erosion of trust, irrespective of whether those affected are paying customers or charity donors. But scratch beneath the surface and you can see how GDPR causes unique problems for small charities, particularly those that work to help society’s most vulnerable.
Duty of care
The new privacy regulations require that personal data is “processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data”. Any security expert will tell you that perfect security is impossible, so businesses can meet this requirement by investing in security considered “good enough” to meet the duty of care to their clients and customers.
But for charities, the duty of care they have for both their vulnerable client base and their donors is so strong that a culture of cost-cutting has formed. Because charities lack the expertise to understand the risks they face, they may wrongly believe they are avoiding risks, or accept risks without understanding the implications. Ultimately, this works against charities investing in the security they actually need. A report commissioned by the UK Department for Culture Media and Sport in 2017 found this culture even led to some charities intentionally relying on out-of-date or low technology solutions. In one case, a charity was even prepared to accept the risk of damaging data losses, in the hope that their donors would be sympathetic and appreciate that, to them, cybersecurity is a luxury they cannot afford.
Charities care for others, but are not always able to care for their data. perfectlab/Shutterstock
Ethical tensions
The new privacy regulations are built around fair treatment, but this also fails to appreciate the ethical tensions faced by charities. Under GDPR, organisations can only collect data from individuals when they have a legal basis for doing so, for example that the individual has given their consent (such as signing up for an email newsletter), or that the organisation must do so in order to comply with a legal obligation (such as banking information required to meet money laundering regulations). However, complications arise because while an individual may give consent, they may also withdraw it.
Imagine, for example, that Bob suffers from a drug addiction. In a moment of clarity, he checks into private rehab uk for help, and gives consent for the centre to collect what personal data they require. But Bob later relapses, and – to keep this information from his family – withdraws his consent and exercises his right to be forgotten, demanding that the rehab centre deletes the data on him that it holds.
The GDPR provides some discretion for processing personal data in matters of life and death, but not if Bob is capable of giving consent. And so the rehab centre faces a dilemma: it can assert Bob isn’t capable, exposing themselves to the risk of a fine should he report them to the ICO. Alternatively, they can comply and expose Bob to future risks that may threaten his health or life, and reduce or remove the information they know that might one day help save his life.
ICO guidance for not-for-profits should answer the sorts of questions regularly raised by charities. But instead it treats small charities like any other small business. The ICO claims the is information that charities want, but it is not the information they need. If guidance fails to acknowledge the risks to small charities, what incentive do charities have to invest time and money following it?
What charities need are less platitudes on what they should be doing – they already know this – and more advice on how to do it, given the very particular challenges they face. In a speech given to the charities attending the Funding and Regulatory Compliance conference last year, the information commissioner said that getting privacy right can be done, that it should be done, and she would say how it can be done. Yet as the deadline looms, charities are still waiting to hear about the “how”.
In November 2017, we were awarded funding through RKEO’s Charity Impact Acceleration fund to work help a local charity — StreetScene — prepare them for the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At the time, many charities were well aware of what GDPR was and the penalties for non-compliance. However, the guidance made available to them by the ICO was general and costly to implement in terms of time and resources. Our thoughts summarising the dilemmas faced by charities facing GDPR were recently covered by The Conversation.
Using work from her doctoral research, Jane Henriksen-Bulmer has devised a customised Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) process for charities, which she is now putting into practice at StreetScene. This helps them evaluate how privacy impacts their business workflows, and the privacy risks they face.
To help other charities benefit from this work, we will be running a free GDPR for Charities workshop on June 11th at the EBC. The workshop will share the results of this work with around 50 participants who work for or with local charities, and provide hands-on training on the process and complementary design techniques and software tools that charities can put into immediate practice. We’ll also be running a panel with invited speakers to discuss the challenges that small charities face with GDPR.
Although this work is helping local charities, we hope our work leads to more debate on how everyone (and not just big business) can ‘build in’ sustainable security and privacy.
As part of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework Community’s move to our new area on Brightspace, the slides and associated materials from the visit by Robert Porter, PhD, are now available to BU staff. The sessions were:
Funding opportunities for international researchers
Strategies for success
National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Humanities and Social Sciences – opportunities for the non- US researcher
Please note – although you will be able to access other pathways, these have been directly transferred from MyBU and are not in their final format with additional activities yet to be added, as we plan our provision for the coming year. Instead of removing access for now until all is finalised, these have been kept as published so that, despite their ‘work in progress’ status, you can still access them. Please be patient with us as we develop and improve your researcher development resources.
If you have any problems accessing these materials, please contact RKEO.
This speech by the PM today was trailed in the press and here is the link to it as delivered. The Brexit bit is towards the end. [Selection of quotes below, my formatting and edited as otherwise it is a bit hard to follow, it was a long speech]
Government has always had a crucial role in supporting scientific research and the technological advancements that flow from it……from the founding of the learned societies under royal patronage in the seventeenth century to the expansion of state-funded research in universities through the twentieth century.
In the last few years, government support has helped create new landmark institutions,…
And in the Industrial Strategy, we have made a commitment to take our support for UK science and technology to another level. £7 billion in new public funding for science, research and innovation: the largest increase for 40 years.
But to truly succeed we will go even further.
As a government, we have set the goal of research and development investment reaching 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2027 – more than ever before. That could translate to an additional £80 billion investment in the ideas of the future over the next decade.
But even that figure fails to capture the scale of the possibility this will create. Because science and technology have a dynamic relationship. The scientific breakthroughs of today will lead to technological advances which themselves open the door to further scientific discovery, the likes of which are beyond our imagination.
And it won’t just be public funding – our R&D target covers the combined power of government and business alike. That is what the Industrial Strategy is all about – not just the state spending money but using smart public investment to harness private funding. Not government running enterprise, but a strategic state using its power and influence to create the right conditions to allow us to thrive in the long term. A strategic approach means ensuring we have an education system that gives young people the skills they need to contribute to the economy of the future.
That means more free schools and academies providing great school places, a curriculum that sets the highest standards, and proper support for our teachers to deliver it…It means more rigorous science GCSEs preparing young people better for further study and work, and more young people going on to do sciences at A-level. And to attract talented science graduates into the teaching profession, we are offering tax-free bursaries worth up to £26,000 in priority subjects.
And it means going even further in the future. Transforming technical education with new high-quality T-levels that are every bit as good as A-levels. New Institutes of Technology to provide higher-level education and training. And a national re-training scheme to help workers of all ages adapt their skills to the jobs of tomorrow.
This is action from a strategic state to drive policy changes that will benefit our economy, our society and the individuals we serve.
……
So today I am setting the first four missions of our Industrial Strategy – one in each Grand Challenge. If they are to be meaningful, they must be ambitious and stretching. That means that our success in them cannot be guaranteed. But I believe that by setting a high ambition, we can achieve more than we otherwise would. So these are the missions I am setting today.
AI and data
First, as part of the AI and Data Grand Challenge, the United Kingdom will use data, artificial intelligence and innovation to transform the prevention, early diagnosis and treatment of diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and dementia by 2030.
Late diagnosis of otherwise treatable illnesses is one of the biggest causes of avoidable deaths.
And the development of smart technologies to analyse great quantities of data quickly and with a higher degree of accuracy than is possible by human beings opens up a whole new field of medical research and gives us a new weapon in our armoury in the fight against disease.
In cancer, our ambition is that within 15 years we will be able to diagnose at a much earlier stage the lung, bowel, prostate or ovarian cancer of at least 50,000 more people a year. Combined with the great treatment and care provided by our NHS, that will mean every year 22,000 fewer people will die within five years of their diagnosis compared to today.
We will work with industry and the medical research community to announce specific ambitions in a range of other disease areas over the coming weeks and months. Achieving this mission will not only save thousands of lives.
It will incubate a whole new industry around AI-in-healthcare, creating high-skilled science jobs across the country, drawing on existing centres of excellence in places like Edinburgh, Oxford and Leeds – and helping to grow new ones.
Healthy ageing
Second, through our healthy ageing grand challenge, we will ensure that people can enjoy five extra healthy, independent years of life by 2035, whilst narrowing the gap between the experience of the richest and poorest.….
We can do that by supporting more people to stay happy, healthy and independent in their own homes for longer, instead of going into hospital. It will take a collective effort to achieve this.
Employers can help, by meeting the needs of people who have caring responsibilities and by doing more to support older people to contribute in the workplace – and enjoy the emotional and physical benefits of having a job if they want one.
Businesses can contribute, and benefit, by supplying the needs of a growing market.
Innovative and well-designed products and services – from housing adaptations that make our homes safer for older people to live in, to smart technologies that help people continue to enjoy life if they have a health condition. These innovations can also be exported to a rapidly growing market around the world.
And we can all play our part – by making healthier lifestyle choices ourselves, and by supporting our friends and neighbours as they get older.
We can build a stronger society, where more people can contribute their talents for longer and fewer people face loneliness and isolation.
Future of mobility
Third, in the future of mobility grand challenge, we have a mission to put the UK at the forefront of the design and manufacturing of zero emission vehicles and for all new cars and vans to be effectively zero emission by 2040. Technology is revolutionising how we power vehicles, how they are driven, how we navigate and how we access information about public transport.
…We can make our towns and cities cleaner, safer and more productive places to live and work.
We can set a global standard for managing technological change to maximise economic and environmental benefits.
We will work with industry to achieve this ambition, and share the benefits this opportunity presents.
Clean growth
And fourth, in the clean growth grand challenge, we will use new technologies and modern construction practices to at least halve the energy usage of new buildings by 2030.
Heating and powering buildings accounts for 40 per cent of our total energy usage. By making our buildings more energy efficient and embracing smart technologies, we can slash household energy bills, reduce demand for energy, and meet our targets for carbon reduction.
By halving the energy use of new buildings – both commercial and residential – we could reduce the energy bills for their occupants by as much as 50 per cent. And we will aim to halve the costs of reaching the same standard in existing buildings too.
Meeting this challenge will drive innovation and higher standards in the construction sector, helping it to meet our ambitious homebuilding targets and providing more jobs and opportunity to millions of workers across the country. It will be a catalyst for new technologies and more productive methods, which can be exported to a large and growing global market for clean technologies.
….These four missions are just the beginning – and in setting further missions across the four grand challenge areas, we will work closely with businesses and sectors. ….
Science is an international enterprise and discoveries know no borders. The United Kingdom today is at the centre of a web of international collaboration.
Our immigration system supports this, with no cap on the number of the students who can come to our universities, and thousands coming every year, learning from some of the finest academics and contributing to the success of some of the best universities in the world. Indeed, since 2010 the number of overseas students coming to study at UK universities has increased by almost a quarter.
The UK will always be open to the brightest and the best researchers to come and make their valued contribution. And today over half of the UK’s resident researcher population were born overseas.
When we leave the European Union, I will ensure that does not change.
Indeed the Britain we build together in the decades ahead must be one in which scientific collaboration and the free exchange of ideas is increased and extended, both between the UK and the European Union and with partners around the world.
I know how deeply British scientists value their collaboration with colleagues in other countries through EU-organised programmes. And the contribution which UK science makes to those programmes is immense.
I have already said that I want the UK to have a deep science partnership with the European Union, because this is in the interests of scientists and industry right across Europe. And today I want to spell out that commitment even more clearly.
The United Kingdom would like the option to fully associate ourselves with the excellence-based European science and innovation programmes – including the successor to Horizon 2020 and Euratom R&T. It is in the mutual interest of the UK and the EU that we should do so.
Of course such an association would involve an appropriate UK financial contribution, which we would willingly make.
In return, we would look to maintain a suitable level of influence in line with that contribution and the benefits we bring.
The UK is ready to discuss these details with the Commission as soon as possible.
AI and data: “To begin, we have one question: Where can the use of AI and data transform our lives?”
Ageing society: “To begin, we would like to hear your thoughts on the following: How can we best support people to have extra years of being healthy and independent?”
Clean Growth: “To begin, we would like to hear your thoughts on the following: How can our construction industry use its existing strengths to halve energy use in buildings?”
Future of mobility: “To begin, we have one question: How can we ensure that future transport technologies and services are developed in an inclusive manner?”
They want new ideas, case studies etc – please contact policy@bournemouth.ac.uk if you would like to be involved
Postgraduate Researchers make sure you are GDPR compliant by this Friday 25 May 2018 *Managing Research Data – Legal Compliance and Record Management – Tuesday 22 May 2018 – 14:00-16:00 Book Now
Specialist Training *Introduction to NVivo – Thursday 24 May 2018 – 09:00-16:00Book Now
Genarrator project groups at Bishop of Winchester Academy – May 2018 photo ©Rutherford
Fourth INRC Symposium: From Clinical Applications to Neuro-Inspired Computation
ESRC Festival of Social Science 2025 – Reflecting back and looking ahead to 2026
3C Event: Research Culture, Community & Cookies – Tuesday 13 January 10-11am
Dr. Chloe Casey on Sky News
Final Bournemouth University publication of 2025
ECR Funding Open Call: Research Culture & Community Grant – Application Deadline Friday 12 December
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 Call
ERC Advanced Grant 2025 Webinar
Horizon Europe Work Programme 2025 Published
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease