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user led research event – 6 places left

The PIER partnership (Public Involvement in Education and Research) are hosting a sandpit event with RKEO on 20th June 9.30-4pm to bring together service users, carers and researchers to explore and generate ideas for user led and user generated research.  Speakers confirmed from Involve and the Patients Association. There are just 6 places left for academics who are keen to explore research ideas with service users and to help us to develop ways of supporting user led research. If you would like to be involved, please contact Dr Mel Hughes, Academic lead for service user and carer involvement mhughes@bournemouth.ac.uk

Research Professional – all you need to know

Research-Professional-logoEvery BU academic has a Research Professional account which delivers weekly emails detailing funding opportunities in their broad subject area. To really make the most of your Research Professional account, you should tailor it further by establishing additional alerts based on your specific area of expertise. The Funding Development Team Officers can assist you with this, if required.

Research Professional have created several guides to help introduce users to ResearchProfessional. These can be downloaded here.

Quick Start Guide: Explains to users their first steps with the website, from creating an account to searching for content and setting up email alerts, all in the space of a single page.

User Guide: More detailed information covering all the key aspects of using ResearchProfessional.

Administrator Guide: A detailed description of the administrator functionality.

In addition to the above, there are a set of 2-3 minute videos online, designed to take a user through all the key features of ResearchProfessional. To access the videos, please use the following link: http://www.youtube.com/researchprofessional

Research Professional are running a series of online training broadcasts aimed at introducing users to the basics of creating and configuring their accounts on ResearchProfessional. They are holding monthly sessions, covering everything you need to get started with ResearchProfessional. The broadcast sessions will run for no more than 60 minutes, with the opportunity to ask questions via text chat. Each session will cover:

  • Self registration and logging in
  • Building searches
  • Setting personalised alerts
  • Saving and bookmarking items
  • Subscribing to news alerts
  • Configuring your personal profile

Each session will run between 10.00am and 11.00am (UK) on the fourth Tuesday of each month. You can register here for your preferred date:

27th June 2017

25th July 2017

22nd August 2017

26th September 2017

24th October 2017

These are free and comprehensive training sessions and so this is a good opportunity to get to grips with how Research Professional can work for you.

Back in the Women’s Room – WAN research seminar

Professor Ann Phoenix

On the 24 May the Women’s Academic Network (WAN) held their first public research seminar entitled ‘“Back in the Women’s Room”: Dialogues on gender-focused research’. This seminar, organised by Professor Sara Ashencaen Crabtree (in reference to the famous feminist novel The Women’s Room by Marilyn French), focused on research that had been either funded by WAN or were closely linked to WAN’s aims and interests. Accordingly 5 paper presentations were given by BU academics with a guest appearance by our founding member, Professor Heather Savigny of de Montford University, speaking on the topic of the hidden injuries to women in neoliberal academia.

A profoundly erudite keynote lecture was offered by our eminent speaker, Professor Ann Phoenix of the Thomas Coram Research Unit at the Institute of Education at UCL, who flew in from her secondment at the Helsinki University Collegium for Advanced Studies to attend the seminar. The day was completed by two successive 90 minute workshops, one given by Professor Phoenix on feminist intersectional research and the other being a fascinating, participative social dreaming workshop on women in academia, conducted by Dr Aanka Batta of the Faculty of Media & Communication (FMC). Professor Tiantian Zhang of SciTech gracefully closed the day.

There was good attendance by BU and external academics along with PGR. The seminar was seen to be enormously successful and received excellent evaluations from participants. However, while a thoroughly gratifying outcome (and hopefully the beginning of other such seminars) the main impact of the day was to be able to focus on issues of genuine relevance and concern to women (and male) academics through papers on gendered barriers to academic careers by Professors Ashencaen Crabtree and Chris Sheil. A paper on women knowledge workers and flexible working by doctoral candidate, Aleksandra Biernat, resonated with our awareness of the difficulties of negotiating masculinised workspaces as women. Drs Haana Osman and Lorraine Brown delivered a WAN-sponsored paper on UK Muslim women tourists. Professor Candida Yates followed with another sponsored research paper on perceptions and emotionality in the wake of Brexit – a most topical issue. Dr Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers gave an impressive account on the ambiguities of gender in post-War Kosovo. Finally, Professor Ann Hemingway et al. discussed their early work on Slow Professorship as a means of reclaiming deep scholarship – where synergies were found with colleagues from the Faculty of Management, who are also engaged in exploring this area. We were also really pleased that this work inspired such a strong response for further engagement with our colleagues across Faculties, where Professor Mike Wilmore, Dean of FMC was eager to continue discussions at a higher level.

The day provided a number of valuable opportunities for colleagues to explore gender as both an analytic framework, a subjective experience and as firmly embedded in ubiquitous contexts and daily social interactions. It provided an invaluable forum to examine the complexities, paradoxes and oppressions that form the problematic and bone of contention in gender politics – and in so doing privileged those vital areas of concern that otherwise too often remain unheard and unseen.

 

Professor Sara Ashencaen Crabtree

 

The NHS faces a staffing crisis for years to come

From August, nursing, midwifery and most allied health students will no longer have their tuition fees paid by the NHS, nor will they receive maintenance bursaries. This will undoubtedly affect the number of students opting to study these subjects. And it will negatively impact NHS England staffing levels in three years’ time.

Many nursing students are mature students and having their fees paid has been an incentive to study. At Bournemouth University, we have a large number of mature students who have a mortgage and dependent children, so they may be reluctant to take on more debt. Taking away the bursary could prevent many talented people from becoming tomorrow’s nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech-and-language therapists, to name just some of the healthcare degrees that will no longer be funded by the government.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) confirms that nursing and midwifery student applications across England are down by 23% this year. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the places on these courses won’t be filled, as they are often oversubscribed, but it’s a worrying dip, nonetheless.

If the government – whoever they may be after June 8 – is serious about securing an NHS workforce for the future, they need to be serious about investing in it now.

Inventing new roles

There are over 55,000 EU nationals working as nurses and doctors in the NHS. As a result of Brexit, fewer nurses from the EU are applying for jobs in the NHS. And the RCN confirms that student nurse applications from EU citizens are down 7% this year.

New healthcare roles have been created in an attempt to counteract the changes to student funding and to Brexit, such as the new nursing associate role. A nursing associate is more junior than a registered nurse, but they can go on to become a registered nurse either by completing a degree-level nursing apprenticeship or by taking a shortened nursing degree at university.

The government has also expanded the range of apprenticeship schemes, such as nursing-degree apprenticeships and apprenticeships which support the development of advanced-practice nurses. But none of these initiatives is a quick fix.

In fact, with the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, introduced for all large organisations since April 2017, the government hopes to train 100,000 apprentices in the NHS by 2020. These apprenticeships will include nursing associates and healthcare assistants (a position below nursing associates). This means that all organisations, not just the NHS, who have an annual wage bill of £3m or more will have an apprenticeship levy of 0.5% of their total wage bill deducted to pay towards the government’s apprenticeships scheme. However, paying for a three-year degree apprenticeship by the NHS Trusts will far exceed what the levy will pay for.

Dire consequences

Nursing shortages will not just be bad for patients, they will be bad for nurses too. A study, published in JAMA, showed that a poor nurse-to-patient ratio can result in an increase in patient mortality and have a detrimental effect on the health and well-being of the nurse, leading to job dissatisfaction and more nurses quitting.

The ConversationThe NHS cannot survive the continued and worsening workforce shortage and retain its reputation for high-quality patient care. So, unless incentives are introduced, such as fees paid for those with a first degree to enter these programmes at the postgraduate level, or assistance with childcare, or similar incentives that would encourage candidates to enter healthcare professions, the workforce crisis in the NHS can only continue to spiral out of control.

Elizabeth Rosser, Acting Dean of the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How prehistoric water pit stops may have driven human evolution

Our ancient ancestors seem to have survived some pretty harsh arid spells in East Africa’s Rift Valley over five million years. Quite how they kept going has long been a mystery, given the lack of water to drink. Now, new research shows that they may have been able to survive on a small networks of springs.

The study from our inter-disciplinary research team, published in Nature Communications, illustrates that groundwater springs may have been far more important as a driver of human evolution in Africa than previously thought.

Great rift valley.
Redgeographics, CC BY-SA

The study focuses on water in the Rift Valley. This area – a continuous geographic trench that runs from Ethiopia to Mozambique – is also known as the “cradle of humanity”.

Here, our ancestors evolved over a period of about five million years. Throughout this time, rainfall was affected by the African monsoon, which strengthened and weakened on a 23,000-year cycle. During intense periods of aridity, monsoon rains would have been light and drinking water in short supply. So how did our ancestors survive such extremes?

Previously, scientists had assumed that the evolution and dispersal of our ancestors in the region was solely dependent on climate shifts changing patterns of vegetation (food) and water (rivers and lakes). However, the details are blurry – especially when it comes to the role of groundwater (springs).

We decided to find out just how important springs were. Our starting point was to identify springs in the region to map how groundwater distribution varies with climate. We are not talking about small, babbling springs here, but large outflows of groundwater. These are buffered against climate change as their distribution is controlled by geology – the underlying rocks can store rainwater and transfer it slowly to the springs.

The lakes of the African Rift Valley.
SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE

We figured that our ancestors could have stayed close to such groundwater in dry times – playing a greater part in their survival than previously thought. When the climate got increasingly wet, groundwater levels would have risen and made springs more plentiful – feeding smaller rivers and leading to lakes becoming less saline. At this point, our ancestors would have roamed across the landscape free of concerns about water.

Life and death decisions

To test this idea, we embarked on a computer experiment. If the springs and water bodies are thought of as the rest stops, or service stations, then the linkages between can be modelled by computers. Our model was based on what decisions individuals would have taken to survive – and what collective behaviours could have emerged from thousands of such decisions.

Individuals were give a simple task: to find a new source of water within three days of travel. Three days is the time that a modern human and, by inference, our ancestors could go without drinking water. The harder and rougher the terrain, the shorter the distance one can travel in those vital three days.

We used the present landscape and existing water springs to map potential routes. The detailed location of springs may have changed over time but the principles hold. If our agent failed to find water within three days, he or she would die. In this way we could map out the migration pathways between different water sources as they varied through 23,000-year climate cycles. The map shows that there were indeed small networks of springs available even during the driest of intervals. These would have been vital for the survival or our ancestors.

The model also reveals movement patterns that are somewhat counter-intuitive. One would assume that the easiest route would be along the north to south axis of the rift valley. In this way, hominins could stay at the bottom of the valley rather than crossing the high rift walls. But the model suggests that in intermediate states between wet and dry, groups of people may have preferred to go from east to west across the rift valley. This is because springs on the rift floor and sides link to large rivers on the rift flanks. This is important as it helps explain how our ancestors spread away from the rift valley. Indeed, what we are beginning to see is a network of walking highways that develop as our ancestors moved across Africa.

Mapping human migration.

Human movement allows the flow of gossip, know-how and genes. Even in modern times, the water-cooler is often the fount of all knowledge and the start of many budding friendships. The same may have been true in ancient Africa and the patterns of mobility and their variability through a climate cycle will have had a profound impact on breeding and technology.

This suggests that population growth, genetics, implications for survival and dispersal of human life across Africa can all potentially be predicted and modelled using water as the key – helping us to uncover human history. The next step will be to compare our model of human movement with real archaeological evidence of how humans actually moved when the climate changed.

So next time you complain about not finding your favourite brand of bottled spring water in the shop, spare a thought for our ancestors who may died in their quest to find a rare, secluded spring in the arid African landscape.

The ConversationThis research was carried out in partnership with our colleagues Tom Gleeson, Sally Reynolds, Adrian Newton, Cormac McCormack and Gail Ashley.

Matthew Robert Bennett, Professor of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Bournemouth University and Mark O Cuthbert, Research Fellow in Groundwater Science, Cardiff University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

African springs shed light on history of human migration

New research published this week in Nature Communications, has shown how African springs helped to shape human evolution.

A unique combination of groundwater and agent based modelling has revealed insight into the importance of spring water in human evolution across East Africa.

By mapping springs and other water sources across the African landscape researchers have been able to model how our ancestors may have moved between water sources taking into account the energetic cost of the landscape.

More importantly, by modelling these springs through a simulated climate cycle they have shown how the springs were vital to human survival in the most arid of times.   Springs acted as key hydro-refugia for our ancestors, a term first coined by one of the authors Tom Gleeson (University of Victoria).

As climate became drier the spring and water network became sparse and in reverse, during wet times, they became denser allowing widespread movement.   Understanding this pattern of mobility and its variation with both climate and geological conditions would have impacted on the mixing of genes within our ancestral populations.

Groundwater currently provides nearly a third of the world’s population with drinking water. It is used for irrigation to produce the largest share of the world’s food supply and is a vital commodity, but this research shows that it may have also shaped our evolutionary history.

Mark Cuthbert (Cardiff University) who led the inter-disciplinary team that did the research said, “We found that the geology is really important in controlling how much rainfall gets stored in the ground during wet periods. Modelling the springs showed that many could still flow during long dry periods because this groundwater store acts like a buffer against climate change”.

Matthew Bennett (Bournemouth University) said, “What we are seeing is the movement of people across vast areas of land. You can think of springs as the service stations or rest stops along the way, where people would be drawn to get their vital water sources.  Through our mapping we have found the routes on the current landscape by which our ancestors may have walked, like motorways, taking people from one water source to the next. This is another vital clue in understanding how these people migrated across the African continent, from water source to source, and how this may have impacted on gene flow and mixing.”

This explains the dispersal of people we have seen, as networks of springs have facilitated migration. We are able to see that there were geological reasons for migration, not just climate related reasons. The landscape was a catalyst for change in Africa.

The research was conducted by a collaborative team of academics from the Cardiff University, University of Birmingham, University College London, UNSW Australia, Bournemouth University, Rutgers University (USA) and the University of Victoria (Canada).

Cuthbert, M.O., Gleeson, T., Reynolds, S.C., Bennett, M.R., Newton, A.C., McCormack, C.J. & Ashley, G.M. (2017). Modelling the role of groundwater hydro-refugia in East African hominin evolution and dispersal, Nature Communications, May 2017

Remembering Rio and the Paralympics

 

We’re keen to hear about your memories and experiences of watching the Paralympic Games last summer. If you would like your voice to be heard as part of a 2-year project researching the impact and legacy of the Paralympics, then get in touch and join one of our small friendly focus group discussions taking place during the weeks of June 12th and June 19th 2017.

We kindly ask you to ‘sign up’ to join one of the following groups:

  • GROUP 1: Non-disabled with no direct experience of disability
  • GROUP 2: Including both non-disabled and those with direct personal experience of disability
  • GROUP 3: Those with direct personal experience of disability

The dates and timings of each focus group are provided below.

  • GROUP 1 Monday June 12th & 19th – 5.30pm (refreshments) 6pm start. Ends no later than 7.30pm
  • GROUP 2 Wednesday June 14th & 21st – 2pm (refreshments) 2.30pm start. Ends no later than 4pm.
  • GROUP 3 Thursday June 15th & 22nd – 5.30pm (refreshments) 6pm start. Ends no later than 7.30pm.

Car parking and refreshments will be provided.

To thank you for your time and effort each participant will receive an M&S voucher to the value of £15.00

 

For more information and to register your interest please call us now on 01202 965046 or email cmartins@bournemouth.ac.uk

REGISTER ON EVENTBRITE.

When registering, please let us know of any accessibility requirements.

We look forward to some lively discussion!

Take part in an International Workshop

The British Council is supporting attendance at a number of international research workshops. To find out more about the workshops and how to access funding to attend, please see the British Council website. Opportunities include:

Plese check each workshop for speicifc eligbility requirements and closing dates.

If you are considering applying, please contact Ehren Milner (FM and FMC) or Lisa Gale-Andrews (HSS and SciTech) for further support.

New projects in the Student Project Bank!

There are new projects in the Student Project Bank!

SPB062: Marketing plan to drive adoption of mobile app for local news

Bundle is an iPhone app for local news readers. It works by aggregating local news articles from a variety of reputable sources and delivering the most relevant to users based on their current location. The app has the potential to revitalise the entire local news ecosystem. Bundle is currently available in the UK App Store but very little marketing has been done. Create a robust plan for the marketing of the app, with a focus on outdoor advertising and experiential marketing activities.

SPB063: Shelley’s Heart: Digital Research Animator

Shelley’s Heart will be a downloadable app is set in St. Peter’s churchyard in Bournemouth town centre and features modern alter egos of Mary Shelley and the Romantic poets. As a Digital Research Animator you will be responsible for researching, designing, and developing 16 animated gifs (2-5 seconds in duration) to enhance the audio narrative. These are based on Photoshop illustrations that have been mocked up for the design document/script. Given the desired interactive element, you will be encouraged to research novel animation technologies including snapchat animations, augmented reality, and geo-location tracking. A design document will be provided however, you will have a role in refining the animation design.

Apply now

Projects are available to all undergraduate and postgraduate students at BU and can be used for their dissertation, assignment, unit or group work. Members of staff may also choose a project to set to their students. A complete list of projects is available here. Send us an email to request a project brief and application form.

 

NIHR Fellowships Session – Resources Available Now

Photo courtesy of Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

As part of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework, RKEO held a session on NIHR Fellowships on Thursday 25th May. We heard from fantastic speakers including Dawn Biram from the NIHR Trainees Coordinating Centre about the fellowship opportunities available from the NIHR. We also welcomed Professor Jane Sandall CBE, NIHR Senior Investigator and National NIHR lead for Clinical Academic Careers for midwives, who provided an overview of her own career history before describing what interview panel members look for in a candidate. BU’s very own NIHR Career Development Fellow, Dr. Samuel Nyman then rounded the day off with his own experiences of applying for an NIHR Fellowship, and what it’s like to be an NIHR Fellow.

The resources from the session are now available on MyBU. To access them, please logon to the ‘Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework’ community, and under ‘Pathways’ select ‘National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)’.

For further information, please contact Lisa Gale-Andrews, RKEO Research Facilitator.

 

 

Photo of the Week: Employability After BU- Am I going to be prepared to begin a career where someday my name will be added to the FMC Wall of Fame?

Employability after BU- Am I going to be prepared to begin a career where someday my name will be added to the FMC Wall of Fame?

Employability after BU- Am I going to be prepared to begin a career where someday my name will be added to the FMC Wall of Fame?

Our next instalment of the ‘Photo of the Week’ series features Vianna Renaud’s image of a first year Faculty of Media and Communication (FMC) student contemplating his employability after BU. The series is a weekly instalment which features an image taken by our fantastic BU staff and students. The photos give a glimpse into some of the fascinating work our researchers have been doing across BU and the wider community.

“A first year student takes a break in the Weymouth House lobby. Contemplating the photos and bios of BU alumni who have achieved great success in their careers, he wonders if he is going to be ready at the end of his course to join their ranks.  While he knows that he must undergo a sandwich placement year as part of his course, he wonders how BU is going to help him achieve his goal of securing his dream placement,”

“My research is on peer to peer coaching amongst students where there is a compulsory sandwich placement component in their academic programme. By pairing final year students who have just returned from their industry placement to first year students, I will investigate the impact this mentoring intervention may have on the sandwich placement search of the first year student when they begin their second year,” explains Vianna.

If you’d like find out more about the research or the photo itself then please contact Vianna.

This photo was originally an entry to the 2017 Research Photography Competition. If you have any other questions about the Photo of the Week series or the competition please email research@bournemouth.ac.uk

Psychology PGR Sarah Hodge presents at two prestigious USA conferences and wins prize

Representing the research team from Bournemouth University, Sarah Hodge presented cross-disciplinary PhD research at two conferences in Las Vegas (April) and Denver (May).

The first conference Broadcast Education Association (BEA) included a symposium organised and attended by key academics in the area of psychology and gaming and within this Sarah won top paper in the symposium track and 2nd place student paper. The research presented was funded by the University Student Research Assistant (SRA) scheme, which involved collaboration between departments and faculties. The research involved creating a game to measure in-game moral decisions. The research team included Jacqui Taylor and John McAlaney from the Department of Psychology, Davide Melacca and Christos Gatzidis from the Department of Creative Technology, and Eike Anderson from the National Centre for Computer Animation.

 

At the second conference Computers in Human Interaction (CHI), Sarah had a workshop paper accepted on Ethical Encounters in Human Computer Interaction and this naturally stimulated many interesting questions about ethics in research. Sarah was a student volunteer at the conference. Sarah was a Chair student Volunteer at British HCI 2016 that was held at Bournemouth University last summer and this experience supported being accepted as a Student Volunteer at CHI. From this experience Sarah was assigned the role of Day Captain, which involved supporting and overseeing the other student volunteers with their duties. Sarah found it to be a great experience and highly recommends other students to consider being a student volunteer as a great chance to network and it also helps with funding conferences as the registration fee was waived.

 

Hodge, S. Taylor, J & McAlaney, J (2017). Restricted Content: Ethical Issues with Researching Minors’ Video Game Habits Human in Computer Interaction (CHI) May, Denver USA

If you would like more information about the research please contact: shodge@bournemouth.ac.uk

Research Staff Association coffee morning 31.05.17 – theme networking and collaboration

The next BU Research Staff Association coffee morning is focused on networking and collaboration.

We are delighted to welcome guest speaker Professor Edwin van Teijlingen to share his knowledge and experience in this area.

  • Date: 31 May 2017
  • Time: 10-11am
  • Venue: Well-being Centre, Bournemouth House, Lansdowne Campus.

We look forward to seeing you there.

BU Research Staff Association

Researchers – we need you…!

If that got your attention then keep reading – it gets better!

We need some more researchers from across Bournemouth University (BU) to join us in The Curiosity Playground (part of this year’s Festival of Learning). The Curiosity Playground celebrates the creative, fun and wacky research happening at BU. The purpose of this event is to increase public awareness of the spectrum of research that BU conducts, and the key message is that research is fun, interesting and amenable to all.

There is even some funding available to help develop props to showcase your research (and you get to keep them afterwards so you can use them for other events too).

So what are you waiting for GET INVOLVED!!!!

For more information please contact Michelle Heward mheward@bournemouth.ac.uk

BU Research Staff Association

 

Media short course framework fosters ‘fused’ research

Last Friday and Saturday three courses ran as part of the Media CPD Short Course Framework: Managing Creativity and Innovation, Media Coverage of Extremism, and the Master’s Project. After the two-day intensive residential all students returned to their respective workplaces to begin professionally oriented (fused) research projects which, in the past, have seen students on this programme drive change in their organisations. Seen here, enjoying ‘networking drinks’ after day one are some of the students and tutors (L to R): Tobi Adesuyi (Channel 4); Peter Bloore (Managing Creativity tutor); Newton Velji (Edinburgh International Television Festival Committee); Mark Readman (Master’s Project tutor); and Mukundi Lambani (Brainbow Productions, Johannesburg).

For more information, or if you’re interested in developing a course, contact Mark Readman.