BU Research Blog

Monday

NUS

The National Union of Students will support a major demonstration against austerity and for free education, in a reversal of a decision which was taken over just a month ago. NUS backs national fees demonstration and censures president (THE).

Tuesday

Student Debt

In a new report, The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the loss of maintenance grants which was announced by the chancellor of the Exchequer in this month’s Budget, will see the poorest 40 per cent of students in England leave university with debts of up to £53,000, rather than up to £40,500. You can view the report here.

Extremism

An article in the Guardian Higher Education Network discusses the new responsibilities that universities will face regarding stopping events happening that could potentially draw people into terrorism. The article suggests that the vague guidelines will perpetuate stereotypes and limit debate. The article also mentions that placing such a heavy responsibility on lecturers will subvert the pedagogic relationship between lecturers and students in the university setting. How do you spot a student extremist in a university? (Guardian Higher Education Network).

EU Membership

Universities need more positive and persuasive arguments for EU membership, according to Nick Hillman, Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.  He has argued that universities should focus on benefits of international collaboration and the importance of big research projects. The pro-EU case must be about more than just funding (Research Fortnight).

Wednesday

Consultation- Alternative Providers

The outcome of the ‘Alternative Providers of Higher Education: Improving Quality and Value for Money’ consultation led by BIS has been published. Some key outcomes reveal that the government will require all alternative providers to provide KIS data from 2016/17 as well as requiring students at alternative providers on courses eligible for student support to have their English language skills assessed at minimum international level B2 on starting the course. You can view the consultation outcome here.

Thursday

HEFCE

The inability of universities to demonstrate the effectiveness of initiatives aimed at improving participation, retention and student success is “increasingly untenable” as the teaching excellence framework approaches according to HEFCE. Hefce to ask for data on outcomes of access and attainment schemes (THE).

REF

The Institute of Economic Affairs, has published a report calling for the abolition of the Research Excellence Framework, used by the funding councils to allocate an annual £1.6 billion of quality-related research funding to UK universities. The authors argue that the REF “uses significant resources and distorts resource allocation within the higher education sector away from teaching and knowledge dissemination”. News blog: right-wing thinktank close to Sajid Javid calls for scrapping of REF (THE).

Friday

Graduate Employment

Female graduates are more likely to find jobs after they leave university than their male peers, but those men who do find work enjoy higher starting salaries, the latest statistics on graduate employment show. Female graduates find more jobs, while men win higher pay (The Guardian).

Dr Caroline Jackson, Head of Events & Leisure Department, Faculty of Management was selected Chair of the Association for Events Management Education

Martin Robertson, Jules Hecquet, Caroline Jackson, Debbie Sadd, Mary Beth Gouthro & Lénia Marques from the Department of Events & Leisure, Faculty of Management

Academics from the Department of Events and Leisure, Faculty of Management, attended the Association for Events Management Education (AEME) Annual Forum at Falmouth University in Cornwall, where Dr Caroline Jackson was elected as Chair of the subject association for the next three years. The Association was officially formed in 2004 to advance events education and research. Whilst mainly a UK Higher Education member organisation, there are industry and international members. Caroline, representing Bournemouth University, was one of the founding members of AEME and developers of events education and research.

Dr Debbie Sadd, Dr Mary Beth Gouthro, Martin Robertson and Jules Hecquet presented ‘Creative approaches to learning being used at Bournemouth University’ and Dr Lénia Marques presented ‘The Intercultural Classroom’. Dr Caroline Jackson presented with Dr James Morgan and Chantal Laws from Westminster University about the early stages of a research project being undertaken for the Business Visits & Events Partnership (BVEP) on Events being part of the Creative Industries. Over 50 Event Management educators attended alongside industry representatives. The theme of the conference this year was ‘Creative Risk’ which proved to be a lively topic to debate.

The following funding opportunities have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:

EPSRC

Healthcare impact partnerships

Funding supports projects that progress previous EPSRC-funded research in the crosscutting capability areas of disruptive sensing and analysis, and medical device design and innovation, towards impact within a healthcare application. Proposals must address at least one of the following healthcare technologies grand challenges:

• developing future therapies;
• frontiers of physical intervention;
• optimising treatment;
• transforming community health and care.

Award amount max: Total budget – £5 million, unspecified for each project Closing date: Intent to submit – 27/8/2015, Full submission deadline – 24/9/2015

Academy of Medical Sciences

Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers

Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers offer funding of up to £30,000 to cover the cost of research consumables. The grants allow research-active Clinical Lecturers to gather data to strengthen their bids for longer-term fellowships and funding.

Award amount max: £30,000 over 1-2 years for consumables Closing date: 1/9/2015

Royal Society

University Research Fellowships

The scheme provides the opportunity to build an independent research career. Those appointed are expected to be strong candidates for permanent posts in universities at the end of their fellowships. The scheme covers all areas of the life and physical sciences, including engineering, but excluding clinical medicine and any researcher addressing a direct biomedical research question.

Award amount max: Up to £39,389.64 in salary, up to £13,000 for research expenses, estates & indirects for first year and specified amounts thereafter for 5 years. Closing date: 3/9/2015

NERC

Joint US–UK workshop on improving understanding of potential environmental impacts associated with unconventional hydrocarbons

NERC and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the Environment Sustainability & Energy Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry (ESED), are inviting applications from UK scientists to attend a jointly organised workshop on Improving Understanding of Potential Environmental Impacts Associated with Unconventional Hydrocarbons in Washington DC on 5-6 November 2015.

The deployment of hydraulic fracturing technology to exploit shale oil and gas reservoirs in the USA and now potentially in the UK has raised a number of environmental concerns.

Award amount max: All reasonable travel & accommodation expenses Closing date: 9/9/2015

Highlight Topics

NERC invites proposals for the second round of highlight topics, a route for funding strategic research. Highlight topics focus strategic research on defined subject areas, and will be delivered through independent projects.

The highlight topics in this call are:

• Evolutionary biotic response to environmental change: limits to adaptation.
• Coastal morphology: coastal sediment budgets and their role in coastal recovery.
• Quantifying climate risk for adaptation and resilience planning.
• Closing the global methane budget.
• Reducing uncertainty in the integrity of potential carbon capture and storage sites.

Award amount max: Total call budget – £16 million, maximum per highlight topic – £4 million Closing date: Notification of intent to submit – 21/9/2015, Full submission deadline – 8/9/2015

Innovate UK

Internet of Things cities demonstrator

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is to invest up to £10 million* in a single collaborative R&D project to demonstrate the capability of the Internet of Things (IoT) in a city region. The aim of this demonstrator is to show how the large-scale deployment of IoT – where everyday objects are connected to a network in order to share their data – can benefit citizens by offering environmental improvements, economic opportunities, and more efficient and effective delivery of services such as transport, healthcare and energy.

Award amount max: £10 million Closing date: Registration of interest – 23/9/2015, Full submission deadline – 30/9/2015

Stratified medicine: connecting the UK infrastructure

This SBRI competition aims to accelerate and/or increase the development and adoption of innovative diagnostic tools in order to offer better targeted treatment to patients within the UK healthcare system.

Award maximum: Up to £10 million Closing date: Registration – 28/10/2015, Full submission – 4/11/2015

BBSRC

Flexible interchange programme

Our FLexible Interchange Programme (FLIP) supports the movement of people from one environment to a different one to exchange knowledge/technology/skills, developing bioscience research/researchers and addressing our strategic priorities.

Award amount max: Up to £150,000 Closing date: 15/10/2015

Modular training partnerships

Modular Training Partnerships (MTPs) fund the development of industrially-relevant short training courses at Masters level. Training should be developed in close collaboration with industry, and evidence of industrial demand is a key requirement for funding.

Award amount max: Unspecified Closing date: 15/10/2015

Wellcome Trust

Seed Awards provide responsive, flexible funding, enabling researchers to develop a novel idea to a position where they would be able to be competitive for a larger award from the Wellcome Trust, or another source.

Their exploratory nature gives scope for the use of bold or innovative methodologies, and a broad range of possible activities; from pilot and scoping studies, to preliminary data gathering and proof-of-principle studies, to planning sessions and meetings of collaborative networks. They are not intended to fund discrete projects with no follow-on plans. We encourage applications which propose to carry out interdisciplinary research across our Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Innovations funding.

Award amount max: Up to £100,000 for up to 2 years Closing date: 22/10/2015

Medical Research Council

Skills Development Fellowships

Quantitative expertise: support training for very early career researchers in, or individuals changing disciplines to, areas covering mathematics, statistics, computation and informatics applicable to any biomedical or health-related data sources.

Expertise at the social science interface: with a focus on areas of health economics and/or mixed methods research.

Award amount max: Unspecified Closing date: 16 June 2016

Please note that some funders specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your  RKEO Funding Development Officer

You can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in  RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.

On the 24th and 25th June, academics, clinicians, commissioners and public health officers gathered at the University of Central Lancashire for its second conference on Health Research with Impact organised by the UCLan’s Health Research Methodology and Implementation (HeRMI) hub.
This 2 day conference focused on evidence synthesis and implementation science, with presentations and workshops from national and international experts illustrated with examples from their research.

The conference started with several presentations of evidence synthesis: the constant challenge of keeping systematic reviews up-to date (Dr Maree Hackett, UCLan and The University of Sydney); improving accessibility of evidence for a specific clinical area through Cochrane Overviews (Dr Alex Pollock, Glasgow Caledonian University); and using qualitative evidence to inform global health care policy through improving their acceptability and feasibility for service users and practitioners (Professor Soo Downe, UCLan and Dr Claire Glenton, Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services). It was interesting that both Professor Downe and Dr Glenton highlighted that within global health policy the opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of qualitative evidence to inform policy arose when policy developed from quantitative data alone did not achieve the expected impact.

The first day finished with a workshop by Dr Alex Pollock on user involvement in systematic reviews where she described her experiences of involving physiotherapists and people with stroke to make decisions on which of the many different complex interventions should be included in a systematic review of stroke physiotherapy. This ensured that the review was relevant to both practitioners and patients. Dr Pollock demonstrated how practitioners and patients through a systematic process can be enabled to make key decisions in a systematic review traditionally performed by academics alone.

The conference then considered the context in which evidence is applied through two presentations and a workshop on Realist Evaluation (Professor Chris Burton, Bangor University and Dr Justin Jagosh, University of Liverpool). Dr Jagosh presented on the qualities of Realist methodology to help understand causation – what works, how and why? Professor Burton’s presentations focused on the context in which clinical practice occurs. The success of clinical practice/programme is determined by its interaction with the context in which it occurs and how participants (patients and practitioners) respond to them. Realist research makes theories more explicit by developing clear hypotheses about how, and for whom programmes might work.
Both Dr Lois Thomas (UCLan) and Dr Henna Hassan (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm) presented their experience of ensuring fidelity in the implementation of complex interventions. Professor Joy Duxbury (UCLan) continued the theme of implementing complex interventions in practice by presenting on reducing physical restraint in the North West NHS mental health in-patient settings. A theme throughout all of the presentations on the second day of the conference was the need to develop strong relationships between academia and practice to enable the co-production of evidence relevant to clinical practice.