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Beijing and Hong Kong with the Fusion Investment Fund Study Leave Strand. Dr. Rick Fisher, HSC/BUDI

Fusion, Research themes

I applied to be seconded to the BU Dementia Institute, with the objective of raising the profile of the Institute on an international stage. This activity builds on  my current role as chair of the HSC International Strategy Group. The Fusion Fund award was granted to enable me to be released from some of my work commitment within HSC to spend two days per week with BUDI over a period of six months. Contributing to the Fusion Strand ‘Mental health and wellbeing across the lifespan’ the intention was to proactively seek academic and research collaboration with colleagues overseas.

Serendipity?

The intended strategy for this undertaking was to identify overseas areas where there was an opportunity for such collaboration to take place. This would be achieved by undertaking a targeted literature review of existing research centres. An initial reading of primary literature identified that dementia is a growing concern in China. At this time, through my role as a member of BU’s International Task Force, I was aware of a delegation visiting Beijing. A leading light in gerontology, Professor Du Peng, who I had identified through my reading, is Professor of Psychology at Renmin University in Beijing. A small flurry of email exchanges resulted in Dr Biao Zeng from BU’s Psychology department being able to meet with Professor Du, paving the way for a visit to take place later in the year.

I also, with the aid of Professor Anthea Innes, identified Professor Timothy Kwok, of the Jockey Club Centre for Positive Ageing (JCCPA) as a potential collaborator. Timothy and Anthea have previously explored comparative research opportunities. The JCCPA is located in Hong Kong; I could have a ‘free’ stop over with my chosen airline, thereby maximizing the funding. Initial email exchanges with Prof Kwok resulted in an agreement to meet during my trip.The meetings were scheduled for the week beginning September 9th. In the meantime I was introduced to Prof Junqi Yan, who was able to arrange for me to visit a neuro-rehabilitation centre in Beijing, thus adding another opportunity to the visit.

 Visit to Renmin University, Beijing.

Situated in the North of Beijing, Renmin University, (formerly the People’s University of China) is a high-ranking educational establishment and is branded as China’s flagship for Social Sciences and Humanities education.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Students relax on campus

 

 

                      Views of Freshers’ Week

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

On a bright, warm Monday morning Biao Zeng and I met with Prof Du,  Prof James Sun, Chair of the Department of Psychology and Associate Dean of the School of Sciences and also Pro Hu Ping who is Associate Dean in the Department of Psychology. Besides his role as head of Population Studies focusing on Gerontology,  Professor Du is also  Director of Academic research for the entire university.

 

     L-R  Prof Sun, Prof Du, Prof Hu, Dr. Rick Fisher, Dr. Biao Zeng

 We had a very positive meeting in which we discussed a number of opportunities. Prof Du and I discussed possibilities of a bid to a recently announced ESRC call for collaborative research between China and the EU.  He is also in the process of setting up a multidisciplinary centre for the study of ageing and has a sociology/social policy background. Prof Du also demonstrated a project, funded by Samsung, in which it is possible to simulate the difficulties older people and those with a physical disability experience as a result of poor building design. This project appears to have some parallels with research being conducted at BUDI.

Prof Sun, who is also Deputy Director of Leadership Studies, is very positive about collaborative ventures. He is keen to foster PhD studentships and a variety of models of faculty exchange. Our meeting was followed by what Prof Sun described as a ‘simple’ lunch, served in the university private dining room, with exquisite presentation.

In all, this was a very positive visit and I am developing a proposal to maintain the keen interest shown in the ESRC bid.

 Visit to Beijing United Family Rehabilitation Hospital

 On the following day I met with Prof Yan and three of his PhD students. We discussed some of their research projects, which included a study into the pressures and health risks being experienced by the fledgling middle management in China’s burgeoning industrial landscape. We travelled through (very slow) Beijing traffic to visit the newly-established Beijing United Family Rehabilitation Hospital. Privately funded and catering for Beijing’s upper strata, this is dedicated to the rehabilitation of those who have neurological impairment. We were met by Dr Jason Zhou, Assistant Chief Medical Officer and Director of Neuro-rehabilitation. Dr Zhou was enthusiastic about the excellent facilities in the hospital which include hydrotherapy and hyperbaric oxygen therapy and he is keen to explore collaborative opportunities for both research and education.

 

                                       Beijing United Family Rehabilitation Hospital.

  Dr Jason Zhu (left) and Prof Junqi Yan next to the hydrotherapy pool.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Positive Ageing

 The following day was spent travelling to Hong Kong. Here I was to meet Professor Timothy Kwok. Besides his work as Director of the Jockey Club Centre for Positive Ageing  he is Professor in Medicine and Therapeutics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His primary research interests centre around the prevention of cognitive decline in elderly people. On arrival I was shown around the Centre by Research Officer, Bel Wong Pui Sze . The centre is arranged  over three floors with good access for wheelchair users throughout. It comprises two levels of day centres; people attend according to the degree of their dementia. There is also a residential facility offering respite care. A major feature of the Centre is in the ways in which it seeks to support those with dementia and those who care for them at home. These include a variety of literature, short courses and a telephone support line. It also aims to raise awareness of dementia within the general public of Hong Kong.

 

 With Prof Timothy Kwok, at the Jockey Club Centre for Positive Ageing

 

   Respite room at the Jockey Club Centre for Positive Ageing

Prof Kwok has numerous interests focused on elderly care and dementia. We had positive discussions regarding a number of ventures and he expressed considerable interest in collaborating on a Chinese language version of the Dementia Educational Game being developed with Fusion Investment Fund monies, by myself, Dr Christos Gatzidis (DEC) and Jonathan Ferraris.

 

                     Goodnight to Hong Kong

In all, this was a positive experience  that has the potential to deliver collaboration across both China and Hong Kong. The next step is to translate some of this bonhomie into measurable outputs.

I would like to thank the BU Fusion Investment Fund for giving me the opportunity to undertake this venture.

rfisher@bournemouth.ac.uk


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turning Research into Film published in Qualitative Research text

 Just published! A chapter entitled, ‘Turning Research into Film’, by Kip Jones and Trevor Hearing has just been published in Sage’s Qualitative Research for the Social Sciences edited by Marilyn Lichtman. The full title of the Chapter: Turning Research into Film: Trevor Hearing speaks with Kip Jones about the process of creating the short research-based film, Rufus Stone.

Lichtman’s books on qualitative research are well-known and adopted for courses internationally.

The Chapter is an an expansion on an earlier interview conducted by the Media School’s Trevor Hearing. HSC’s Kip Jones illuminates several of his responses with excerpts from the story development for the award-winning, research based short film, RUFUS STONE. Hearing and Jones also collaborated on creating the trailer for RUFUS STONE. 

The film was recently purchased by the Alzheimer’s Society for use in its trainings nationally.  In addition, it will be screened locally for Dorset Healthcare Trust nurses and staff. The film has been keynoted at events at Cambridge, LSE, Birkbeck and Durham Universities over the past year and featured in both the ESRC Festival of Social Science and BU Festival of Learning.

The unique collaboration forged in making the film has been reported in the New York Times and Times Higher Education as well as in academic journals and other book chapters and featured as ‘inspirational’ in the BU’s Annual Report. The film has been screened in academic settings, for social and health service providers and general audiences in several cinemas. Rufus Stone won two awards for short film at the prestigious Rhode Island International Film Festival.

The film will be screened on the Lansdowne campus in December for staff and students.

Monday, 9 December, 1 pm

Wollstonecraft Theatre (BG10)

Bournemouth House

All are welcome!

Just a few reactions to Rufus Stone from audience members attending screenings:

“Critically the authenticity of the film shone through – the characters were real and genuine”.

    •   “emotionally gripping”
    •   “technically innovative and striking”
    •   “a brilliant way to portray research”
    •   “beautiful and very intense”
    •   “a quite remarkable film”
    •   “a brilliant film, beautifully crafted and full of empathy”

Cinematographer Annika Summerson and crew set up shot with Harry Kershaw (centre) who plays young RUFUS STONE

Cyber Security Seminar: “Will people use this? Will they comply?” – Can we answer these questions (Chris Porter, UCL)

I am delighted to announce that our first Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar will take place on Tuesday, 15th October at 5pm.  The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be open to all.  As promised in my previous post, these seminars will be approachable, and require nothing more than a general interest in security, and an enquiring mind.

Our speaker will be Chris Porter from University College London. Chris Porter is a PhD candidate within the Information Security Research Group in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. His research focuses on the design process of identity-centric e-government services together with associated collaborative tools.

Talk Abstract: Design decisions have an impact on the end-user’s experience, and this could in turn influence the end user’s decision making process (e.g. on whether to use an e-service and/or comply with given security requirements). This talk will introduce Sentire, a technique that adapts and merges traditional software engineering techniques with UX (User Experience) and human-centric design principles. This technique, together with associated collaborative tools, helps designers and system developers quantitatively assess and compare the impact that various design decisions can have on the user’s experience (e.g. workload, willingness to complete the task). Persona Calibration, the driving technique behind Sentire, aims at eliminating the turn-around time (and costs) required to get feedback from end-users (required to pinpoint potentially risky decisions) and the concept of a re-usable persona library becomes central to the whole idea. Calibrated Personas are introduced as part of the requirements specification process. The technique has been applied to design decisions specific to e-government service enrolment processes, and some initial results will be presented giving us more scope for a general discussion/Q&A.

Where Has the Fun Gone?

Research is fun; fun is research!  Appraisal targets, REF, RKE income targets, online journal submission systems, conferences – just to name a few of my personal bête noirs – all squeeze the fun out of research for me.  They all matter, no doubt about it, but they are all terribly serious!  Give me a pair of boots, a spade and a note book in some distant field and the stress of the world disappears to be replaced by the intellectual puzzle before me, the banter of my colleagues and a story to tell of past events!  Now that is fun and that is what research means to me.  That is when research is at its most fun, an experience immortalised and crowned by a published paper with illustrations crafted by my own hand.  I would love to know when research is most fun for you?  In fact I am committing myself this autumn to the leading the research is fun campaign!  So why not join me and share your experiences?

New staff profile pages launched

Guidance

We are pleased to announce that the new staff profile pages were deployed yesterday (Thursday). 

The profile pages have a fresh, professional appearance.

  

If you have a BRIAN profile and access to an external page, please have a look at your profile.

The easiest way to navigate to your profile is to open the application (or click on the ‘academic profile’ link from the intranet home page).  Next, click on ‘People’ in the page header and then on the start letter of your surname.  Finally, click on your name.  Your profile will then appear.  You can also search for your name. 

If you have any feedback on the new staff profile pages, please email us at BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

Research Professional – all you need to know

Funding opportunities

Every 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.

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:

22nd October 2013

26th November 2013

28th January 2014

25th February 2014

25th March 2014

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.

Change of venue for eBU drop in session

PG research, Publishing

The venue has changed for the first drop in session for prospective authors and those interested in eBU: Online Journal.

I had advertised sessions on Talbot on Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th – both in PG30d. However, the Monday session will now take place in TAG01. I shall place a sign on the door of PG30d in order to redirect people!

The revised eBU drop in sessions are now as follows:

Monday 7th October 11am – 2pm TAG01

Tuesday 8th October 11am – 2pm PG30d

And on the Lansdowne:

Wednesday 9th 11am – 2pm EBC ground floor cafe

New staff profile pages will be released tomorrow

Guidance

BRIANThe new staff profile page application is being transitioned into live operation during the morning tomorrow.  The new pages should be accessible by noon.

There is nothing BRIAN users need to do.  However, the staff profile pages draw most of their information from BRIAN so ensuring your BRIAN profile is up to date and you have populated the new fields, eg the research field, would be good preparation to ensure your new profile page looks great.

One area of the new profile pages that is still being worked on is the link to documents in BURO.  Documents that are available in BURO can still be accessed from the staff profile pages.  Our work is to remove the link to those documents that are no longer available in BURO.  This work should be complete next week and will mean that BURO document links will only be displayed for accessible files.

Please have a look at the new pages once they are live and let us know what you think by emailing BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU PhD Studentship Competition 2014 – Call for Project Proposals

 The Graduate School is delighted to announce the launch of the 2014 BU PhD Studentship Competition. Potentially, there will be up to 50 studentships available across two parallel strands: (1) Matched Funded and (2) Fully Funded.

At this stage, Academic Staff are invited to submit proposals for studentship projects which, if successful, will be advertised to recruit PhD candidates for an October 2014 start.

Full details can be found on the Graduate School Staff Intranet.

 Support for Academic Staff:

Staff Development are running a one day workshop “Funding your Studentship: engaging effectively with business and industry” on Tuesday 15 October 2013 for academic staff considering submitting a proposal(s). Full details of the event and how to book are available here.

Submission Deadline:

Applications should be submitted on the Studentship Proposal form to the Graduate School; email: phdstudentshipcompetition@bournemouth.ac.uk) no later than 5pm on Monday 6 January 2014. Funding decisions will be made in line with the Studentship Policy within 3 weeks of the deadline.

‘Workshop ‘Modelling Organisational Behaviour and Social Agency’

BU’s Business School is hosting the Workshop ‘Modelling Organisational Behaviour and Social Agency’, 27-28 January 2014, EBC. Abstract submissions are now open!

The Workshop is organised by Davide Secchi (Dept. of Human Resources and Organisational Behaviour, BU) and Martin Neumann (Institute for Information Systems in Business and Public Administration, U. of Koblenz) and it is supported by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) UK. 

We aim at bringing together a group of people that is interested in any aspect of agent-based models (ABMs) of social agents in organisations. We invite submissions that seek to examine the applications, structure, how-to, potentials, and philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of ABMs applied to organisational behaviour and social agency. The workshop welcomes contributions from any discipline, including but not limited to psychology, sociology, management, computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, economics, philosophy, you name it!
Submissions are due 3rd November 2013.
For more information, check the Call for Abstracts.   CFA-ABM Workshop

Publication of the Third NUS/HEA ‘Student Attitudes towards and skills for Sustainable Development’ report

This is the third year of reporting on student attitudes towards, and skills for, sustainable development (SD) continuing research conducted in 2010 and 2011

Two page Executive summary available at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/documents/sustainability/Executive_summary_2013-4.pdf

Full report at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/sustainability/2013_student_skills_final_report

BU is well placed in addressing SD within the curriculum but perhaps we could do more?

CEMP Research & Innovation

Funding opportunities, Publishing

      At the open forum last week, we agreed the following actions for the coming year:

Research & Innovation Bulletin – to continue for information only, once a fortnight, via the research blog, from October 10th;
CEMP meetings – for CEMP staff only, once a month, to include bidding and income monitoring;
CEMP Coffee Mornings – once a month, ‘drop in’ for anyone in the MS who wants to talk to us about funding applications or other research / innovation opportunities. The first of these will be Thursday October 17th;
CEMP workshops – a series of supportive events to help people get started with research, bid writing, publishing, networking;
CEMP Associates – a proposal will be submitted to facilitate more experienced colleagues working with CEMP in a more structured fashion – to collaborate on bid writing, projects and making connections across academic groups.

Fusion: Sports Academic Group and School of Tourism to Advance Partnerships with US East Coast Universities

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion, REF Subjects, Research themes

As part of the overall internationalisation dynamics spreading through the School of Tourism – especially concerned with creating opportunities for students – Dr Tim Breitbarth, Senior Lecturer in Sports Management, will travel to South Carolina and Florida end of October.

The project is funded through the BU Fusion Investment Fund, based on the trips’ three impact-focused objectives of, firstly and mainly, advancing partnership development for the sports academic group as well as the School of Tourism and potentially other Schools as well; secondly, Tim will collect further sets of empirical data for an established and awarded international collaborative research project on CSR and sport; and thirdly, develop and foster industry and research contacts aiming towards strengthening BU’s golf/sport management programmes and editing a first book on global golf business.

Main contacts and places to go are the University of South Carolina, which has the largest undergraduate sports and entertainment management programme of its kind in the USA, with more than 1000 majors and minors (recently been listed in the Top25 in the 2013 SportBusiness Global Postgraduate Ranking), and the University of Central Florida, where a university partnership agreement covering many subject areas is already well underway.

“My experience with the Fusion fund and the way it is managed is that coherent applications focusing on wider impact and multiple outcomes are very welcome,” says Tim, who already was successful with staff mobility and networking applications in the past. Please feel free to contact Tim (tbreitbarth@bournemouth.ac.uk) if you like to learn more about his upcoming trip.