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Latest BU REF Highlight Report now available

Research assessment

The latest BU REF Highlight Report (#14) is now available for BU staff to download. It covers the period from November 2012 to January 2013.

Features in this report include information about:

  • UOA merger decisions by RASG and new UOA leaderships;
  • BU REF Timetable
  • The REF2014 Module on BRIAN for the Spring 2013 mock exercise
  • Efforts and activities in progressing the environment narrative, impact template and impact case studies
  • Links to the latest official REF documents.

You can access your copy of the report from the following location on the I-drive (just copy and paste the following into Windows Explorer): I:\R&KEO\Public\RDU\REF\REF preparations\REF highlight reports.

1-2-1 Sessions with an Expert Bid Writer at BU Available!

Training

The RKE Development team have organised a unique experience for BU staff; a 1-2-1 with a leading grant writer. With a career background in both Academia and Industry Dr. Martin Pickard of Grantcraft is a specialist in writing and supporting research grant applications and tenders as well as providing administrative and management support services for ongoing projects. During the last 20 years Martin has worked extensively across Europe with a large number of universities, and research institutes as well as industrial firms, ranging from small SME’s to major international companies.

Martin is providing individual 1-2-1 surgeries with any academic staff member and works individually and confidentiality with each Principal Investigator as the project is structured and prepared in order to optimize the application documentation from every aspect of the Funders perspective; guiding, steering and showing how to optimize the application throughout the bid process.

Academics at BU who have undertaken his guidance have stated his ‘support and direction was invaluable – Martin gave me some pragmatic suggestions which really helped to shape the bid. His eye for detail made the document much easier to read and the message much clearer. I was very grateful for his input’ Assoc. Prof Heather Hartwell, School of Tourism.

In this highly competitive environment, many strong applications pass the threshold but fail to reach the funding level not because of their science or what they say, but because of their structure and what they omit to say.  The science and art of Martin’s assistance directly addresses this major hurdle to success from innumerably perspectives; enabling demonstrated significantly higher success rates. Even experienced staff at BU who have utilized his services, have called Martin’s approach, ‘refreshing and helpful and renewed my energies in the arduous search for funding. He has had a major influence on the structure and presentation of my recent bids’ Prof Barry Richards, Media School.

Martin will work with you through a process of successive discussions and iterations of the application document, identifying and optimising as many of the weaker aspects as possible, starting with your 1-2-1 session. Identifying these weaknesses is important and takes considerable experience to be fully encompassing but the unique aspect of this approach is the direct provision of solutions and alternatives assembled from a lifetime career involvement, understanding and practise.  This way, not only are you made aware of the problem but given a direct improvement solution It is only at the latter stages that effective grant-writing becomes evident with tweaks to phrases and styles as well as implementation of key/typical standards and texts. Results confirm that without this build of research structure behind and throughout the application success is always limited. This unique experience is valued by academics who have undertaken this process with him ‘Martin makes you think differently about approaching bid writing, constructing a bid and how to build up an argument throughout the various boxes; without changing the actual content he makes you think how to make key points jump out at the reviewer’, Dr Darren Lilleker, Media School.

The process, although labour intensive, works; with a proven historical average success rates of close to 1 in 2 against norms of 1 in 8 to 1 in 10. You can take up this unique and valuable experience, by booking a session now. 

Appointments are approx 45 minutes long and you can book multiple sessions. You will also have unlimited telephone and email support to progress your application after meeting with Martin and you can discuss several applications with him. 

Martin is at BU on the following dates and times and sessions must be booked through Dianne Goodman

Upcoming dates:

  • 27th March 2013, 1:15-5pm (Talbot Campus) now full

Newly available dates (please note – limited availability):

  • 15th April 2013, 9-11am and 2-5pm (Lansdowne Campus) now full
  • 16th April 2013, 16:15-5pm (Lansdowne Campus) now full
  • 16th May 2013, 9:15am- 5pm (Talbot Campus) now full
  • 10th July 2013, 9:15am- 5pm (Talbot Campus)
  • 4th September 2013, 9:15- 5 (TBA)

 

Grant to develop trans-national partnerships for Cyberpsychology education and research

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion

I was delighted to be awarded a FIF Staff Networking and Mobility grant to develop international links with staff and students in Canada, Australia and Malta in the three areas of e-learning, employability and Cyberpsychology. During the visits I will set-up cross-University online discussions, for students to discuss how psychology theory and methods can be used to understand online behaviour. This will not only develop students’ global awareness and key technological skills, but the activity will also generate research data to inform cross-cultural understanding of online phenomena. Also during the visits, I’m looking forward to learning more about the work of Australian academics into the concept of ‘Psychological literacy’ to bring this into my own employability teaching. Finally, I have been invited to disseminate my own work on psychology teaching and learning through guest talks and staff workshops at each University and I will also be coordinating a Symposium during the International Conference on Teaching of Psychology in Vancouver. A longer term aim is to develop links with these universities to explore psychology student placements. This is going to be a busy 6 months;-)

Need A Fully Funded Research Fellow ???

Funding opportunities, Training

  

 The Prize

These schemes provide strong financial support for a Research Fellow in your department for a period of 12 – 24 months on any research topic.

The Catch

The Research Fellow must come from another European Country or International Base worldwide. It is joint application with you and the fellowship candidate – so they must be identified. (If the fellow is already in the UK they must have been working here for less than 1 year in the last 3.)

The Deadline

Deadline for application is August 2013 – but the forms are relatively easy & straight forward – although moderately time consuming.Fellowships will start in early 2014 but this start date could be extended to early 2015.

Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)                  Deadline  Mid August 2013

International Incoming Fellowships (IIF)       Deadline  Mid August 2013

Note: For people already at the University there is a similar outgoing international Fellowship scheme to enable research periods in other , non European, Labs and Research Centres.

These fellowships are prestigious and highly sought after, especially as they pay very well. There is a difference in emphasis between the two schemes but the overriding criteria is candidate, and host, excellence with respect to the justification of the project rationale. This is all derived from the candidates cv and thus please discuss initially with Martin Pickard who can advise on suitability and fit.

These fellowships are an excellent, and often overlooked, way to expand and compliment a research team. Initial advice is imperative as, again, project structure and rationale with respect to the candidate are very important in determining success and need to be argued and justified around the actual science and project.

Requirements.

One University (Host) and one applicant, of any nationality, other than from than the UK. (candidates may already be in the UK but must have spent less than 12 months of the past 36 in the UK)

The higher the quality of the cv, rated against age and experience, the more likelihood of funding success. Each prospective fellow can only apply for one fellowship but any host can have as many fellows as they want applying to work with the same PI.

The Grant

Typical project period – Minimum 12 months — Maximum 24 months

Fellow income: In excess of 80,000 Euro per year.

University Income: Minimum of 18,000 Euro per year.

Help Needed ??

If you have a research Fellow in Mind (or can find one through networking or your colleague links) the application will not take a lot of time – but a clearly defined and specific approach is required. Guidance notes will be available as well as direct one to one support from our proposal writing specialist Dr. Martin Pickard. 

To assist further we have also arranged a series of 2 morning information sessions to be held on the Wednesday 27th of March and repeated again on the Tuesday 16th of April 2013 

Information Session 1 –  09:00am – 10:00am

A Brief Introduction to the Marie Curie Fellowship Schemes – for those of general interest.  

In addition to the general European topic specific calls under the cooperation programme there are a number of explicit opportunities arising through other schemes – some of which are far more easily accessible and have the advantage of being open to literally any research idea/topic. Several of these arise through the People programme under the Marie Curie calls and this 40 minute plus Q&A information session seeks to highlight some of these opportunities and identify their pro’s and cons so that a clear strategy can be developed to avoid missing these significant, and relatively easy, opportunities.

Information Session 2 – 10:15am – 12:15pm

How to Approach and Structure your Marie Curie Fellowship Application –  for those possibly intending to submit a bid.

The structure of any bid (partner interactions, methodology synergy etc.) is critical to the success of an application and forward planning is a key element of winning proposals.

If you are thinking of applying this August this session will illustrate the basic approach requirements for success and show how to structure and present your research application in the correct form of “Brusselese”.  A brief, 2 hour, guide to the Marie Curie application process.

Please note: If you are already intending to submit a bid this August then Session 1 will provide very little additional information. Also Grants Academy members who have already attended our Grants Academy 2 Day Bid Writing Workshop will not need to attend Session 1 as this has already been covered in your workshop so we would recommend you book into and attend Session 2 only.

If these are a potential interest to you – don’t miss this exceptional opportunity. Please book in ASAP via Staff Development Booking Link to reserve your space as we anticipate these sessions will be very popular.

 

Fusion Investment Fund – Decreasing spatial disorientation: towards dementia-friendly environments

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion

Dr Jan Wiener (DEC) and myself are delighted to have been awarded Fusion funding to develop a student driven research programme to investigate navigation and orientation skills in people with dementia.

Spatial disorientation is among the earliest indicators of dementia, an increasingly common condition in our ageing society that currently costs the UK £23 billion annually. We aim to develop an inter-disciplinary eye-tracking research programme to investigate factors that affect spatial disorientation in people with dementia. Data gathered will be used to formulate design principles for dementia-friendly care homes, potentially reducing care costs, and leading to new knowledge with significance and reach.

To record gaze when solving wayfinding tasks, we will combine eye-tracking, head tracking and virtual reality (VR) technology. Participants will stand or sit in front of an array of large monitors arranged in a semi-circle that subtends their entire horizontal visual field and affords natural viewing behaviour. In order to create this unique and technically advanced research environment, students from DEC, HSC and the Media School will collaborate as researchers, increasing their skills through immersive experience on a well-designed, cutting-edge research programme.

This will give ambitious students with different backgrounds a unique opportunity to work co-operatively as part of a high-level, well-resourced multi-disciplinary team. We will share the knowledge we gain on improving dementia care home design with the academic community, practitioners, service providers, and the general public. These links will in turn enable us to form strategic local and national partnerships to ensure that the knowledge gained has an impact on professional practice.

Dr Mariela Gaete Reyes (HSC/BUDI) & Dr Jan Wiener (DEC)

Renewable energy and renewable technology within the BU fusion and cross-school collaboration initiative

Fusion

This cross-school fusion event is an opportunity to hear about renewable energy initiatives that are engaging the local community and businesses.  A multi-disciplinary network has been developed that engages students with practitioners, real world issues and the development of practical solutions.  In the presentations we will discuss the student experience and how this initiative is developing the transferable skills needed for employment in the 21st century.  You will also hear about the multi-disciplinary network that has been created to focus on renewable energy and renewable technology, current activities and future potential.  There will be an opportunity for informal discussion with those involved and for networking with local businesses and community organisations.

The event will take place on Thursday, 14 February from 1300-1530 in The Octagon, Sir Michael Cobham Library. For a full programme and more detail, please click here.

To book your place, please email staffdevelopment@bournemouth.ac.uk.

CIPPM Spring Lecture Series 2013

The annual series of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management’s (CIPPM) http://www.cippm.org.uk/ Spring Lectures starts on Thursday 21 February 2013 at 6 pm.

Professor Hector MacQueen, Professor of Private Law at the University of Edinburgh will deliver the first lecture, titled “Ae fond kiss: A Private Matter?” on Thursday 21 February 2013.

Professor MacQueen has written extensively on Intellectual Property law and is author, co-author and editor of a number of books on Intellectual Property law. He was the Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Edinburgh (1999-2003) and Director of the AHRC Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law (SCRIPT) (2002-2007). In 2010 Professor MacQueen took up an appointment as Scottish Law Commissioner (2010-2014).

CIPPM Spring Lectures take place at 18:00, in the Executive Business Centre, close to the Bournemouth Travel Interchange (89 Holdenhurst Road, BH8 8EB). The lectures are free to attend, but places are limited, and admission to the building closes at 18:15. If you wish to reserve a place, please contact Mandy Lenihan at ALenihan@bournemouth.ac.uk

For further information on forthcoming CIPPM Spring Lectures and for booking information see http://business.bournemouth.ac.uk/news/2013/jan/ne001-cippm-lectures-2013.html

Workshop Metastable Dynamics of Neural Ensembles. Paris, 18th of July 2013

This workshop will take place this summer in Paris and will have the participation of five of the most recognized European experts in neural modelling. The context is the 23th conference on Computational Neuroscience; perhaps the most prestigious international meeting specialized in this topic, which alternates between Europe and America on a yearly basis (other conferences have mainly a national scope). For the workshop organization we are having the constant support and collaboration of Professor Hamid Bouchachia of BU.
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking on how we would fund the workshop expenses. I mentioned my concern about this to my colleague and director of our Smart Technology Center, Professor Bogdan Gabrys. He strongly encouraged me to apply to the internal European funding schemes. That was a good advice, and thanks to the EUNF funding scheme of BU now I am able to organize the workshop jointly with Professor Gustavo Deco and I am writing this. If you have a similar idea I think you really need to try, response in either way is very, very quick and just takes a short time to apply. You can find the documents in this same blog.
The topic of the workshop is metastable dynamics of neural ensembles. Metastability is a term used in several research areas such as statistical physics; loosely speaking refers to states which are stable but only for a limited time span. We will discuss about the following question: Is the traditional view on brain activity dynamics, in which the cognitive flow of information wanders through multiple stable states driven by task-dependent inputs, still a robust model? This picture has been recently challenged both empirically and from the modelling perspective.
For instance, in several contemporary models, intrinsic noise drives default transitions between cortical states, even in the absence of external stimuli. This model explains a range of puzzling phenomenology such as the intrinsic fluctuations of neural activity observed in functional magnetic resonance imaging when subjects are not performing a task (the so-called resting state). According to these models, cortical noise, commonly regarded as irrelevant, has a fundamental role [1, 2]. But there are completely different metaphors of transient brain dynamics where noise is not an essential ingredient: These models are rather based on complex dynamical objects which explain how metastable states could be mapped to cognitive entities even without the intervention of noise or external inputs [3].

In our woskshop, we will have the contribution of advocates of those two complementary perspectives, as well as a rich representation of different neural models and analyses of neural recordings during perceptual and cognitive processing [4].

[1] Deco, G.,and Jirsa, V. (2012). Ongoing cortical activity at rest: criticality, multistability and ghost attractors. J. Neurosci. 32, 3366–3375.
[2] Deco, G.,Jirsa, V. and McIntosh, A.R. (2011). Emerging concepts for the dynamical organization of restingstate activity in the brain. Nat.Rev. Neurosci. 12, 43–56.
[3] Rabinovich, M., Huerta, R., and Laurent, G. (2008). Transient dynamics for neural processing. Science 321, 48–50.
[4] Balaguer-Balllester, E. Lapish, C., Seamans, J. K. and Durstewitz, D. (2011). Attracting Dynamics of Frontal Cortex Ensembles during Memory-Guided Decision-Making. PLoS Comput Biol. 7(5): e100205.

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PhD Student from DEC presenting at the House of Commons, Westminster London

Mayank Anand a Post-Graduate Research Student at School of Design, Engineering & Computing, BU has been selected by the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee to present his research work to the Members of both Houses of Parliament at Westminster during National Science and Engineering week. In the current research, Mayank is working with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), Head Quartered at Poole, Dorset. The project involves examining the real-time quality of lubricants used in lifeboats of RNLI. This is an industry based PhD in which he spent part of the time at the RNLI HQ working closely with engineering team. The research is also in-kind supported by BP Technology Centre, Pangbourne U.K.

Mayank said, “I see this upcoming event as a great opportunity for an early-stage researcher like me, where one can showcase his/her work and ideas alongside getting invaluable feedback from the judges. Networking will be an added bonus”. He added “the support from the supervisory team at university including Prof Mark Hadfield, Dr Ben Thomas, Sustainable Design Research Team, and the RNLI has been a key in producing good research outputs and gaining confidence to present to a wider mass”.
At the event, Mayank will also be competing against 60 other participants within Engineering and Science session for the prestigious Engineering Medal and 180 others for Westminster Medal for the overall winner as a part of National Competition.

BU to host 35th meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group!

BU will host the 35th meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) on the 16-18 December 2013. TAG is a lively international meeting that promotes debate and discussion of issues in theoretical archaeology.

BU last held TAG back in 1997, a meeting that is still remembered for its strong international profile and also some rather disruptive snow-showers! This year we anticipate 300-400 delegates, many of whom will be undergraduate and postgraduate students. Indeed, TAG 

 is rather unique in the sense it is run by students (overseen by faculty) for students. It presents a valuable opportunity to fuse academic research with student learning, exploring new and topical ideas and showcasing original work.

More details will be posted in due course by event-leader Professor Timothy Darvill.

EU resources at BU

This is just a quick reminder of the resources we at BU to help you with an EU submission.

  • Copies of submitted proposals on the I drive  I:\R&KEO\Public\RDU\European Related\Successful EU proposals
  • Blogposts featuring tips on writing a proposal from our successful award holders as Rudy Gozlan and Bogdan Gabrys 
  • Presentation slides from UKRO and our EU showcase presenters  I:\R&KEO\Public\RDU\European Related

I also wanted to remind you that if you are thinking of making a submission, it is imperative to let your R&KEO Senior Officer know as early as possible to enable them to complete the relevant documentation, obtain signed contracts and provide costings etc.

We have a wealth of EU knowledge, experience and resource so do get in touch!

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BFX

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion

In November 2012 the VFX Hub – a HEIF funded initiative from BU and AUB, launched BFX, a 5-day festival of Animation and Visual Effects that will be held annually in Bournemouth.

One of the highlights of BFX will be a competition which aims to discover the best new talent in Visual Effects and will run from July to mid August 2013, with the winners being announced during the festival in September. Competitors will be expected to form teams of 4-6 members and will have to submit a written creative and technical treatment that explains in detail how they intend to produce an animated or VFX sequence in answer one of five specific briefs. Following the recent award of Fusion Funding the VFX Hub team will be presenting BFX to an international audience at FMX in Stuttgart during April, as well as pitching the competition to Animation and VFX students at several other UK Universities in the coming weeks – with the aim of attracting teams from at least 8 other institutions. The teams will live on campus at BU free-of-charge for the duration of the competition and each member will receive a £70 per week stipend towards their cost of living expenses. The work produced by the teams will mentored throughout the 6-weeks by professionals from Soho VFX companies Framestore, Double Negative, Cinesite, MPC and The Mill.

The rest of the festival itinerary will be updated on the website as events, venues and personalities are confirmed; it will include master classes, workshops, screenings, an exhibition and advice on careers and education.

At an early stage in your research career? Then come to one of our ECR Forums!

Training

Last year we ran a series of forums for academic colleagues who are at an early stage in their research career.  You can find out more about the September session here

The forums are an open, informal sessions where you can meet with experienced academics and members of R&KEO to discuss anything you like to do with research. From publications to projects to funding to research strategy we will be on hand to help and advise.  Going forward we plan to hold these forums on a School by School basis.  If you would be interested in attending one of these events, please contact Nikki Gloyns here.

The next forum will be a Media School event and will be held on 27 March 2013 from 12:30 – 15:00 on Talbot Campus.  If you wish to attend the Media School forum, please contact Nikki Gloyns to book. Lunch will be provided so booking is essential.