Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
The international publisher Routledge published earlier this month a new book with the title: The Psychology of Stress [1]. The three authors of this excellent book are: Drs. Charlotte Mottram, Alison Woodward and Shanti Farrington. The latter two academics are based in Bournemouth University’s Psychology Department.
Well done and congratulations!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
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Dr. Laura Iannuzzi, based in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health, is acting as one of the two guest editors of a Special Issue for the international journal Healthcare. This Special Issue called ‘Advancing Midwifery and Nursing Practice: Equity, Inclusion and Integrated Care’ currently has a call out for contributions. Details can be found by clicking here!
Healthcare is looking for authors to submit papers exploring strategic directions for midwifery and nursing in advancing inclusion, equity, and health. This Special Issue is open to topics such as integrated care strategies and long-term care models, professional nursing roles, evidence-based interventions, and community-engaged approaches. The proposed theme aligns with Healthcare’s focus on multidisciplinary research and practical solutions that improve health outcomes across populations.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:
The Guest Editors are Dr. Simona Fumagalli and Dr. Laura Iannuzzi
Tulip bulbs can be eaten, but it is not a common source of human food. Eating tulip bulbs helped many Dutch people in the Hunger Winter, the last winter of the Second World War (1944-1945). During the German occupation the Dutch suffered from a shortage of food. In the collection of my mother, I found a short book published in 1941 with a made-do-and-mend approach about growing your own food. My mother died this summer at the age of 92.
The book ‘Veel groenten van weinig grond’ (in Dutch: Many vegetables from little soil) gives advice to readers on how to grown vegetables in small plots of land, gardens, etc. This book in the first year of the occupation does not mention the use of tulips as food. Hidden in the book was a typed one-page sheet with three instruction for tulips followed by five recipes. 
The main message seems to be that the preparation of the tulip bulbs as well as the taste is very much like potatoes. For example, the recipe for tulip bulb puree includes boiling the bulbs, one packet of vanilla sugar or vanilla essence, three spoons of honey, artificial honey or syrup, mix well and add warm water.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Faculty of Health, Environment & Medical Sciences
This morning ResearchGate informed us that our paper ‘Understanding health education, health promotion and public health‘ [1] which was published in 2021 has been read 8,000 times. This thinking piece delves into the differences between the concepts of: (a) health education; (b) health promotion; and (c) public health. This confusion does not limit itself to the individual terms,
but also to how these terms relate to each other. Some use terms such as health education and health promotion interchangeably; others see them clearly as different concepts. The paper starts by outlining the authors’ understanding of these individual terms.
They suggest how the five principles of health promotion as outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO, 1984) fit into Tannahill’s (2009) model of three overlapping areas: (a) health education; (b) prevention of ill health; and (c) health protection. Such schematic overview places health education within health promotion and health promotion itself in the centre of the overarching disciplines of education and public health. The authors hope their article helps reduce confusion among all those interested in our discipline, including students, educators, journalists, practitioners, policymakers, politicians, and researchers.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMWH
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Last month a US organisation published The Beautiful Work Challenge: On Birth | The Situation on YouTube. The episode which includes two Bournemouth University professors-Ann Luce and Edwin van Teijlingen can be found here: https://youtu.be/sKdBYTASCt8
The advert for the video highlights questions such as: What’s the current situation in birth? On Birth has stories to tell about the Sahrasia hypothesis, the rulers of birth, an ongoing inquisition, the invention of obstetrics, Hollywood’s influence, and the rise of eBirth. Welcome to the age of medicalised, techno-driven birth. What you don’t know can hurt you.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
Earlier this week the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its annual list of the most popular baby names for boys and girls. The top three names for girls were: Olivia, Amelia and Lily and for boys these were Muhammad, Noah and Oliver. Interestingly two different spellings of Muhammad, namely Mohammed and Muhammed also made it to the top hundred most common names. There is a clear sociology in the naming of babies. First, there is an element of culture and religion, but there is also a clear element of fashion.
To make a simple comparison I looked at the top three most common names for girls and boys in neighbouring the Netherlands. According to Dutch official statistics the top girls’ names were in 2024: Emma, Olivia and Lily, and the top three boys names were: Noah, Luca and Lucas. Interestingly, the top name in England and Wales Muhammad is not even in the top 40 most popular boys’ names in the Netherlands, and neither are Mohammed and Muhammed. However, whereas England and Wales listed three different spellings of Muhammad, the Netherlands had six different ones (these were names used at least ten times that year): Muhammad, Mohammed, Mohamed, Mohamad, Muhammed, and Muhammad. All variants together made it the fourth most popular boys name in the Netherlands.
To highlight the fashion element of naming babies, the name Edwin was not listed on either country’s list. The ONS website also offers historic lists of top 100 names for baby boys and girls for 1904 to 2024 at ten-yearly intervals. The very last year Edwin was in the top 100 boys’ names was in 1944 when it reached number 89 in the top 100!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Professor of Reproductive Health, Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
This week Dr. Pramod Regmi, who is Principal Academic in International Health in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, taught a CPD refresher workshop on systematic reviewing in Kathmandu. This workshop is part of our long-standing Memorandum of Agreement between Bournemouth University (BU) and Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Nepal. The teaching aimed to refresh knowledge and provide practical training on various aspects of the systematic review process, including literature searching, study selection, data extraction, critical appraisal, and synthesis. The programme, which included both staff and Master students, was jointly organized by MMIHS and BU.
The staff at MMIHS also welcome BU’s Ph.D. student Ms. Anjana Paudyal. Anjana is currently in Nepal as part of the UK’s Turing Scheme Traineeship Programme. Over the past few years MMIHS have kindly hosted several BU students who came to Nepal under the Turing Scheme. Anjana’s Ph.D. focuses on human trafficking, which is form of modern slavery. Despite being a global problem, modern slavery is understudied and poorly understood. Victims of modern slavery are exploited and can experience significant physical, psychological, or sexual, and reproductive health problems.
Until recently, there has been little research in this field, especially in low-income countries such as Nepal. Anjana”s Ph.D. fits in with BU’s collaboration with the US-based La Isla Network, the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Nepal Development Society (for details click here!). Led by La Isla Network, we are leading the first-ever international effort to research and address trafficking among Nepalese labour migrants. The work is funded by a $4 million cooperative agreement awarded by the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, International Programs.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
Today the University of Huddersfield reported online on the international array of over 70 delegates who attended the Annual Meeting of the Global Consortium for Public Health Research (GCPHR) hosted by the University of Huddersfield in June. Academics, policymakers, clinicians and researchers from around the world (including from Bournemouth University) spent two days on campus for the third GCPHR yearly meeting. Further details on the online report can be read here!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
At the beginning of July, the chapter Interactive Tangible and Intangible Heritage Applications Built on Real-Time Graphics Systems: Heritage Experiences in Desktop CG, Virtual and Augmented Reality by Eike Falk Anderson, Valery Adzhiev, Paul Cheetham, Glyn Hadley, David John, Catja Larsson, Ana-Maria-Cristina Ureche and Mario Romero was published in the volume Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage of the highly regarded Springer Series on Cultural Computing.
The chapter explores different types of interactive heritage experiences that can be built using modern computer games technologies, including museum exhibits, games and mobile apps, providing exemplars for heritage applications in the form of a set of case studies that encompass both tangible and intangible heritage.
Among the featured case studies are three final year undergraduate student projects that were created at the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) during the 2021/2022 academic year: two projects by Catja Larsson and one project by Ana-Maria-Cristina Ureche. Both alumni co-authored the chapter, demonstrating once again the excellent quality of work produced by NCCA undergraduates.
Today was the first day of strategic planning for the MIHERC project. Our collaborators from Sheffield and Doncaster came down to Bournemouth University to discuss progress, meet with midwifery practitioners from University Hospital Dorset NHS Foundation Trust,
and plan action for the coming year. 
MIHERC comprises an interdisciplinary team, led by Prof. Hora Soltani at Sheffield Hallam University, which has members from ethnically and professionally diverse colleagues from Sheffield Hallam University, Bournemouth University and Doncaster City Council.
Professors Vanora Hundley and Edwin van Teijlingen from the Centre for Midwifery and Women’s Health (CMWH), and Prof. Huseyin Dogan and Dr. Deniz Cetinkaya from the Department of Computing and Informatics are the key Bournemouth University applicants in MIHERC (Maternal & Infant Health Equity Research Centre). Further Bournemouth University academics have been incorporated since its start, these include: Drs. Malika Felton, Orlanda Harvey, Dominique Mylod and Daisy Wiggins. MIHERC is one of the nine NIHR-funded groups to tackle inequalities in UK maternal healthcare as part of the NIHR Challenge Call: Maternity Disparities Consortium. We are proud that of the nine funded groupings across the UK, MIHERC is the only one that is midwifery led.
The long awaited 10-year health plan for England emphasises the use of digital technologies and the aspiration to “make the NHS the most AI-enabled health system in the world”. This requires expertise in artificial intelligence and data science, but interdisciplinary collaboration is also essential if we are to make this a reality.
The Maternal and Infant Health Equity Research Centre (MIHERC) aims to do this by bringing together experts in maternal health, behavioural science, AI and digital health to help drive innovative solutions through co-production and real partnership, ensuring better outcomes for all women and babies. MIHERC is led by Professor Hora Soltani at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) in collaboration with key partners including Bournemouth University (BU), the City of Doncaster Council and South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub.
Alongside Professor Vanora Hundley, who has been appointed as a Capacity Training and Development Lead, Professor Huseyin Dogan and Prof Alessandro Di Nuovo from MIHERC will be co-leading the cross-cutting workstream titled “digital, data, monitoring, evaluation and implementation science” as part of the NIHR Maternity Disparities consortium. This workstreams aims
– to identify and test trusted, reliable AI technologies for deployment by the NHS to help reduce disparities;
– to develop and refine equity monitoring, real-world evaluation and implementation science methods for use in maternity disparities research, with a focus on enhancing their robustness and practical application;
– to embed advanced analytic and digital tools and implementation frameworks into maternity disparities research to improve the rigor and impact of studies on equity; and
– to build a community of practice within and external to consortium to develop analytical, methodological, and implementation science capacity.
The BU key academics are: Huseyin Dogan, Vanora Hundley, Edwin van Teijlingen, and Deniz Çetinkaya. Please do get in touch with the MIHERC team for further information.
What a brilliant and absolutely packed South West Regional Defence & Security Cluster showcase event at the BattleLab on July 2nd, 2025! The team, led by Professor Huseyin Dogan, proudly showcased Bournemouth University’s capabilities in the defence sector.
The Bournemouth University team included Finn Morgan, Nigel Davies, Serdar Akar, and Egemen Oner, alongside their client, Dr. Shamal Faily from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). Among the 180 guests and exhibitors, the BU team presented three Dstl-funded projects covering critical areas such as human factors, risk-informed decision-making, and cyber resilience.
Featured Dstl-Funded Projects:
Collaboration for Secure by Design Practices
In addition to the BattleLab showcase, Dr. Duncan Ki-Aries and Prof. Huseyin Dogan also partnered with Mima, a human-centred design consultancy. Their collaboration focused on developing and evaluating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This MVP demonstrates how safety, security, and human factors analysis can be seamlessly integrated into Secure by Design requirements practices. The tool was successfully demonstrated at the Dstl Portsdown West site in June 2025, further highlighting Bournemouth University’s expertise in developing secure and effective systems for defence applications.
If you’re interested in learning more about these impactful projects, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Prof. Huseyin Dogan and Dr. Duncan Ki-Aries.
Scholars worldwide are in dialogue about using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various fields of research. Of course, AI can make certain kinds of work more efficient, this is also the case in social science research. Although ethical use of AI is still fuzzy, the use of AI in visual anthropological and sociological research that entails the Interpretive Approach raises several questions. The editorial team of Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, including BU’s Professor Edwin van Teijlingen, just published a research note raising three key questions: First, are researchers satisfied with the interpretation (the meaning created) by AI, i.e., the authenticity of the interpretation?; (b) Secondly, can AI reach the depth of the details of the visual object being interpreted? And thirdly, what ethical issues would AI-based research encounter if AI were highly supportive?
They agree that answering these questions is not easy. Since a detailed analysis of these components needs rigorous research work, we consider issues that will be the basis for further research in this editorial note. Hence, the purpose of this editorial note is to bring the research agenda to the forefront of researchers for further investigation rather than answering specific research questions mentioned above.
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Earlier this month (15 June) Dr. Samreen Ashraf, was cited in the newspaper The Guardian in an interesting article with title ‘Modest fashion’ headed for mainstream despite political hostility, say experts. The article recognizes that Dr. Samreen Ashraf pioneered UK research into modest fashion. The journalist reporting on this, Chris Osuh, cited Samreen as saying that the growth of modest fashion “was also driven by women’s desire to avoid objectification” and that “the market remained underserved, with issues around clear labeling from big brands and affordability with smaller suppliers”.
Samreen is Principal Academic in Marketing, the Bournemouth University’s Business School.
Congratulations!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
On World Refugee Day 2025, Friday 20 June, the new Maternal and Infant Health Equity Research Centre (MIHERC) website was launched. MIHERC is a hub for research, collaboration and action on maternal and infant health equity. MIHERC) is a collaborative effort between Sheffield Hallam University, Bournemouth University and City of Doncaster Council working to reduce health inequalities for mothers and babies. This year’s World Refugee Day’s theme, hashtagSolidarity, reflects MIHERC’s mission to stand with all mothers and babies – especially those facing health and social inequalities or barriers to care.
Yesterday the online newspaper Online Khabar in Nepal published an opinion piece in English written by three Bournemouth University academics working with a colleague in Kathmandu. This interdisciplinary piece ‘Resilient through experiences: Unlocking the entrepreneurial prowess of Nepal’s left-behind women‘ brings together ideas gained from many different studies and disciplines. The three authors from Bournemouth University are: Dr. Sukanya Ayatakshi-Endow, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, and Dr. Pramod Regmi, and they collaborated with Dr. Rashmee Rajkarnikar who is based at Nepal’s oldest and largest university, Tribhuvan University. The four authors brings insights from economics, business studies, sociology, women’s studies, migration studies and health.
Yesterday (25 June) the online journal PLoS One published ‘Life-time experience of violence among women and girls living with disability in Nepal‘ our latest study on disability in Nepal [1]. This cross-sectional study was conducted in 28 municipalities representing all seven provinces as well as all three ecological regions of Nepal. A total of 1,294 women and girls with disability aged 15–59 years participated in 2021. We trained local enumerators using the KoBo application on smartphones or tablets. Both written and oral informed consent was sought from all participants. Cross-tabulations were performed in STATA 18 to determine the distribution of the prevalence of violence. Also, bivariable and multivariable logistic regression models were fitted to establish association between the participants’ characteristics and odds of experiencing violence.
Overall, 457 (35.32%) women living with disabilities had ever experienced violence at a point in their lifetime. Psychological/emotional violence was the most prevalent violence (74.40%) followed by physical violence (31.07%) and denial of services (28.67%). Age was positively associated with the likelihood of experiencing violence. Women belonging to the Brahman/Chhetri ethnic group had reduced odds of violence [AOR = 0.56; 95%CI: 0.37–0.85] compared to Hill Dalits. Divorced or separated women showed a markedly higher likelihood of experiencing violence [AOR = 6.69; 95%CI: 2.31–19.40] compared to currently married women. Participants who had not witnessed violence against other women exhibited significantly higher odds of experiencing violence [AOR = 1.86; 95%CI: 1.20–2.89]. Women living in the Koshi province [AOR = 4.04; 95%CI: 2.54–6.42], Madhesh province [AOR = 2.16; 95%CI: 1.15–4.08] and Bagmati province [AOR = 2.21; 95%CI: 1.41–3.46] reported significantly higher odds of experiencing violence compared to those in Karnali.
The paper concludes oncludes that age, ethnicity, marital status, and provincial residence are significant predictors of violence among women and girls living with disability in Nepal. Interventions aimed at addressing violence against women living with disability in Nepal must prioritize older women and those who were previously married. Also, policy-makers may want to consider giving priority must be given to those provinces where the prevalence and risk of experiencing violence is highest.
The study was funded The United Nations Women Trust Fund, and the paper is freely available in the Open Access journal. We previously published on research into disability in Nepal in 2023 [2].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
Visiting Faculty, Centre for Disability Studies, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India.
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This week the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Global Consortium for Public Health (GCPHR) takes place at the University of Huddersfield on June 25th-26th. GCPHR 2025 was attended by people involved in global health research from the UK, India, Nepal, Qatar, and Ghana. Building on the success of the 2023 inaugural two-day meeting and the second annual event in 2024, the 2025 meeting brought together a diverse community of health researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and global health leaders. This initiative has as its main aim to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, promote innovation, and strengthen international collaboration.
Bournemouth University academics have been involved since GCPHR’s inception, and this year Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen from the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH) contributed to a panel discussion on ‘Innovating Tomorrow: National and Global Research in the Age of AI’. He presented around the pros and cons of Interdisciplinary Research in Global Health. Together with colleagues Edwin has published several papers on interdisciplinary research [1-3] and collaborative writing of research output with a range of colleagues from different disciplines [4-5].
Prof. Padam Simkhada from the University of Huddersfield (and Visiting Faculty in BU’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences outlined the recently awarded British Academy grant on ‘Evidence-based Policy-Making in Nepal’. The latter project, which includes BU’s Dr. Pramod Regmi as co-investigator, also has policy-makers in Nepal as collaborators, giving it great potential to become a REF Impact Case-Study.
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BU staff can login below:
UK Turing Scheme: My student mobility programme in Nepal
Bournemouth University psychologists publish new book
Connecting Research with Practice: FoodMAPP Secondment in Austria and France
Health promotion paper read 8,000 times
The Beautiful Work Challenge: On Birth
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 Call
ERC Advanced Grant 2025 Webinar MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025
Update on UKRO services
European research project exploring use of ‘virtual twins’ to better manage metabolic associated fatty liver disease
Research Information Network
Horizon Europe Work Programme 2025 Published
Horizon Europe 2025 Work Programme pre-Published
Explore our work, meet our partners, and find out how you can collaborate with us by clicking here! MIHERC is led by Sheffield Hallam University, with Bournemouth University as a key partner and the important funding coming from NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) Maternity Challenge Initiative. The BU key academics are: Huseyin Dogan, Vanora Hundley, Edwin van Teijlingen, and Deniz Çetinkaya. Please share with all who may be interested.