Category / Research themes

From Nepal, to BU and back again

PG research, student research

Recent BU graduate Dr Pratik Adhikary is currently working alongside BU researcher Professor Edwin van Teijlingen and the Centre of Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health (CMMPH) in Nepal.

The CMMPH have been working on improving maternity care in Nepal for a number of years. They’ve most recently begun looking at the impact of women’s groups on maternal and child health uptake in Pharping- rural Nepal.

A former BU PhD student, Dr Adhikary is in charge of planning and monitoring the study, as well as training local Nepalese data collectors. He also looks after the data entry and the overall evaluation of the study.

As well as this, Newton funding is offering him his first fieldwork post as an independent researcher. Below we follow his journey from a former BU student to a BU staff member.

“I’m originally from Nepal and came to Bournemouth University in 2009 to study for my PhD. This looked at Nepalese migrant workers working in the Middle East and Malaysia – this focused on their physical and mental health, as well as any risks they took in their jobs. Previously, I studied for an MSc in Public Health at the University of Aberdeen, as well as working as a cardiac data collection officer in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary,” says Dr Adhikary.

“Studying at BU was very important for my academic career. I was lucky enough to present my PhD study at an international conference, which provided me with useful feedback from both academics and early career researchers,”

“My academic supervisors Prof van Teijlingen and Dr Steven Keen were instrumental throughout my PhD- in gaining a partial fee waiver, international travel funds to attend conferences and arranging a grant from the open society foundation,”

“As a young researcher, I am planning a number of drafts for publication in 2017. Support from my BU colleagues has given me a unique stepping stone in the academic world,”

“Being at BU has enabled me to grow my researcher’s network and provided me with an insight into the some of the highest quality of research in the world,” says Dr Adhikary, “I’ve always felt at home at BU and I’m keen to continue my research career here! “

You can read one of Dr Adhikary’s PhD papers online for free here

Dr Adhikary was also a co-author on this recent 2016 paper on the BU Research Blog

Patient and Public Involvement Seminar Series

DrBUDSPA James Gavin is running a free series of seminars on  patient and public involvement (PPI).

This series will highlight the importance of PPI throughout the research cycle, from design to dissemination. PPI is gaining importance to identify treatments that meet people’s needs and are more likely to be adopted in practice.

Speakers will share insights on involving the public as partners to improve: relevance, quality, study protocol design and the communication of findings in health research. The speakers are from a variety of roles in occupational therapy, mental health, social work, health demographics, education and national health governance.

To find out more information and to book your place please click here.

Date Location Time Speaker Seminar Title
Monday 6 March 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 3.00-4.30pm Professor Jo Adams Making research meaningful and accessible to patients: Why PPI is crucial to designing effective health research studies
Wednesday 15 March 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 3.00-4.30pm Lisa Gale-Andrews & Dr Zoe Sheppard Importance of public involvement in research design: an orthopaedic case study
Monday 3 April 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 3.00-4.30pm Dr Mel Hughes & Angela Warren Recruiting and supporting participants to engage in meaningful PPI
Monday 24 April 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 11.00am-12.30pm Simon Denegri How can today’s patient help research tackle tomorrow’s health challenges?

Eating out in Britain: the feeding habits of non-native pitcher plants

Recent work from Bournemouth University indicates that these non-native pitcher plants are consuming bumblebees but their current impact is limited.

In a bog in Dorset grow a small patch of the strange, alien like forms of the invasive pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea. It is adapted to the poor soils of American wetlands and therefore supplements its diet with insect prey, luring them in with the promise of sweet nectar.

bog1

Photo by Anita Diaz

It is not every day that an invasive plant species also counts as predator and this can prove a challenge for management. The pitchers are one such case and a research team from Bournemouth University have been investigating the impact these invaders are having on the native bumblebees. They have done this by looking at the contents of the pitcher’s

traps.

Their results showed that no rare bumblebee species were found in the sampled pitchers from 2012-14. In 2013 the pitchers were found to be consuming a considerable amount of bumblebees (101 bees in the 170 pitchers sampled), however, very few bumblebees were caught in 2012 and 2014. Bumblebees also seem to be attracted to pitchers where the pitchers grow in higher density, suggesting that the bumblebees are treating the pitchers as they would another floral resource, despite individuals being trapped.

It is quite probable that the bumblebees feed off the flowers of the pitcher plants, as they do in the plant’s native America, as well as the nectar from traps. It is also likely you see flowers online due to the low capture rate of pitchers (around 1 in 100 insects get caught), and the majority of visiting bumblebees are getting a ‘free meal’ in a bog habitat with limited other resources.

‘It could very well be that the sugar rich solution produced by the pitchers, coupled with the low trapping rate of pitchers, is worth the risk to our native bees’ Dr Liz Franklin

bee in pitcher

Photo by Anita Diaz

It is important to prevent the spread of invasive plants like S. purpurea, as they can have a drastic impact on our native plant life and wildlife, however in a sensitive bog habitat with Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) status, removal could cause severe damage to the native habitat and risk the further spread of the invasive.  It is hoped that this work will help inform when and where management of S. purpurea is needed in its invasive populations around Europe

Although further work needs to be done on the interactions between invasive pitcher plants and their native prey, the pitchers might not be as bad for our bogs and their fauna as first thought, although it will be important to keep an eye on them.

 

Want to find out more, visit our open access article

Franklin E, Evans D, Thornton A, Moody C, Green I, Diaz A. Exploring the predation of UK bumblebees (Apidae, Bombus spp.) by the invasive pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea: examining the effects of annual variation, seasonal variation, plant density and bumblebee gender. Arthropod-Plant Interactions.:1-0.

 

 

New Post-doc says ‘Hi’

IaNmUdIe

Hi all,

This is just a quick post to introduce myself – I started in January as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Human Sciences and Public Health, and am working on the Implementing Nutrition Screening in Community Care for Older People (INSCCOPe) project (led by Professor Jane Murphy).

This project explores factors that may promote or inhibit successful implementation, and embedding in routine practice, of a new procedure for screening and treatment of malnutrition by integrated community teams (ICTs). The procedure is currently in development as part of service improvement work within Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, and the INSCCOPe project will run in parallel. The project will run for 14 months, and is informed by Normalisation Process Theory (NPT) (http://www.normalizationprocess.org/).

I’ve been made to feel very welcome in my short time at BU, and look forward to meeting new people in the faculty in future. Below is a short summary of my background and current research/development interests.

Kind regards,

Mike.

(p.s. apologies if you’re seeing this for the second time – I initially sent this around the HSS-staff list by mistake)

Dr. Mike Bracher (Post-doctoral Research Fellow, INSCCOPe project)
Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Department of Human Sciences and Public Health, Bournemouth University.

Background:

  • I’m health sciences researcher with a social science background, and the majority of my research experience has been in the areas of autism and cancer.
  • I completed my PhD, an exploration of pre-diagnostic identity formation in the lives of people diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome in adulthood, at the University of Southampton from 2009-2013.
  • Following this, I completed a service evaluation and development project at the Autism Diagnostic Research Center (ADRC Southampton), which explored post-diagnostic support needs.
  • In February 2014, I moved to the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Southampton, where I worked as part of a team to produce the first analysis of free-text survey responses from a national (Wales) sample of cancer patients (http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/9/e011830).
  • I was also involved in methodological developments in the application of text mining to analyses of free-text responses from large surveys (http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/10/e007792), and a further analysis of free-text responses from patients in England who had been diagnosed with cancer of unknown primary (CUP).
  • From February 2015 to February 2017, I worked as a Research Fellow on the True Nth Decision Support: Understanding Consequences project, a complex intervention aiming to improve treatment decision support for men with low and moderate risk prostate cancer.

Current research interests and professional development aims:

My research interests are in the uses of data from applied health research to drive improvements in healthcare by:
​

  • better understanding the needs of specific populations;
  • understanding social and organisational processes that promote or inhibit successful provision of services or implementation of new technologies and innovations;
  • developing models and tools from theoretical and empirical knowledge of experiences and/or processes in healthcare, as a basis for service improvement.

My current professional development aims include:

  • further development in conversation analysis – conversation analysis offers a set of useful tools to describe and analyse micro-level processes that shape everyday interactions in healthcare settings;
  • further development in quantitative data analysis methods, including exploration of epidemiological and psychometric methods;
  • programming using Python and R.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS Two-day workshop: Politics in a post-truth era

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

Two-day workshop: Politics in a post-truth era

10th – 11th July 2017, Bournemouth University

The concept of post-truth, where facts are deemed less important than beliefs, is one that has recently been frequently invoked when making sense of the modern political campaigning environment. The suggestion is that political campaigns exploit and reinforce strongly held beliefs, encouraging the disavowal of contrasting facts, in order to undermine support for the arguments of opponents.

Post-truth has become most associated with campaigns that invoke more populist arguments. Such arguments give voice to privately held beliefs, often hidden by norms of societies which reinforce pejorative stereotypes based on religious and racial differences, gendering of roles and discussing myths of us (as a nation and people) and the others whose differences mark them as not us. Hence there are far-reaching implications of such practices for democratic societies.

The workshop will explore the underlying themes and implications of this phenomenon.

KEY QUESTIONS

1) Is post truth really new, or simply a synonym for the exaggerations and spin long associated with the techniques of political campaigns? Or have political campaigns been proven to lie more?

2) What does a post-truth campaign look like, how is the communication constructed to tap into belief systems and feed the dynamics of a post-truth (belief-based) political environment?

3) Why might beliefs have more power in influencing voting behaviour than more fact, logic or reason based arguments?

4) How does post-truth link to the models of a marketised and professionalised campaign environment?

5) What does post-truth tell us about the current and future state of democratic engagement and of democracy itself?

CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions need not be full papers, rather informed arguments that promote discussion – although they should have the potential to be full or part papers. The workshop seeks to tease out what post-truth means, how this is encouraged during political campaigns, its root causes, impacts on election outcomes and, importantly, what are the implications for democracy.

PUBLICATION

The longer-term aim is to develop an edited collection of work that would include solo-authored or joint publications from participants that address these questions. The volume will be published in the Palgrave series Political Campaigning and Communication.

DATES

The event will be held on July 10th and 11th with a workshop dinner on the evening of the 10th. There will be no attendance costs – the venue, refreshments and evening meal will be covered jointly by funding from the Centre for Politics and Media Research and the PSA Political Marketing Group.  Participants should expect to cover travel and accommodation. The venue will be the Bournemouth University’s Executive Business Centre close to Bournemouth train station.

ABSTRACTS

Interested participants should propose their participation by offering a short 200-300 word abstract that summarises the main points of the argument, case studies and evidence drawn upon and the broader socio-political implications into which their argument offers insights. The deadline for abstracts is 1600hrs GMT on Friday 6th April 2017. Please email them to dlilleker@bournemouth.ac.uk ​

Deadline Extended: Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis

conferences, international, open access, PG research, Publishing

The deadline has been extended to the 14th of April , 2017.

This is a call for papers for the Special Session on Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis at IEEE CIBCB 2017.

The IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB 2017) will be held at the INNSIDE Hotel, Manchester from August 23rd to 25th, 2017.

This annual conference has become a major technical event in the field of Computational Intelligence and its application to problems in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, chemical informatics, bioengineering and related fields. The conference provides a global forum for academic and industrial scientists from a range of fields including computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and engineering, to discuss and present their latest research findings from theory to applications.

The topics of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):

  • Medical image classification
  • Medical image analysis
  • Expert systems for computer aided diagnosis and prognosis
  • Pattern recognition in the analysis of biomarkers for medical diagnosis
  • Deep learning in medical image processing and analysis
  • Ethical and Security issues in machine learning for medical diagnosis and prognosis

Up-to-date information and submission details can be found on the IEEE CIBCB 2017. The submission deadline is the 14th of April, 2017.

Please e-mail srostami@bournemouth.ac.uk with any questions.

British Academy Visit – reserve your place now!

Funding opportunities

british_academy_logoThe British Academy is returning to BU on 8 March 2017.  This is an invaluable opportunity to find out more about the international and domestic funding available through the organisation.  For those of you who are not familiar with the British Academy, it is the UK’s leading independent body for the humanities and social sciences, promoting funding, knowledge exchange and providing independent advice within the humanities. 

The session will last just over  1 hour (13:00-14:15) and will comprise a presentation focusing on international and domestic funding opportunities along with an overview of the British Academy, followed by a Q&A session.

Representatives of the British Academy will be available to answer any individual queries not covered in the presentation or Q&A session, and members of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office will be on hand should you wish to discuss BU’s processes for bidding to the organisation.

Places for this event can be reserved through Organisational Development here.

 

New paper published by CMMPH’s Dr. Susan Way

Publishing, Training, writing

This week saw the pre-publication of ‘Core principles to reduce current variations that exist in grading of midwifery practice in the United Kingdom’ in Nurse Education in Practice.  This paper is co-authored by Dr. Susan Way in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH).  The authors argue that these core principles could contribute to curriculum development in midwifery and other professions internationally.

Congratulations!

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

Reference:

  1. Fisher, M., Way, S., Chenery-Morris, S., Jackson, J., Bower, H. Sue Way Feb 2017(2017) Core principles to reduce current variations that exist in grading of midwifery practice in the United Kingdom, Nurse Education in Practice (forthcoming) see: http://www.nurseeducationinpractice.com/article/S1471-5953(17)30092-6/abstract

 

BU staff, students and alumni celebrate the launch of Events Management: An International Approach

student research

Editors

Dr Paul Kitchin, Lecturer Sports Management, Ulster University and Dr Nicole Ferdinand, Senior Lecturer Events Management, Bournemouth University, Editors for Events Management: An International Approach

On January 25th 2017, Bournemouth University staff and students celebrated the launch of Events Management: An International Approach. The text brings together the work of 22 authors boasting 11 nationalities. At the launch event, which was hosted at King’s College London, leading Editor for the publication, Dr Nicole Ferdinand, Senior Lecturer in Events Management at Bournemouth University was joined by BU colleagues, current students and alumni as well as staff and students from a range of universities and other organisations – including Goldsmiths University, University of East Anglia, University of East London, University of West London, Set Square Staging Limited and Vodafone.

Ms Emelie Forsberg, Event Manager for British Private Equity and Venture Capital, Panel Member, Author and BU Alumnus

Ms Emelie Forsberg, Event Manager for British Private Equity and Venture Capital, Panel Member, Author and BU Alumnus

 

Mr Christian White (pictured left), BU alumnus and Youngest Author of Events Management: An International Approach

Mr Christian White (pictured left), BU Alumnus and Youngest Author of Events Management: An International Approach

 

The event started with an international networking reception in which attendees from 15 different countries were given the opportunity to meet individuals from a variety of cultural and also professional backgrounds. At the end of the reception two lucky attendees received free copies of the text.

Networking session in full swing

Networking session in full swing

Dr Paul Kitchin hosted the book launch, providing an overview of the text and facilitating the academic versus industry panel discussion which was the highlight of the evening’s proceedings.

Author panel members (from left to right) Academics: Professor Stephen Shaw, Emeritus Professor, York University, Dr Nicole Ferdinand, Senior Lecturer, Events Management and Dr Nigel Williams, Senior Lecturer Project Management both at Bournemouth University, Industry: Mr Bruce Johnson, Manging Director, Bruce Johnson Consultancy, Ms Emelie Forsberg, Event Manager, British Private Equity and Venture Capital and Mr Michael Chidzey, Marketing Director, Chillisauce Events

 Events Management: An International Approach is available for purchase from Amazon.co.uk:  https://goo.gl/c8rZ3O

 

 

High Dynamic Range Point Cloud Rendering

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

RSImg

Speaker: Dr Carlo Harvey

 

Title:     High Dynamic Range Point Cloud Rendering

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 15th February 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract: As a new member of staff, I feel it useful to use this opportunity to briefly present my previous research in the field of physically based rendering.

This seminar however, will be mainly focussed upon introducing the challenges that enshrine my current research into synergising High Dynamic Range and Point Cloud data. Specifically the work presented will introduce a technique in development to flip the standard paradigm of geometry triangulation and re-topologisation from Point Cloud data. Instead, this fairly laborious, and often manual process, is optimised away from the rendering pipeline and rendering is instead conducted on a set of generated point lights and estimated surfaces reconstructed from a sparse set of points.

 

We hope to see you there.

NIHR webinar: How nurses can build a career in research – 11am on Wednesday 22 Feb

Nurses are in a unique position on the frontline to see where the gaps are in delivering care and what questions need answering. Pursuing a clinical academic career can provide a stimulating and rewarding career pathway.

Training and career development awards from the National institute for Health Research (NIHR) range across all levels, are open to a wide range of professions and are designed to suit different working arrangements and career pathways.

This special one hour webinar, specifically for nurses, will explore the opportunities available to nurses from the NIHR to pursue a clinical academic career.

This webinar will cover:

  • An overview of the funding opportunities available from the NIHR for nurses to pursue a clinical academic career
  • Details about the HEE/NIHR Integrated Clinical Academic Programme (for non-medical professions) – including advice and guidance on applying
  • Some of the challenges nurses can face and tips on how to overcome them
  • A live Q&A session

The webinar will be presented by Dr Pete Thompson, Assistant Director at the NIHR Trainees Coordinating Centre and HEE/NIHR Senior Clinical Research Fellow Kirsty Winkley, Specialist Diabetes Nurse.

You can register for the webinar via the following link: http://bit.ly/researchcareersfornurses

If you have any issues when registering please email tcc@nihr.ac.uk.

Don’t forget, your local branch of the NIHR Research Design Service is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) on the 5th floor of Royal London House. Feel free to pop in and see us, call us on 61939 or send us an email.

CEMP awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship.

Awarded & submitted bids, REF Subjects

MarieCurie-fellowship     cemp-logo

CEMP’s Richard Berger has been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship. The Fellowship seeks to provide professional development opportunities for an early careers researcher in an innovative research environment. The award is a recognition of CEMP’s recent activities, specifically its international conference, two journals and unique Doctor of Education (EdD) programme – which the Fellow will join as a tutor and supervisor.

To that end, Dr. Annamaria Naeg (currently at the University of Nottingham’s China campus) will join CEMP and the EdD programme in September 2017. Over the next two-years, Annamaria will work on the EU funded project ‘MediaLitRefYouth’, supervised by Richard.

In 2015 alone, almost 90.000 unaccompanied minor asylum seekers registered in the EU. Mass media reported intensely on how smart phones became crucial tools for young people during their journey. Unaccompanied children and teenagers have to navigate through European public systems, cultures, languages and institutions. The ‘MediaLitRefYouth’ project aims to discover and aggregate how unaccompanied minor refugees are using digital technology after receiving asylum in their host countries. Moreover, the project will use the results of the study to design creative educational interventions aiming to develop young refugees’ media literacy as the EU has stressed media literacy’s vital importance for digital engagement, economic growth and job creation. To achieve this, Annamaria will collaborate with an NGO which works with young refugees through creative arts and participatory action research (PAR). The tangible outputs of this project will be educational materials for civic engagement through media.

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