Category / BU research

British Academy Newton International Fellowships – Information Session

BU research, Funding opportunities, PG research, Postgraduate Research, pre-award, Research news, Research Training

Wednesday 11th November 10:00 – 11:00

BOOK YOUR PLACE NOW

This session provides support for preparing an application to the British Academy Newton International Fellowships. Potential BU mentors and international candidates are welcomed.

The session will provide an understanding of the Newton International Fellowship Scheme, and it’s aims and objectives, and provides support for those considering applying. This is also suitable for those who are not sure if this is the right fund to apply to.

To book, please email Organisational Development with evidence of approval from your departmental Head or Deputy Head.

For more details see here, and if you have any queries, please contact RKEDF@Bournemouth.ac.uk

BU’s Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre opening event -video recording

BU Challenges, BU research, Events, Fusion, Research Centres, Research news

On Monday the 2nd of November we celebrated the opening of BU’s Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre. 

During the event we provided an overview of the techniques, recording modalities and facilities that we have available, and discussed potential collaborations and projects.

The centre is designed to foster collaborative research in neuroscience within the university and with our external partners to enable us to bid for external funding. We also seek to promote education in neurosciences in graduate and post-graduate programs.

If you couldn’t attend and are interested in this area, please find below the video recording of the event. Thank you very much and we hope you enjoy it!

Link to recording: https://bournemouth-ac-uk.zoom.us/rec/share/0Zhf4FTcv9M-KjqFHiuWOUZWVkW-8niOSW2fzs_j5gHQUwSRzfmoX-CURAXQ1goA.R6n_l-4nGOjAfOTg

Passcode: UK#E1QhK

If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact any of us (Ellen Seiss, eseiss@bournemouth.ac.uk, Hanna Burianová hburianova@bournemouth.ac.uk, Emili Balaguer-Ballester eb-ballester@bournemouth.ac.uk, or Peter Arabaci Hills phills@bournemouth.ac.uk).

Annual PGR Conference Keynote Speaker and Registration

BU research, conferences, Doctoral College, Events, Featured, PG research, Postgraduate Research, Research communication

Annual PGR Conference Keynote Speaker & Registration

I am extremely happy to announce that our Keynote Speaker for our 12th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference is Professor Edwin van Teijlingen with his keynote talk ‘Flexibility in Research: Dealing with Adversity’.

You can read Edwin’s biography and keynote abstract on the conference website.

The call for abstracts is now closed.

Registration to attend is now open – all welcome. The full programme will be released in due course.

#BUPGRConf20 | #BUDoctoralCollege

Updated guidance for off campus (outside of the home) research and knowledge exchange activities

BU research, Knowledge Exchange, PG research

In light of the Government’s announcement that new national restrictions will come into force on 5th November to curb the spread of COVID-19, BU’s Major Incident Group has announced that non-essential travel should not take place during this second ‘lockdown’ period.

Therefore, research and knowledge exchange activities which take place off-campus and outside of the home should be reviewed in light of the latest government guidance on essential work. If these activities can be undertaken in a compliant way, the risk assessment should be updated and approved by the relevant Executive Dean. If they cannot be undertaken under the new lockdown conditions, they should pause for the next four weeks.

For colleagues that have previously completed the return to research process and/or undertaking research in the context of COVID-19 process, and have received a letter stating that they can undertake research off-campus, this permission is now paused until restrictions are lifted. If you have reviewed the activities, still wish to proceed and have the approval from your Executive Dean, please email sia@bournemouth.ac.uk and an appropriate letter will be issued. It is recommended that before requesting permission to proceed with research activities, that you read the latest government guidance on research.

This is important as although BU’s campuses have been made COVID-19 secure enabling you to continue to come into work, this cannot be guaranteed in off-campus locations, and therefore careful consideration needs to be taken as to the feasibility of research proceeding between now and 2nd December.

Implications of Covid-19 on researcher development | Survey

BU research, Centre for Excellence in Learning, COVID-19, Doctoral College, Featured, Impact, PG research, Postgraduate Research

As part of our case study exploring the achievements, challenges and opportunities of Covid-19 on researcher development we are recruiting participants to complete our online survey sharing their experiences during this time.

Survey 1: For postgraduate researchers who have engaged in the Doctoral College: Researcher Development Programme over the past 12 months.

Survey 2: For Doctoral College: Researcher Development Programme workshop facilitators.

 

Closing date: Monday 30 November 2020.

 

If you have any questions about the research, please contact a member of the research team:

Natalie Stewart, Dr Martyn Polkinghorne, Dr Camila Devis-Rozental

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research Professional – all you need to know

BU research, 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. The Funding Development Team Officers can assist you with this, if required.

Research Professional have created several guides to help introduce users to Research Professional. 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 Research Professional.

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 Research Professional. 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 Research Professional. They are holding monthly sessions, covering everything you need to get started with Research Professional. 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:

10th November 2020

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.

Have you noticed the pink box on the BU Research Blog homepage?

By clicking on this box, on the left of the Research Blog home page just under the text ‘Funding Opportunities‘, you access a Research Professional real-time search of the calls announced by the Major UK Funders. Use this feature to stay up to date with funding calls. Please note that you will have to be on campus or connecting to your desktop via our VPN to fully access this service.

Discussion on Gender-based Violence in Tourism – Links to Zoom presentations

BU research, Events

A month ago, Dr Paola Vizcaino (Bournemouth University), along with co-editors Dr Heather Jeffrey (Middlesex University – Dubai) and Dr Claudia Eger (Copenhagen Business School) welcomed attendees to the virtual launch of the edited collection Tourism and Gender-Based Violence: Challenging Inequalities (CABI – find the book here). Nearly 30 academics, students and general public joined the discussion on the multiple and interconnected forms of gender-based violence against women and girls in tourism production and consumption. Please find below the links to the Zoom presentations by the book editors, chapter contributors and grassroots organisations.

Tourism and Gender-based Violence, Challenging Inequalities. Edited by Paola Vizcaino, Heather Jeffrey, Claudia Eger

Tourism and Gender-Based Violence Book Launch 30th Sept. 2020, Introduction by Dr Paola Vizcaino – https://youtu.be/P_eRv-adlpI

The relevance of the book and the need to continue examining GBV in tourism research by Dr Stroma Cole – https://youtu.be/8ZCV0h0ev6s

Chapter discussion: Critical debates on Gender-based Violence by Dr Claudia Eger – https://youtu.be/8ewG4Y_YyQE

Chapter discussion: Trafficking in human beings in the tourism industry by Dr Tenia Kyriazi – https://youtu.be/e4zNSHoidWo

Chapter discussion: The double-bind of a female traveller in Morocco by Dr Siân Stephens – https://youtu.be/Brf4XkBQB1k

Chapter discussion: Embodying Gender and Risk: Mountain Bike Tourism in Mexico by Dr Isis Arlene Díaz-Carrión – https://youtu.be/7o20Wsl5Cv4

Profiles of grassroots organisations working to tackle GBV in tourism and beyond by Sara Ali Abdelghani – https://youtu.be/r_U9eOD5OvM

Las Kellys representing hotel workers in Spain, presentation by Myriam Barros (in Spanish with English translation) – https://youtu.be/MBBDSPT879Q

Tourism and Gender-Based Violence – Q&A segment – https://youtu.be/BJc4ATDBO7Y

Closing remarks by Dr Heather Jeffrey – https://youtu.be/VBo2Gyrsb3s

 

Smart technology and the Future of Hospitality and Tourism after COVID-19

BU Challenges, BU research

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis contributed a presentation entitled
Smart technology and the Future of Hospitality and Tourism after COVID-19
to the School of Hotel and Tourism Management, PolyU, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

#IMPACT2020 Conference today.

https://youtu.be/YTqnN27khic

#CrisisManagement #Recovery #Strategy #TourismRecovery #RecoveryStrategy #Future #Hospitality #Tourism #Technology #COVID19 #PostCOVID19 

 

Making your research count: how research impact is measured and what it means for you.

BRIAN, BU research, Doctoral College, Events, Impact, Knowledge Exchange, Postgraduate Research, Research communication, Research news, research staff, RKE development framework, staff profile pages, Training

 

The library is offering a workshop on 16th November on Enhancing your Research Impact: understanding and navigating bibliometrics. 

This will provide an opportunity to understand both what bibliometrics are, and how research impact is measured. We will also discuss how to look after your researcher profile and the various ways impact is measured across different disciplines, as well as exploring Altmetrics and how your research can be viewed through social media posts and downloads.  

You can sign up for this workshop on the staff intranet, and you can explore the information in the guide below to find out more. 

Image sourced from:

Altmetric 2015. Altmetric logo with black text [png]. London: Altmetric. Available from: https://www.altmetric.com/about-us/logos [accessed 29th October 2020].

 

 

Academic Targeted Research Scheme (Data Science for Medical Imaging and Visualisation): Medical Image Analysis

BU research, Research news

My name is Adrian Galdran, and I was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Data Science for Medical Imaging last November, in the context of BU’s Academic Targeted Research Scheme. Although I am particularly interested in medical image analysis, I have a broad interest in medical data taking any shape and nature, be it text, imaging, video, or even big tables filled with numbers!

I have been working on computer vision with medical applications for a while now. After earning my PhD in the Basque Country University (northern Spain), I headed to the beautiful Porto, where I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at INESC-TEC. In those years I focused a lot on the automatic analysis of images of the eye fundus. These are images acquired by projecting light into the back of the eye and capturing a picture of the retina, and they are useful for the early detection of diseases like Diabetic Retinopathy or Age-Related Diabetic Maculopathy.

An image of the eye fundus – the retina

When a person suffers from this kind of diabetes, retinal vessels start to hemorrhage and leak blood into the retina, which at first starts as micro-aneurysms, but later develops into larger lesions and leads to sight-threatening situations. I find it fascinating that we can diagnose diseases like diabetes by looking into the human retina.

After my stay in Portugal, I moved for a second postdoctoral experience to Montréal, Canada, where I worked on deep learning for medical image classification and segmentation, again with a focus on retinal imaging. I spent one year in Canada, with its rough winter and a wonderful summer. It was then that I received the offer to pursue my research within BU, in the context of the new Medical Imaging and Visualisation Institute (IMIV). I am very excited to collaborate with this new institution, which houses an MRI scanner and ultrasound devices. I expect that the privilege of having access to these advanced facilities will trigger research in medical image analysis at BU, and I am hoping to be part of it.

If you are interested in collaborating in any aspect of medical image analysis, please contact me to discuss any common project we may build.

Conversation article: Expanding marine protected areas by 5% could boost fish yields by 20% – but there’s a catch

BU research, Research communication, the conversation

Sweetlips shoal in the Raja Ampat marine protected area, Indonesia.
SergeUWPhoto/Shutterstock

Peter JS Jones, UCL and Rick Stafford, Bournemouth University

Marine protected areas, or MPAs as they’re more commonly called, are very simple. Areas of the sea are set aside where certain activities – usually fishing – are banned or restricted. Ideally, these MPAs might be placed around particularly vibrant habitats that support lots of different species, like seagrass beds or coral reefs. By preventing fishing gear such as towed seabed trawls from sweeping through these environments, the hope is that marine life will be allowed to recover.

When used well, they can be very effective. MPAs have been shown to increase the diversity of species and habitats, and even produce bigger fish within their bounds. A new study argues that by expanding the world’s MPAs by just 5%, we could boost future fish catches by at least 20%. This could generate an extra nine to 12 million tonnes of seafood per year, worth between USD$15-19 billion. It would also significantly increase how much nutritious fish protein is available for a growing human population to eat.

So what’s the catch?

Spillover versus blowback

The scientific rationale is sound. We already know that MPAs can increase the numbers of fish living inside them, which grow to be bigger and lay more eggs. The larvae that hatch can help seed fish populations in the wider ocean as they drift outside the MPA, leading to bigger catches in the areas where fishing is still permitted. We know fish can swim large distances as adults too. While some find protection and breed inside MPAs, others will move into less crowded waters outside where they can then be caught. Together, these effects are known as the spillover benefits of MPAs.

The study is the first to predict, through mathematical modelling, that a modest increase in the size of the world’s MPAs could swell global seafood yields as a result of this spillover. But while the predictions sound good, we have to understand what pulling this off would entail.

The study maintains that the new MPAs would need to be carefully located to protect areas that are particularly productive. Locating MPAs in remote areas offshore, which are hard to access and typically unproductive, would have much smaller benefits for marine life than smaller, inshore MPAs that local fishing vessels can reach. Just 20 large sites in the remote open ocean account for the majority of the world’s MPAs. As the low hanging fruit of marine conservation, these MPAs are often placed where little fishing has occurred.

A world map showing the locations of marine protected areas.
A minority of the world’s MPAs are strict no-take zones.
Marine Conservation Institute/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

The MPAs themselves would also need to be highly protected, meaning no fishing. Only 2.4% of the world’s ocean area has this status. Increasing this by a further 5% would mean roughly trebling the coverage of highly protected MPAs, and that’s likely to provoke a great deal of resistance. Many fishers are sceptical that spillover can boost catches enough to compensate for losing the right to fish within MPAs and tend to oppose proposals to designate more of them.

People in the UK are often surprised to learn that fishing is allowed in most of the country’s MPAs. While 36% of the waters around the UK are covered by them, only 0.0024% ban fishing outright. Increasing the number and size of highly protected MPAs from just these four small sites to 5% of the UK’s sea area would represent more than a 2,000-fold increase. This would be strongly resisted by the fishing industry, snatching the wind from the sails of any political effort ambitious enough to attempt it.

Keeping fishers on board

Gaining the support of local fishers is crucial for ensuring fishing restrictions are successful. That support depends on fishers being able to influence decisions about MPAs, including where they’ll be located and what the degree of protection will be. Assuming that designing highly protected MPA networks is mostly a matter of modelling is a mistake, and implies that fishers currently operating in an area would have little say in whether their fishing grounds will close.

A fisher on a wooden boat casts a net into tropical water at dusk.
Ensuring fishers buy into a new MPA is crucial for its success.
Sutipond Somnam/Shutterstock

But this study is valuable. It provides further evidence for how MPAs can serve as important tools to conserve marine habitats, manage fisheries sustainably and make food supplies more secure. It’s important to stress the political challenges of implementing them, but most scientists agree that more MPAs are needed. Some scientists are pushing to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030.

As evidence of the benefits of MPAs continues to emerge, the people and organisations governing them at local, national and international scales need to learn and evolve. If we can start implementing some highly protected MPAs, we can gather more evidence of their spillover benefits. This could convince more fishers of their vital role in boosting catches, as well as keeping people fed and restoring ocean ecosystems.

Peter JS Jones, Reader in Environmental Governance, UCL and Rick Stafford, Professor of Marine Biology and Conservation, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre informal event

BU Challenges, BU research, BU2025, REF Subjects, Research Centres, Research news, research staff

We would like to invite you to the informal online opening event of BU’s Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Research Centre on Monday 2 November from 10am – 12pm, in Zoom.

The centre is designed to foster collaborative research in applied, translational and theoretical neuroscience within the university and with our external partners to enable us to bid for external funding. We also seek to promote education in neurosciences in graduate and post-graduate programs. The centre offers a range of experimental and theoretical expertise and we are interested in collaborating with internal and external colleagues.

During the event we will provide a very brief overview of the techniques, recording modalities and facilities that we have available. Then we would welcome discussion around potential collaborations and projects.

Add this event to your diary and join us on Zoom. 

Meeting ID: 885 0146 7009
Passcode: BE@hTx^1

Thank you very much and we are looking forward to seeing you there.

If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact any of us (Ellen Seiss, eseiss@bournemouth.ac.uk  Emili Balaguer-Ballester eb-ballester@bournemouth.ac.uk or Peter Abaraci Hills phills@bournemouth.ac.uk).