Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
The HRA have recently released a blog post, written by their Director of Policy, Juliet Tizzard surrounding Research waste and ensuring transparency. The blog goes into the importance of ensuring that research results, even if unfavourable, are published and disseminated appropriately.
You can read the blog here.
If you are running your own clinical research then get in touch with Research Ethics to discuss registering your study and for assistance with this task.
Image from www.horiba-mira.com
Up to £20million funding is available from the Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) where upon investment will be made in technologies that support the development of low carbon propulsion technology in the UK and ancho a next-generation supply chain.
The APC is particularly looking for projects that support the UK’s long-term capabilities and supply chain in the design, build and manufacture of low-emission vehicle technologies.
Projects must help make capabilities a permanent part of the UK supply chain. They must be in the following areas:
Projects must have a proven technology concept and demonstrate that there is a clear route to market. The primary technology application must be automotive.
Please see below for a summary of funding opportunity:
Competition Opens: 6 August 2018
Deadline for competition: 3 October 2018
Requirement : Must be led by a business working in partnership with others; must include SME; and a vehicle manufacturer/ tier 1 supplier
Funding available: £5m to £40m
Project duration: 18 to 42 months
A briefing event will be held on 16 August 2018 where further advice on applying for APC funding will be available. Please click on this link to find out more.
Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) is a growing part of clinical research, and as such the National Institute for Health Research have released a pilot training resource surrounding PPI – free, and available via the NIHR Learn website (select the NIHR Endorsed Learning link).
PPI is defined as ‘research being carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ members of the public rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them’, and there are clear benefits to incorporating this into your own research. The module will take you through the importance, theory and practice of PPI.
In applying for NIHR grants and funding, this is a core requirement. Likewise evidence of this activity having taken place, will be requested.
On the above website, there are further training modules available surrounding various key areas of clinical research.
If you wish to book onto any of the face-to-face Good Clinical Practice courses, please get in touch with Research Ethics.
Over the past year, Dr Ben Hicks and Dr Shanti Shanker have been running a range of public outreach seminars, funded by the British Psychological Society, to explore identity and raise awareness of issues related to the brain and neuropsychology. Part of this work included a series of graffiti workshops for people living with dementia both in the community as well as an Assisted Living Facility in Brighton. These workshops sought to use this art form as a means to engage people with dementia and explore their sense of ‘self,’ whilst also providing them with an opportunity to participate in new, meaningful activities and continue their life-long learning.
As part of the project this work was filmed and the final piece is now available for public dissemination. If you are interested in the work, please take a look at the video below, which details the 2-day graffiti workshop at the Assisted Living Facility, Brooke Mead in Brighton. The graffiti workshops were delivered by Angela El-Zeind from GraffInc. and the video was produced by James Skinner from Skinner Productions.
For further details on the project, please contact Ben Hicks on: bhicks@bournemouth.ac.uk
Dr Sascha Dov Bachmann, Associate Professor in International Law (BU) and War Studies (Swedish Defence University), acting Director of BU’s Centre for Conflict,Rule of Law and Society has joined forces with Professor Louis de Koker and Professor Pompeu Casanovas from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia to convene the conference
Global peace and security has seen the arrival of new security threats in the form of hybrid threats and cyber-attacks.
This symposium provides a platform for the discussion of a new form of warfare, namely ‘hybrid warfare’. Hybrid war is the use of a range of non-conventional methods (e.g. cyber warfare and lawfare) in order to disrupt, discourage and disable an adversary’s capabilities without engaging in open hostilities and may use the full range of military and non-military options for achieving its strategic objectives. Such hybrid warfare might include aspects of ‘cyber terrorism’, ‘cyber war’ and cyber-based ‘information operations’, a topic of particular interest given Russia’s ‘Ukrainian Spring’, the continuing threat posed by radical Islamist groups in Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region as well geopolitical shifts.
The interdisciplinary symposium will discuss military doctrines, new and traditional approaches to war and peace and its perceptions, the use of cyber warfare, the use of mass media communication to meddle in internal state affairs, including impact on state elections and public sentiment, as well as the use of lawfare (the strategy of using – or misusing – law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve a war-fighting objective) to achieve military goals in a non-kinetic way and the use of various means to disrupt a nation’s economy, public services and national interests.
At the heart of the symposium stand the questions of how to increase resilience and whether responses to such hybrid threats need to change in the future.
This seminal conference brings together academics and military professionals from the region and beyond to discuss new security challenges from a Asia-Pacific and especially an Australian perspective.
Deadline for submissions: 31 October 2018
Symposium Date: 25 – 26 March 2019
Place: La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Proposals must be sent by email to the Lead Convenor: Professor (AP) Sascha Dov Bachmann (email: sbachmann@bournemouth.ac.uk).
Convenors:
Please see the calls currently open, or forthcoming, being offered through the Newton Fund scheme.
If you are interested in applying to any of these calls then please contact your RKEO Funding Development Officer, in the first instance.
Newton Advanced Fellowships (Academy of Medical Sciences)
The Academy of Medical Sciences, in partnership with the Royal Society and the British Academy, is offering Newton Advanced Fellowships to support early to mid-career international researchers from partner countries.
Applicants from China
Deadline for applications 5 September 2018 – 3pm UK time
Newton Advanced Fellowships (Royal Society)
This award is currently available to international early career group leaders to develop their research by linking them with some of the best research groups in the UK.
Awards are currently only available for scientists in the following country: China
Deadline for applications 5 September 2018 – 3pm UK time
PhD Placements and Supervisor Mobility Grants China-UK (British Council)
This programme is a sponsorship opportunity for UK and Chinese PhD students and their supervisors to spend a period of study of three to 12 months (for PhD students) and up to three months (for supervisors) at higher education institutions in China or the UK. The focus is on research areas that reflect the common interests and demands of both countries, including:
Deadlines for applications 20 September 2018 – 12pm UK time
Development of intelligent devices and AI algorithms for recognition of user experience through emotion detection using physiological signals are explored in this project. The designed intelligent device would recognize user’s emotion quality and intensity in a two dimensional emotion space continuously. The continuous recognition of the user’s emotion during human-machine interaction (HMI) will enable the machine to adapt its activity based on the user’s emotion in a real-time manner, thus improving user experience.
Experience of emotion is one of the key aspects of user experience affecting to all aspects of the HMI, including utility, ease of use, and efficiency. The machine’s ability to recognize user’s emotion during user-machine interaction would improve the overall HMI usability. The machines that are aware of the user’s emotion could adapt their activity features such as speed based on user’s emotional state. This project focuses on emotion recognition through physiological signals, as this bypasses social masking and the prediction is more reliable.
Prediction of emotion through physiological signals has the advantage of elimination of social masking and making the prediction more reliable. The key advantage of this project over others presented to date is the use of the least number of modalities (only two physiological signals) to predict the quality and intensity of emotion continuously in time, and using the most recent widely accepted emotion model.
If you are interested to collaborate or know more about this project please contact Roya Haratian, lecturer in Department of Design and Engineering, Science and Technology Faculty.
Rick Stafford, Bournemouth University
Our oceans are threatened by three major challenges: climate change, overfishing and pollution. Plastic pollution is of growing concern, and has gained international attention from governments, media and large sections of the public, partly fuelled by last year’s BBC documentary Blue Planet II and its images of sperm whales and seabirds entangled or ingesting plastic debris.
Despite the attention plastic pollution has received, some scientists think this is the least important of the major marine threats, and that climate change and fisheries need more urgent attention.
This is not to say that plastic is not a major issue – it is, especially in some parts of the developing world, and in large open ocean gyre systems where ocean currents meet and all that they carry accumulates. Research has also found that microplastics (small fragments which form as larger plastic pieces are broken down in the sea) are found in seafood, and plastic may even accumulate as it passes up the foodchain.
One reason why plastic pollution seems to get more attention than other threats to the ocean is that the issue may have a technological “fix”. The Ocean Cleanup is the flagship tech solution to marine plastic and proposes using several 600-metre long barriers to float in the ocean current and catch plastic drifting in the surface waters of the gyres.
Invented by a then 19-year-old student, the idea has come in for criticism in recent years with concerns ranging from the project’s ability to reach microplastics to it causing harm to wildlife.
Nevertheless, the Ocean Cleanup has captured imaginations by trying to reverse the problem of ocean plastic on a large scale.
We’re familiar with the idea that we can all do something to prevent plastic ending up in the sea, such as refusing plastic straws and carrying a refillable water bottle. However, while we need to use less, we also need to produce less, and throw away less of it. This means not only individual behaviour change, but changes in industrial processes, and government policies worldwide.
The visual impact of plastic pollution and high levels of public interest might be fundamental to some solutions. In many countries, local beach cleans are a regular occurrence, and are rapidly gaining in popularity. It has also been suggested that despite plastic hotspots in ocean gyres, eventually, many large plastic items will wash up on beaches, and that a significant proportion of plastic waste ending up in the sea comes from coastal or riverside communities.
This provides hope for community networks to be formed that can combat plastic pollution at a local level. These networks need to expand beyond beach or river clean-ups to involve and engage multiple groups and individuals in society.
These stakeholders, who have a shared interest in healthy oceans, should include local retailers who can provide deposit return schemes on bottles and other recyclable materials and even reduce or eliminate the sale of products such as plastic straws, disposable coffee cups, plastic bags and takeaway containers.
Local councils could set up rubbish and recycling facilities for beach goers and enforce penalties for littering and fly tipping near beaches and rivers.
Communities in charge of managing their local environment have been shown to be effective in coastal areas, but issues always arise with the scaling-up of these approaches to national or international levels.
There is clearly a need for policies which support local initiatives, rather than combat them. For example, government policies should immediately call for bans on non-essential plastic packaging rather than “working to a target of eliminating avoidable plastic waste by the end of 2042” as the UK’s 25 year environmental plan currently indicates.
Remaining non-essential packaging should urgently be made recyclable, and recycling incentive schemes, such as payment for recycling, need to be introduced quickly, beyond the approaches used by local retailers.
Technological solutions can and should form part of our approach to environmental problems, whether plastic pollution or climate change. However, they can only be part of a solution.
Schemes which change attitudes and empower communities at a local level can be effective worldwide, but they need support from national and international policies to bring about real change. At present, pollution and natural resources are dismissed as necessary casualties in the pursuit of economic growth.
Support for seaside communities in policy is missing, and until it is in place, no high tech miracle will step in to save us.
Rick Stafford, Professor of Marine Biology and Conservation, Bournemouth University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The mahseers are an iconic group of fish found throughout the fast-flowing rivers of South and South-East Asia. Characterised by their large scales, attractive appearance and potentially vast size, the mahseers have long been afforded saintly status as “God’s fishes”. They are also known to anglers as some of the world’s hardest fighting freshwater game fish, earning them the reputation of “tigers of the water”.
But despite lots of interest in mahseers, their future is under serious threat as their rivers become polluted and blocked by hydropower dams in order to support a rapidly growing human population. Those fish that do survive are vulnerable to illegal “dynamite fishing” in which a blast kills or injures all aquatic life, allowing poachers to harvest anything that floats to the surface.
Of the 18 currently valid species of mahseer, the official IUCN Red List of Threatened Species currently lists four as endangered, one as vulnerable, and one as near threatened. The rest either lack enough data to reach a conclusion or haven’t been evaluated.
Recent research published by colleagues and I in PLOS ONE focused on the hump-backed mahseer, the largest and most endangered of all mahseers. The fish was once common throughout the Cauvery river and its various tributaries in southern India, but it is now limited to just a handful of small isolated populations. Weighing as much as a small adult human (55kg), this freshwater giant qualifies as megafauna, yet bizarrely it has remained a taxonomic enigma without a valid scientific name.
Until now. Colleagues and I discovered that the hump-backed mahseer is actually the same species as Tor remadevii: a mahseer that previously lacked a common name. Scientists first described Tor remadevii as a new species in 2007, based on a small sample of juvenile fish from the most southerly tributary of the Cauvery catchment in the state of Kerala. Little did they realise that the small fish they had discovered from this remote sub-catchment was the same as the monster mahseer found in the upper and middle reaches of the main river Cauvery.
The hump-backed mahseer was first brought to the attention of the world’s anglers in Henry Sullivan Thomas’s 1873 classic, The Rod in India. During British rule, several huge specimens were recorded, including the still-standing world rod-caught record, a 120lb (54kg) monster captured in 1946 by a taxidermist from Mysore known as de Wet Van Ingen. Indian independence followed soon after, and the mahseer was largely forgotten by the outside world, with many believing the fish had been dynamited to extinction.
That was until 1977, when the Trans World Fishing Team – comprised of three Englishmen –travelled to India and spent several months exploring the country’s rivers before reaching the Cauvery. There they found the hump-backed mahseer very much alive, and realised their sporting dreams by recording individual catches up to 92lbs (42kg).
This reignited global interest, and catch-and-release anglers from around the world flocked to the River Cauvery in search of the legendary fish. Local villagers found employment as angling guides, cooks or drivers, some of them rehabilitated poachers who realised that a live mahseer had renewable value, unlike the single value of a dead one at market. Patrols were set up to protect the species 24/7, allowing the ecology of the river to flourish.
But all was not what it seemed. Since their establishment in the 1970s, the angling camps had been collecting invaluable data which shed new light on the situation. When colleagues and I analysed these detailed catch records, we realised the hump-backed mahseer had almost disappeared. Although overall mahseer stocks were rising, the humpback itself was being rapidly replaced by a non-native and highly invasive species of mahseer, which had been deliberately introduced to the River Cauvery to boost stocks in the late 1970s. This led us to publish a paper in 2015, outlining the threat of imminent extinction facing the hump-backed mahseer.
The hump-backed mahseer has been known around the world by its common name, but confusion over its scientific name has prevented its inclusion in the IUCN Red List of threatened species. Given the fish is on the edge of extinction, it proved a significant challenge finding wild specimens from which to collect the DNA and associated evidence required to support a formal taxonomic clarification. Only after three years of expeditions was our team finally successful in finding a small population of humpbacks in a remote jungle section of the River Moyar, a tributary of the Cauvery.
The paper we recently published fixes the scientific name as Tor remadevii and should see the iconic species assessed as “critically endangered” in the next update of the Red List. The significance of the research published will afford this iconic fish the recognition and legislative protection it so urgently requires to develop robust conservation planning.
However, in the long term, the fish’s future rests in the hands of the three Indian states with stakes in the highly-contested Cauvery river system – Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka. One hope is that the humpback mahseer will become a unifying force and bring these states together to protect the rich biodiversity and natural function of the Cauvery from further decay, allowing the river to continue to support the many millions of people who depend on it.
Adrian Pinder, Associate Director, Bournemouth University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Dr Choe, from the Faculty of Management provided a public lecture on ‘Spiritual Tourism and Sustainable Development’ at Chiang Mai University (CMU), Thailand.
Research staff at the Center of Tourism Research & Development, Social Research Institute at CMU kindly helped organise the event and added a very warm welcome and hospitality. They invited CMU research staff and students as well as staff/students from other universities in Chiang Mai. Their promotional efforts attracted a big crowd!
Dr Choe passionately shared her research ideas, data collected from Chiang Mai, her observations and interpretations. Lively discussions including helpful feedback and questions from local academics and students made the session very interesting, productive and meaningful.
Dr Choe suggested that other Southeast Asian destinations can learn from Chiang Mai’s successful push for spiritual and sustainable tourism and the management programmes. For example, Luang Prabang in Laos has similar tourism attractions such as numbers of historically significant Buddhist temples. However, they do not offer meditation retreat/’monk chat’ programmes that Chiang Mai offers to ‘spiritual travellers’ in unique and effective ways. Dr Choe also emphasised the ASEAN’s regional cooperation for future tourism development.
Dr Choe and research staff at Social Research Institute and Dept of Tourism, Faculty of Humanities at CMU have started collaborating on a number of projects. Updates will be posted on the BU Research Blog, so stay tuned 🙂
On the 13th July 2018, the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) hosted a free half-day workshop for dementia practitioners and academics interested in understanding how digital gaming technology can be used to support the well-being of people with dementia and their care partners.
The event was attended by people from a range of professional backgrounds including care home staff, day centre Activity Coordinators, community volunteers, researchers and local Government. The morning session provided them with the opportunity to listen to presentations from:
During the afternoon session, the attendees were provided with a more ‘hands-on’ opportunity to use the applications and talk to the researchers in more detail about how the technology could be incorporated within their practice. These sessions were facilitated by Bournemouth University students Amy Dytham, Amy-Jane Pegler and Olivia Bryant who have been involved as Research Assistants in a number of the projects.
The event provoked some interesting questions and seemed to raise awareness of how technology can be used in the future care of people with dementia; both in providing those living with the condition with better opportunities for meaningful leisure activities and those supporting them with a more informed understanding of what it may be like to live with a dementia. The event also provided a great networking opportunity for the attendees, and discussions regarding future collaborations are already underway.
For more information on the event or for a copy of the presentations that were delivered on the day please contact Ben Hicks on bhicks@bournemouth.ac.uk.
Ben Hicks discussing the HEIF funded Game Plan project
Laura Wade discussing A Walk Through Dementia
Phil Joddrell discussing the development of the AcTo Dementia website
Amy Dytham leading a training session on the AD-Gaming platform
Some thought provoking discussions
Yolanda Barrado-Martín from the Psychology Department and Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) attended the 47th edition of the British Society of Gerontology in Manchester (UK) from 3rd July to 6th July 2018.
International researchers from different disciplines gathered in Manchester to learn about projects under the theme “Ageing in an Unequal World: Shaping Environments fro the 21st Century”. This was a very well attended conference (with a waiting list), with up to 17 parallel sessions. Dementia had a relevant space in this conference with different sessions highlighting the use of diverse interventions to improve the quality of life of people living with dementia and those providing support such as facilitating decision making processes, exploring environmental adaptations and supporting home-care for those willing to stay at home.
Yolanda Barrado-Martín had an oral presentation entitled: “How is Tai Chi received by people living with dementia and their informal carers?” Those attending the session showed their interest in the topic and asked questions about people living with moderate dementia’s involvement in the classes and about the Ransomised Controlled Trial Phase of the study. This was a great experience for Yolanda who presented her PhD pilot results to a friendly international audience.
The ADRC’s work was also represented by Dr Michele Board who gave a presentation on “Evaluating the impact of the Virtual Reality app ‘A Walk Through Dementia’, and Mananya Podee who discussed leisure activity, arts and social inclusion for those with dementia.
Participation in the BSG conference was a valued addition in knowledge regarding psycho-social interventions for people living with dementia and a great opportunity to network with researchers from the gerontology background. Yolanda’s attendance to this conference was possible thanks to one of the Santander Mobility Awards.
British Society of Gerontology 47th Annual Conference – Ageing in an Unequal World: Shaping Environments for the 21st Century.
What is consciousness? In the traditional view, consciousness is a state of self-awareness in which the brain can experience perceptions; but which suddenly disappears in anaesthesia, coma or dreamless sleep. However, the common belief that there is sharp edge between an underlying unconscious state and consciousness is being challenged by new neurophysiological findings and theoretical models.
Is an isolated network of cells, a piece of mammal brain confined in a dish (an in vitro preparation) “conscious of itself”? if so, how can this be demonstrated? And by extension, is it a complex neuronal network model, capable of emulating the causal computations of such neuronal circuit, able to perform conscious functions?
These and connected topics were the focus of the discussions during my fascinating visit last June to the Sanchez-Vives Lab http://www.sanchez-vives.org/, within the Institute for Biomedical Research IDIBAPS; located in the core of the city of Barcelona, in the picturesque carrer Rosello. The visit was supported the Erasmus + Funds for Staff Mobility, https://www.erasmusplus.org.uk/apply-for-higher-education-student-and-staff-mobility-funding; through Global BU at Bournemouth University, coordinated by Ms Elaine Asbridge.
Professor Maria-Victora Sanchez-Vives is the leader of an associated project within the large Human Brain Project initiative, https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/ a FLAGSHIP FET 2020 project, spanning for 10 years and involving the over 100 European Universities. Mavi Sanchez-Vives co-supervises a Bournemouth University PhD student, Mr Roman Arango-Cabrera, whose research focuses on studying the rhythms of the spontaneous neuronal activity in isolated cortical slices in vitro.
I was particularly keen to know directly from the team of experienced postdoctoral researchers the experimental process leading to the datasets that Roman has been analysing. Likewise, I was very excited about explaining Mavi and the team the new ideas that we are designing in Bournemouth.
Their recording techniques are especially devised for identifying the spatiotemporal propagation of extracellular potentials through a neuronal network. During my short period in Barcelona, we discussed the design of a new experiment, a variant of their current state-of-the-art recording system by enhancing the precision of the registrations. This new experiment can serve as a feasibility test for our new algorithms developed in Bournemouth University.
The visit was successful in every way, I learned a lot and enjoyed very much the atmosphere in the lab during the four days I spent with them. I am very grateful to Mavi, Vanessa and to every member of the Lab for the invitation and for the great support.
In summary, in the quest for a biophysical substrate of consciousness, a key milestone is the understanding of spontaneous activity propagation in isolated cortical networks; which is the topic of this training visit supported by the Erasmus + Mobility funds. The boundary between conscious and unconscious states seems to be increasingly blurred with each new advance in the area; proposing exciting ethical challenges for the following decade.
Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, Marcello Massimini, Maurizio Mattia. 2017. Shaping the Default Activity Pattern of the Cortical Network. Neuron, 94(5): 993-1001.
The NIHR’s Research Activity league Table has been released recently, showing that Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust (DHUFT) has more than doubled its recruitment over the last year, compared with the previous. Over 1,200 participants were recruited to clinical research studies, showing a 217% increase.
The article, available here includes thoughts from Dr Ciarán Newell, an Eating Disorders Consultant Nurse and a Facilitator of Research and Development for Dorset HealthCare and Dr Jonathan Sheffield OBE, Chief Executive Officer of the NIHR Clinical Research Network (CRN). As a research Sponsor, we work closely with DHUFT and our colleagues at the Wessex CRN, and hope to contribute even further to the fantastic recruitment taking place throughout the country.
As always, if you’re interesting in running your own research in the NHS, get in touch with Research Ethics.
The British Academy is inviting proposals from UK-based researchers across all disciplines within the social sciences and humanities to develop international interdisciplinary research projects with development impact, in collaboration with colleagues from the natural, engineering and/or medical sciences. Aims The complexities of global change and the proliferation of diverse communities of knowledge, practice and intelligence highlight the necessity of collaborative engagement between communities of practice, disciplines, capacities and borders. The British Academy is keen to support and work with proposals that strengthen understanding of challenges in this context and engage with questions concerning the relationship between expertise, public understanding and policy delivery. We are interested in projects of interdisciplinary nature that examine encounters between academic, professional and lay knowledge, and how valid knowledge, knowledge associations and evidence are built and developed, communicated and disseminated, and the factors which can serve as barriers to this in different political or cultural settings. Eligibility Requirements Value and Duration Application Process Application deadline: Wednesday 3 October 2018 (17.00 UK Time) Host Institution deadline: Thursday 4 October 2018 (17.00 UK Time). Funding for the projects will begin on 31 January 2019. Contact Details Please contact internationalchallenges@britac.ac.uk or call 020 7969 5220 for further information. If you are interested in applying to this call then please contact your RKEO Funding Development Officer, in the first instance at least 3 weeks prior to the stated deadline.
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The British Academy is inviting proposals from UK-based researchers in the humanities and social sciences to develop interdisciplinary projects which bear on our understanding of the UK’s international challenges and opportunities (past, present and future). Proposals will relate to the themes of Conflict, Stability & Security; Europe’s Futures; Justice, Rights & Equality; and Urban Futures. This call for proposals is the third round of this programme, following the first two rounds in 2016 & 2017.
Aims
The purpose of each project will be to bring original interdisciplinary research ideas from the humanities and social sciences to bear on our understanding of the international challenges and opportunities which the UK has faced, is facing and will face. The projects awarded will aim to deliver specific academic, public, cultural and/or policy-relevant outputs.
For this scheme originality can arise also from looking at material (such as archival material) in new ways or bringing forth new understanding from material that has previously been unknown or less well known, or innovative combinations of researchers (and/or practitioners) in an interdisciplinary manner.
Eligibility Requirements
The lead applicant must be based at a UK university or research institute, and be of postdoctoral or above status (or have equivalent research experience). International co-applicants are strongly encouraged.
Value and Duration
Awards are of 18 months in duration and are available for up to £50,000. Funding can be used to support research and/or clerical assistance; research expenses and consumables; travel and subsistence; and networking, meeting and conference costs. Awards are not funded on a full economic costs basis, with contributions to overheads an ineligible cost.
Application Process
Applications must be submitted online using the British Academy’s Grant Management System, Flexi-Grant®.
Application deadline: Wednesday 3 October 2018 (17.00 UK Time)
Host Institution deadline: Thursday 4 October 2018 (17.00 UK Time)
Funding for the projects will begin on 31 January 2019.
Contact Details
Please contact internationalchallenges@britac.ac.uk or call 020 7969 5220 for further information.
If you are interested in applying to this call then please contact your RKEO Funding Development Officer, in the first instance at least 3 weeks prior to the stated deadline.
The nursing research centre is one of the newest BU research centres. The buzz and energy at our inaugural away day this week was fantastic, as we planned our first year of activity. The overall aim of the research centre is to contribute to the knowledge base informing the nursing management of long-term health challenges, a rapidly growing aspect of contemporary health care. We are developing four research programmes in collaboration with practice partners and service users in the following areas:
Led by Dr Janet Scammell and Professor Sam Porter, the research centre has over 40 members and is developing its programme through a collaborative and inclusive strategy to capitalise on the talents of all Centre members and develop research capacity within the department of nursing and clinical sciences.
The Team Collaboration winners from the 2017 VC Staff Awards recently saw their prize legacy through with a development day. As part of the award, a staff development activity was offered to support the team on building on its success of hosting the British Conference for Undergraduate Research in April 2017 at BU. After much weighing out amongst the group into the options for activities and related calendar alignment (!), a development day was hosted at AFC Bournemouth. Much of the original team were able to take part however given the competing priorities of academic life, not everyone could make it! The programme for the day included guided tutorials from learning technologist John Moran with comprehensive input in providing the team with support of team teaching tools such as eg mentimeter, cahoot and padlet. In the afternoon, senior academic from CEL Curie Scott facilitated sessions. This included workshops on origami and collage, etc as a powerful way within pedagogy to articulate, reflect and critique within education practice.
It was timely to use Curie’s session and the methods within to think about future planning. Discussions then centred around sustaining work practices by connecting them, where possible, to our values. Curie explains ‘We used origami to consider responses to working creatively in education practice: that creative making may initially tricky to engage with as it may be unfamiliar to adults, that it stimulates a great deal of association and that meanings of image in juxtaposition are numerous. Critically, making an object allows highly personalised learning for the individual. Hopefully, the fun continued after our time together as each person was gifted a colouring in origami kit’.
CEL are creating more workshops and can connect this particularly with teams of colleagues for reflective practice, discussions of large topics such as curriculum re-design, group/ team working. If interested register with organisational development
For those considering nominations to VC Awards, our team was pleased to be recognised first by nomination, and then as an award winner. The next round of VC staff awards offers more opportunities for individuals and groups to be recognised and nominated.
BU staff can login below:
BU Professor has been invited to a series of plenary and invited lectures.
Research reaching non-academic audiences
April’s Café Scientifique – Should we help machines understand and respond to our emotions?
Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2024 – 2 WEEKS LEFT
Working with The Conversation: online training session – Wednesday 8th May
Apply for up to £1,000 to deliver an event and take part in a national festival of public engagement with research
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024
Research Information Network
Horizon Europe News – December 2023