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Funder Visit – Japan Society for the Promotion of Science on 21st November 2017

Funding opportunities, Info Days, international

BU’s Research & Knowledge Exchange Office is delighted to be hosting the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science visit on Tuesday, 21st November 2017.

The schedule for the event is:

13:00           Welcoming Address

13:05            JSPS – Overview, Institutional and Group Programmes

 Ms Chika Itoi, Deputy Director, JSPS London

13:25            JSPS Fellowship Programmes

 Ms Shiho Hayashida, International Programme Associate, JSPS London

13:45            Experiences of Doing Research in Japan

 Professor Chang Hong Liu (BU’s Department of Psychology)

13:55            Questions and Answers

14:00           Close

This event is open to BU academics and those from other regional universities. To book your place, please email RKEDevFramework@bournemouth.ac.uk, putting JSPS in the subject line. The event will take place on BU’s Talbot Campus, with the room confirmed to you after booking.

Please also see the post concerning JSPS’ Fellowship scheme which is open until 1st December 2017.

 

Photo of the Week: Baltic Pride: The visibility of LGBT human rights claiming

Baltic Pride: The visibility of LGBT human rights claiming

Baltic Pride: The visibility of LGBT human rights claiming

Our next instalment of the ‘Photo of the Week’ series features Dr Jayne Caudwell’s image of a Pride bus in Baltic Pride 2016.  The series is a weekly instalment, which features an image taken by our fantastic BU staff and students. The photos give a glimpse into some of the fascinating work our researchers have been doing across BU and the wider community.

This research project focuses on Baltic Pride 2016 and the politics of LGBTQ visibility. Pride parades can be important for the advocacy of LGBT human rights claims. Prides take place across the world and their histories and scales vary enormously. Some adopt en-mass celebration and carnivalesque styles, whilst others face severe opposition. Global manifestations of Pride are uneven and yet, they are connected. Many take place around the month of June because of the legacies of USA-based LGBT liberation triggered by the Stonewall Riots on June 29th, 1969 in Greenwich Village, and most rely on rainbow flags, LGBTQ-positive banners and slogans to carry the politics of global Pride.

The research explores the transnational flow of the Pride movement and associated universal human rights claims through the visuals of Baltic Pride 2016.

If you’d like find out more about the research or the photo itself then please contact Dr Caudwell.

This photo was originally an entry in the 2017 Research Photography Competition. If you have any other questions about the Photo of the Week series or the competition please email research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Nursing Students Experience Virtual Reality

 

The ADRC is working with Alzheimer’s Research UK to evaluate another form of simulated learning and evaluate the effectiveness of their newly created Virtual Reality app ‘A Walk Through Dementia’ (AWTD) which offers a unique glimpse into life for a person living with dementia. The Android and IOS Phone app was developed by Alzheimer’s Research UK and virtual reality specialists VISYON, and uses the widely-available Google Cardboard headset. It is designed to help the public think beyond memory loss to gain a fully immersive insight into the varied symptoms people with dementia can experience in everyday life.

 

A Walk Through Dementia is the first time a smartphone Cardboard app has been used to engage the public with the condition. The experience, which can also be viewed headset-free on the app or online at www.awalkthroughdementia.org, uses a combination of computer generated environments and 360 degree video sequences to illustrate in powerful detail how even the most everyday task of making a cup of tea can become a challenge for someone with dementia.  To date Alzheimer’s Research UK have received some preliminary feedback on using AWTD from the public, health care professionals and care sector.

 

On 11th October over 280 year 1 undergraduate adult and mental health nursing students attended a Dementia themed study day, led by Dr Michele Board, and during the day they gained insight into the lived experience of dementia using the AWTD Virtual Reality App. With support from Professor Jane Murphy, Laura Phipps from Alzheimer’s Research and Professor Liz Falconer, the students were instructed to use the app and discuss questions about the film and how it might influence their practice. The prospect of this session was a little nerve wracking, but the result amazing. The students really engaged and said how valuable the app was and giving them an insight into dementia.

Cross-Research Council Mental Health Network Plus call is now open

BU Challenges, Funding opportunities

The research councils are pleased to announce the cross-disciplinary mental health network plus call.

The aim of the call is to encourage the creation of multi-disciplinary networks that cross the remit boundaries of the research councils. These networks will address important mental health research questions that require an innovative, cross-disciplinary approach to accelerate progress; to build cross-disciplinary research capacity in the field; and to strengthen the UK mental health research base.

The call for network plus proposals closes at 16:00 on 22 March 2018.

If you are interested in applying to this call, please contact your Research Facilitator. We will be holding a networking event for BU academics who are interested in this call. Details of this event will be announced on the BU Research Blog shortly.

For further information and to apply see here.

Real-time Research Professional Updates at the click of a button

Funding opportunities

Have you noticed this box on the BU Research Blog?

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.

Alternatively, receive regular alerts by signing up to as many groups as you want by clicking on ‘Bournemouth University‘ on the Research Professional home screen and selecting relevant searches that have been set up to locate funding calls. Just find the ones which suit your needs, click on the name of the group and select ‘Join this Group’.  You can also modify a shared search to save into your own alerts area by clicking on the padlock symbol.

You can find out more about Research Professional from the RKEO monthly updates which give further details of this service and the help available to BU staff. Just search ‘Research Professional or click on Research Professional tag at the bottom of this post to see all our posts about this subscribed service for BU staff.

We will still continue to blog about specific calls of note as usual.

If you need further assistance with using Research Professional, please contact your Funding Development Officer.

Forthcoming Event: Branded Content Research Network Conference

The Branded Content Research Network are pleased to announce that their forthcoming Branded Content Research Network Conference is taking place next month from Tuesday 7 to Wednesday 8 November in London.

A one-day conference will take place on the Tuesday, while Wednesday will consist of pre-conference meetings of the network and an open public meeting ‘Is there anything wrong with branded content?’ to end the two-day event.

The Branded Content Research Network is an academic network project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, who seek to bring together academic researchers, industry and civil society interests to explore the practices and implications of branded content, native advertising and the convergence of media and marketing communications.

About the Conference:

Marketers increasingly produce their own branded media content (‘owned’ media) and they seek to integrate advertising more seamlessly into the editorial forms and flows of publishing, audio, audiovisual, and social media communications. The integration of media and advertising is not new, but it is intensifying. Forms of branded content and ‘native’ advertising are developing rapidly, transforming marketing communications, challenging regulatory arrangements, and raising a host of issues from consumer awareness and acceptance of advertising to the consequences for the media’s editorial independence and creative autonomy.

The Branded Content Research Network aims to investigate the changing relationships between media and marketing and to promote research, collaboration and dialogue across a very wide range of interests and perspectives. The network brings together academic researchers, industry and civil society interests to explore the practices and implications of branded content, native advertising, and media-marketing convergence. Branded content is both an economic and a cultural phenomenon that requires cross-disciplinary resources and new approaches in analysis.

The conference will bring together international researchers at all stages of their careers, and marketing practitioners, for presentations and dialogue to explore insights and help to build research capacities and international collaboration. The conference is hosted by the Branded Content Research Network and the Advertising Research Group (ARTWG), a temporary working group within the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

Click here to view the full draft conference programme.

Registration

The event is free but places are limited and advance booking is required. To register, please click here.

Please complete your booking by 2 November as we will not be able to accept late bookings after that date (except for the public meeting, space permitting). Please note that all those who have booked a two-day ticket for 7-8 November do not need to book separately to attend the evening meeting.

If you would like any further information, including travel and accommodation, please email j.hardy@uel.ac.uk.

Molecular basis for a healthier heart…new work published by BU

Research funded by the British Heart Foundation looking at tissue fibrosis (scarring), will soon be published in Experimental Gerontology, one the world’s leading journal on ageing. Fibrosis occurs naturally as part of our injury response process but also develops in ageing and chronic disease. Treatments are scant despite fibrosis leading to organ failure and increased risk of death.

The image shows valves (v) in the hearts of young and ‘late middle aged’ fruit flies that have been genetically engineered to express fluorescent collagen, an key ‘scar protein’. Although the fly heart is just two cells wide it represents a lot of the genetic machinery for a human heart. Amazingly, the function of human and fly hearts declines as they age – and they both accumulate collagen.

Our previous work linked heart function with SPARC – a protein associated with fibrosis in humans.  We’ve now demonstrated that the heart’s ‘health-span’ during ageing can be significantly lengthened if the expression SPARC is reduced. We also show that if SPARC levels increase – fibrosis is increased too. Hence, we’ve nailed a cause-and-effect relationship between SPARC and heart function which supports the idea of targeting SPARC clinically to control cardiac health and fibrosis.

Paul S. Hartley (Department of Life and Environmental Science).

*Last chance to book* The BU Protocol of academics engaging with business- 18/10/17

Business Engagement

If you are interested in working with local industry stakeholders, and don’t know how best to approach communication, please attend “The BU Protocol of academics engaging with business” on 18/10/17.

BU has many partnerships and established relationships with local and national stakeholders. This short session, run by Ian Jones, Head Of Regional Community Partnerships within the Office of the Vice-Chancellor, will cover the route of communication and protocol for approaching and working with these stakeholders. Examples of best practice will be presented along with details on how to understand when institutional commitments are being made.

The intended learning outcomes of this session are:
•Attendees will learn who they need to speak to before contacting some of our partners
•Attendees will learn the protocols expected by some stakeholders
•Attendees will gain insight into when they are making “institutional commitments”

You book through the link here. For any questions about how this course may be useful to you, please contact Ehren Milner (emilner@bournemouth.ac.uk)

PGRs hurry! Get your 3MT application in.

PG research

The Countdown Begins – Can you beat the clock?

Deadline for the Doctoral College 3MT application submission is Sunday 22 October 2017.

For more information, eligibility and how to apply visit the website.

Don’t miss out on the chance to win £400 towards a conference of your choice, plus entry into the Vitae National 3MT competition plus £100 voucher.

 

SAIL Project Team Meeting

Knowledge Exchange

Last week, Prof Ann Hemingway,  Prof Adele Ladkin  and Dr Holly Crossen-White joined European research colleagues in Ostend, Belgium for a SAIL Project bi-annual team meeting. Over two days  all research partners from four different European countries had the opportunity to share their initial research data from pilot projects being developed within each country for older people. The BU team will be undertaking the feasibility study for the SAIL project and will be drawing together all the learning from the various interventions created by the other partners.

 

 

BU Briefing – Fatigue management programme for people with multiple sclerosis

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

The manualised group-based programme called FACETS (Fatigue: Applying Cognitive behavioural and Energy effectiveness Techniques to lifeStyle) is a conceptual framework integrating elements from cognitive behavioural, social-cognitive, energy effectiveness, self-management and self-efficacy theories. The aim of the intervention is to help people with multiple sclerosis (MS) normalise their fatigue experiences, learn helpful ways of thinking about fatigue and use available energy more effectively.

This paper presents the results from one year follow-up data obtained from a pragmatic three-centre trial of FACETS.

Click here to read the briefing paper.

For more information about the research, contact Professor Peter Thomas at pthomas@bournemouth.ac.uk or Roger Baker at rbaker@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

New CMMPH midwifery publication

international, Publishing, writing

Congratulations to Dr. Sue Way and Prof. Vanora Hundley in BU’s Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) on their latest publication on the latent phase of labour.  Their paper ‘Defining the latent phase of labour: is it important?’ appeared in Evidence Based Midwifery and was written with midwifery colleagues across the UK, Germany and Canada [1].

 

Congratulations

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Reference:

  1. Hundley V, Way S, Cheyne H, Janssen P, Gross M, Spiby H (2017) Defining the latent phase of labour: is it important? Evidence Based Midwifery 15 (3): 89-94. 

 

Have you been involved with an event designed for the external community?

Guidance, Research assessment

Then we want to hear from you!smiley-face1

The University is currently compiling the data for the annual Higher Education – Business & Community Interaction survey (HE-BCI) due to be submitted to HESAshortly. Data returned is used to calculate our HEIF grant.

We are asked to submit details of social, cultural and community events designed for the external community (to include both free and chargeable events) which took place between1 August 2016 and 31 July 2017.

hesa_logo

Event types that should be returned include, but are not limited to:

  • public lectures
  • performance arts (dance, drama, music, etc)
  • exhibitions
  • museum education
  • events for schools and community groups
  • business breakfasts

We cannot return events such as open days, Student Union activity, commercial conferences, etc.

All events that we ran as part of the Festival of Learning, ESRC Festival of Social Science and Cafe Scientifique series are likely to be eligible for inclusion and we will collate this information on your behalf centrally.

If you have been involved with any other event which could be returned, please could you let your contact (see below) know the event name and date, whether it was free or chargeable, the estimated number of attendees, and an estimate of how much academic time was spent preparing for (but not delivering) the event:

  • SciTech – Norman Stock
  • FoM – Rob Hydon
  • HSS – Tanya Richardson
  • FMC – Mark Brocklehurst
  • Professional Service – Rebecca Edwards (RKEO)

The data returned is used by HEFCE to allocate the HEIF funding so it is important that we return as accurate a picture as possible.

Food Security: What’s on your Plate? CHANGE OF DATE – Tuesday 14th November 2017

On Tuesday 14th November 2017, BU’s Research and Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO) will be hosting a STEAMLab on Food Security.

Which means…?

We have renamed ‘Sandpits’ to the new name of ‘STEAMLab’.  This demonstrates the purpose of the STEAMLabs as being open to all disciplines and encouraging truly interdisciplinary research ideas.  The ‘Lab’ part demonstrates the working environment that leads to the creation of novel research ideas and partnerships. In a nutshell, the STEAMLabs offer the opportunity to meet new people from all disciplines and sectors, and to spend dedicated time developing novel ideas for research projects.

For this STEAMLab, we’re seeking to come up with novel research which addresses challenges in food security. With increasing pressure on food sources and the food industry, we need to consider how food security can be guaranteed for the future. Potential areas to address this challenge may include but are not limited to, malnutrition/nutrition, agriculture, logistics, robotics, supply chain, new forms of food, sustainability, political/economic problems, food policy, food waste & recycling, and climate & the environment.

So, who should attend?

STEAMLabs cover broad themes to ensure that they are open to everyone from all disciplines. So if you think you have something to contribute then come along.  If you think that they don’t include you then please have a chat with your RKEO Facilitator who can explain how your research could make a vital contribution to new ideas and approaches. In order to encourage wider partnerships, each STEAMLab will include academics from other universities, as well as representatives from industry and other sectors.

What do I need to prepare in advance? What will the STEAMLab entail?

Absolutely nothing in advance. During the session, you’ll be guided through a process which results in the development of research ideas. The process facilitates creativity, potentially leading to innovative and interdisciplinary research ideas. These ideas will be explored with other attendees, and further developed based on the feedback received.

What if I don’t have time to think about ideas in advance?

You don’t need to do this but it will help. Attendees will come from a range of backgrounds so we expect that there will be lively conversations resulting from these different perspectives.

What about afterwards? Do I need to go away and do loads of work?

Well… that depends! The interactive day will result in some novel research ideas. Some of these may be progressed immediately; others might need more time to develop. You may find common ground with other attendees which you choose to take forward in other ways, such as writing a paper or applying for research funding. Your Research Facilitator will be on hand to support you as you develop bids for funding.

What if my topic area is really specific, and doesn’t really relate to food?

Your contribution will be very welcome! One of the main benefits of this type of event is to bring together individuals with a range of backgrounds and specialisms who are able to see things just that bit differently to one another.

So, is this just networking?

Definitely not! It is a facilitated session with the primary intention of developing innovative research ideas, which also enables the development of networks. It gives you the opportunity to explore research ideas which you may develop over time, together with the chance to find common ground with academics from across BU and beyond.

How do I book onto this event?

To take part in this exciting opportunity, BU staff should complete the Food Security Application Form and return this to RKEDevFramework by Friday 3rd November. As places are limited, this will be assessed to ensure good mix of attendees with different perspectives. Places will be confirmed w/c 6th November 2017.

By applying, you agree to attend for the full duration of the event on 14th November 2017 (c. 9:30 – 16:00). This event will be held in the EBC, Lansdowne Campus.

If you have any queries prior to submitting your application, please contact Lisa Gale-Andrews, RKEO Research Facilitator.

This event is part of the Research Knowledge Exchange Development Framework.

 

New research shows that active gaming technology could help people with Multiple Sclerosis

A new study published by Bournemouth University has shown that using the Nintendo Wii™ could help people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) become more active.  Being more physically activity has a range of potential benefits, including better balance and posture, improved confidence and improved mood.

The study saw 30 participants trial the use of Wii Fit Plus™, Wii Sports™ and Wii Sports Resort™ games at home, following initial orientation and guidance from physiotherapists in a hospital setting.  People recorded how often they used the Wii™, as well as responding to a number of questionnaires exploring its effects.  Dr Sarah Thomas, lead researcher, explains the rationale behind the project:

“Physical activity is known to make a difference to the health and wellbeing of people with MS, but they often face greater barriers to participation.  I’d noticed from my own family that playing the Wii appealed across the generations and was interested to see whether its ease of use and accessibility would make a difference to people with MS,” says Dr Thomas.

“Conversations with the Dorset MS team showed that they’d been thinking along the same lines, as they’d noticed that the Wii was increasingly being used by their patients.  That’s what led us to develop a successful grant application to the MS Society.”

As part of the Mii-vitaliSe study, people with MS were allocated  at random to one of two groups – one which trialled the Wii intervention immediately alongside their usual care for 12 months, and one which started the Wii intervention after a 6 month delay.

“The people we worked with were relatively physically inactive at the beginning of the study,” explains Dr Thomas, “Through regular 1-2-1 sessions with a physiotherapist, they were able to develop individual goals, which they then worked towards achieving using the Wii™ in their own homes.”

“We found that people were using the Wii™ on average about twice a week, most often for balance exercises, yoga or aerobics,” continues Dr Thomas, “Our participants found it a fun and convenient way to increase their physical activity levels, with people reporting benefits such as reduced stress, increased confidence and better balance, among others.”

“In day-to-day life, people noticed improvements such as dropping fewer pegs when hanging out washing, finding it easier to get in and out of the shower and walking further.”

We hope to build on these promising initial findings by carrying out a large multi-centre trial to test whether this intervention is effective.”

The full study can be read here.

A briefing paper about the research can be found here.