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Horizon 2020 Secure Societies Societal Challenge (SEREN3), Brussels

Funding opportunities

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My journey to the Horizon 2020 event in Brussels (secure society) started when my colleague Ehren brought the event to my attention and suggested it is one I should attend. In between doing other things I committed to go and decided to take one of my research students who works in a related area to mine. The earlier Brussels attacks didn’t change my mind, or her’s, and in fact made it so more important that we should attend the event given its nature – secure society. Despite all her best efforts, including taking an 18 hour bus journey to Manchester and back to apply for her visa, her visa didn’t arrive on time, and here it I was on my way to Brussels, taking the 3.00 am bus to Waterloo and then the Eurostar from St Pancras to Brussels. Quiet streets of London early at 5 am meant I met a couple of unwanted friendly rats who accompanied me from Victoria coach station to Victoria underground station, where I saw some more  of them fighting on the rail. Travel to Brussels was quick and I got in to the city centre at 11.00 am and headed for the meeting venue where it started at 1.30 pm.

The meeting in the afternoon was excellent, they had a number of speakers from the Deputy Head of Horizon, to the call coordinator, legal, finance, ethic support etc. Each one went to into great detail and explained all one needs to know about applying for the Horizon bids in general.  The meeting was extremely well organised and it was disappointing to see such a large number of participants failing to attend, ironic that the strand was for a secure society and yet we are failing to take our part. I left the meeting at 6.00 pm and managed to look around ‘military Brussels’, witnessing some of the lost freedom in the capital of Europe, taken by those who used the liberal democracy of Europe to attack it from within.

The Wednesday morning sessions could not have been better, the EU Horizon 2020 professionals, went through each bid call, one by one, and explained all the criteria and the do’s and don’ts when bidding. There were a number of opportunities to ask questions regarding the bids and the time available for the presentations for attendees to pitch to secure suitable partners. They laid on a wonderful lunch which was served to us and in the afternoon there were further opportunities for one-to-one speed dating with other attendees.

Attendance at the meeting in the Sheraton hotel was free, and one of the best organised meetings I have ever attended. I left Brussels having learned a great a deal in terms of EU bidding activities, details regarding my selected bids and a number of business cards from colleagues across Europe and beyond. It was a brilliant opportunity to put faces to names and more importantly to listen to professionals talk – all in all it was an absolute eye opener and invaluable training for bidding! Thank you Ehren and Jacqui for making this happen, Thank you Seren3brussels2016 for such a wonderful training sessions and great hospitality!

I will go again…

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Committee inquiries: open calls for evidence

Below is a list of committee inquiries with current open calls for evidence. Please contact Emma Bambury-Whitton if you would like to discuss submitting evidence.

Commons Select Committee inquiries

Lords Select Committee inquiries

 

HE Policy Update

Monday

Tier 2 visas

The government has responded to the Migration Advisory Committee review of Tier 2 migration. The government has announced it will exempt PhD positions and those switching from a Tier 4 student visa to a Tier 2 visa from the immigration skills charge.  You can view the response to a written question by The Minister of State for Immigration here.

UK universities overseas

Universities that deliver transnational programmes in countries with dubious human rights records have been warned that they are putting more than their reputations at risk. Human rights warning for universities operating overseas. Human rights warning for universities operating overseas. (THE).  

Tuesday

University cooperation

A report by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education has revealed that negative views of universities based on their perceived “lower prestige” might also be harming efforts to bring together universities, business and government to boost local economic growth. Status anxiety ‘harms university cooperation’. (THE).

Wednesday

Prevent

Research Professional reports that universities risk ignoring laws about protecting freedom of speech in their attempt to protect students against being radicalised. Cultural cold wars (Research Professional).

Thursday

REF

The extent to which the next REF should focus on overall university performance has emerged as a key battleground between the Russell Group and University Alliance. The Russell Group have argued for more emphasis on critical mass at the institutional level, whereas University Alliance have argued that aggregation of assessment at institutional level would destroy dynamism. Universities clash over future of REF. (THE).  

Friday

Student Loans

The private company that took over 250,000 loans from the Student Loan Company has left graduates in turmoil after it wrongly sent letters demanding early repayments. Student loans firm Erudio leaves graduates fuming over latest error (The Guardian).

EU Students

Students from other European Union countries attending UK universities generate £3.7 billion for the UK economy and support more than 34,000 jobs across the country, according to analysis from Universities UK. You can view the report here.

Innovate UK

Innovate UK is to reorganise its funding programmes to address concerns that they are too complex and to make it easier for the agency to work with universities, businesses and the research councils. Innovate UK embraces simplification. (Research Professional).

HRA Approval for NHS Research

Research Ethics

HRA Approval is the new process for the NHS in England that simplifies the approvals process for research, making it easier for research studies to be set up. It replaces the need for local checks of legal compliance and related matters by each participating organisation in England. This allows participating organisations to focus their resources on assessing, arranging and confirming their capacity and capability to deliver the study.

Laura Purandare, Research Monitor RBCH, has kindly agreed to run a seminar on 4th May at 2pm in BG14 to explain the changes.

The session will cover:

  • What HRA approval is
  • The implementation of changes
  • The difference it proposes to make to health research in England
  • What it means for our researchers
  • Key resources

The session will last approximately an hour, and Laura will be available for questions following the session. We hope to see you there.

Inspiring Future Innovation Event

Business Engagement, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

events

 

 

Date: Tuesday 24 May

Time: 10.00am  – 4.00pm

Location: The Grange Road Business Park in Christchurch

Event information: A supply chain expo hosted by BAE Systems  in Christchurch and a chance to show innovation to not only BAE (who have people coming from far and wide) but others such as Cobham and Aish will also be exhibiting. This is the first annually held event hosted by  this organisation.  The aim being to  future innovation through showcasing BAE Systems’ own technology as well as technology from other companies. The event will provide a unique opportunity to discover new technology, as well as developing new relations with other companies within the supply chain, whilst raising the profile of exhibiting companies and providing a chance for networking and future collaboration opporuntities.

Registration is essential as there is a limited number of spaces available and will be assigned on a first come first serve basis.

To register your interest:  email –  inspiringfutureinnovation2016@baesystems.com and confirm whether you are interested in exhibiting and /or attending the event.

 

Universities increase income from business collaboration

Business Engagement, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

Technology in the hands

UK universities earned £4.2 billion from provision of services to businesses and collaborative research in the 2014-15 academic year, up from £3.9bn the previous year.
The latest Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey (2014 – 2015), published on 7 April by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, looked at all publicly funded UK higher education institutions and their interactions with businesses and other organisations.
In 2014-15, the largest chunk of this income was from collaborative research involving public funding, which reached £1.26bn, up from £1.14bn in the previous year. This was a change in emphasis, as in 2013-14 universities gained most of their income from contract research. However, contract research earnings also increased between 2013-14 and 2014-15, from £1.2bn to £1.21bn.

Universities also upped their earnings from courses for business and the community by £35m to £715m, from regeneration and development programmes by almost £22m to £205m, and from intellectual property by £24m to £155m.

The analysis also includes information on the number of spinouts and start-up companies created by UK universities, and shows that the number of graduate start-up companies created in 2014-15 was 4,160, lower than the 4,581 companies started in 2013-14.

However, the total number of active firms with some involvement from a higher education provider in the UK was 13,045 in 2014-15, up from 11,856 in 2013-14.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England will publish its analysis of the data for England later in the year.

This article was posted in Research Professional.

You can set up your own personalised alerts including news  on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

 

 

Innovate UK launch new delivery plan – key sectors and funding opportunties included

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

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Innovate UK have launched their delivery plan for 2016/17 .

This  includes:

  • a new sector focus that is easier for industry, investors and government to work with
  • a 5-point plan to underpin activity across these sectors and drive productivity growth
  • clearer funding programmes that are easier to navigate
  • improvements to the way Innovate UK connects businesses to knowledge and partners
  • a stronger regional presence

With evidence of :”focusing ever more closely on scaling up SMEs” …

Clearer sector support has been established and these include four groups:

  • emerging and enabling technologies
  • health and life sciences
  • infrastructure systems
  • manufacturing and materials

Funding competitions for businesses are also to be simplified.

There will be 2 broad funding competitions covering each sector group per year, and 2 open competitions for applications from any sector or technology area. There will be other programmes and competitions in partnership with other government organisations.

Click here fore more information. 

Download the Delivery Plan.

BRAD Week: Mixed Methods

Training

BRAD wordleAs part of the BU Researcher/Academic Development (BRAD) Programme, a session on Mixed Methods will be run by Dr. Joanne Mayoh tomorrow (8/4/16) from 11:00 AM.

This session will provide a broad overview of the practical and philosophical aspects of mixed methods research.  The following areas will be outlined:

•Paradigmatic assumptions of post-positivist and constructivist/interpretivist research

•The key philosophical debates surrounding the paradigmatic stance of mixed methods inquiry

•Practical issues such as priority and sequence decisions, point of integration, write-up and dissemination

This session would be extremely useful for anyone thinking of using a Mixed Methods approach for their research, or those looking to develop their understanding of research paradigms more generally.

To book onto this course, please follow the following link.

Researching innovative pedagogy: An Evaluation of Team-based Learning

Centre for Excellence in Learning, conferences, Fusion, innovation

An Evaluation of Team-based Learning – 4-5pm in PG11, Wednesday 13th of April 2016

What is Team-based Learning?

Team-based Learning (TBL) is an example of the ‘flipped classroom’ concept whereby what might be described as traditional teaching content is accessed by students outside of the classroom while activities that might be termed ‘homework’ are conducted in class. In class, students have to answer questions as individuals to test them on their learning from the set pre-reading activities (termed the individual Readiness Assurance Test), then the same questions in allocated teams (team Readiness Assurance Test). Each team has a scratch card so that students can check if their agreed answer is correct (immediate feedback). Following that, teams then work on application exercises, where they have to apply their knowledge to problem-solving real-life scenarios.

Why bother with this approach?

TBL is thought to confer some advantages over traditional teaching methods in terms of student engagement and provides immediate feedback on student performance. While it does tend to mean some extra work for lecturers in terms of preparation activities, increased job satisfaction is commonly reported, and students report enjoying learning in this way. It is believed to improve critical thinking skills and in some cases improved exam performance has been reported. Further, this collaborative learning process promotes the importance of effective team-working, a skill desired of our graduates by many employers.

Do you want to find out more?

I am delivering a session on TBL at the CELebrate Conference 2016 next week. In this session, you will be introduced to TBL and get to experience a TBL session yourself! Quantitative (using the validated TBL-SAI instrument) and qualitative (focus group discussions) results from an evaluation of the implementation of TBL into a unit on the Adult Nursing degree programme will also be presented.

What to do now?

  1. Click here to watch this video before the session (it’s less than four minutes) -it’s a snippet from my online lecture on circulatory shock. Don’t panic if you’ve little knowledge regarding human physiology, it’s only to help illustrate the TBL approach – hopefully you’ll enjoy it!
  2. Then click here to book onto the session

Best wishes

Dr Jonny Branney

Congratulations to Prof. Hundley on her latest systematic review paper

Publishing, writing

This week Professor Vanora Hundley in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) published a systematic review form with her international collaborators working on early labour.   The paper is called ‘Diagnosing onset of labor: A systematic review of definitions in the research literature‘ and can be found it the Open Access journal BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth. [1]

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

Reference:

  1. Hanley GE, Munro S, Greyson D, Gross MM, Hundley V, Spiby H and Janssen PA (2016) Diagnosing onset of labor: A systematic review of definitions in the research literature. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 16: 71 http://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-016-0857-4

 

Your ORCID ID now visible on the staff profile pages

BRIAN, Publishing, staff profile pages

Bernhard Angele

Following an enhancement to the staff profile pages, your ORCID ID is now displayed as a click-able link.

ORCID is an international, interdisciplinary, open, not-for-profit organisation. Its core function is to provide a registry of unique, persistent, and resolvable person identifiers together with web services to enable interoperability through integration of identifiers into research systems and workflows.

The core issues underlying the ORCID initiative are the effective and appropriate identification of individuals who participate in the research community, and linking individuals with their research outputs, activities and affiliations. Solving this problem makes individuals more discoverable and assists researchers in finding resources and collaborators to support their work. Linking the researcher identifier with research outputs, activities, affiliations and other existing person identifiers extends interoperability and supports reporting.

Registering for a free ORCID ID takes less than 1 minute. Please click on this link to register now – https://orcid.org/register

To display your ORCID ID on your staff profile page, you must first update your Core HR portal with your ORCID ID.

After you have logged on to the system, click on ‘My Profile’ in a blue box as shown below:

HR core

This will open up your profile page and you will see ‘Other information’ at the bottom of a side bar on the left, click on ‘+’ to expand the menu and you will see ‘Orcid’ as one of the tabs.

.HR core 2

To add your ORCID iD, please click on the ‘add item’ tab

orcid

After the system is refreshed overnight, your ORCID ID should be visible on your staff profile page the following day. If you have any queries, please get in touch with Pengpeng Hatch, pphatch@bournemouth.ac.uk, 01202 961354.

Open Access Drop-in Sessions

BRIAN, open access, Publishing, Research assessment

Thinking about the next REF?

On 11th, 12th and 13th of April, RKEO will team up with the Library to provide Open Access Drop-in sessions. Please do pop in to get some hands on support and advice on making your research open access to comply with the HEFCE post-REF2014 Open Access Policy.

Monday, 11th April – 12.30pm to 1.30pm – S117, Studland House

Tuesday, 12th April – 12.30pm to 1.30pm – S117, Studland House

Wednesday, 13th April – 12.30pm to 1.30pm – S117, Studland House

Sign up to EU RSS News Feeds to keep up to date

Funding opportunities, Info Days

Hate that sinking feeling of finding out that you have missed out on a key funding Info Day or brokerage event?

Sign up now and be in the know.

The European Commission’s DG Innovation and Research provides subject-specific news feeds to help you to keep up to date with your research activities in your discipline and EU opportunities, including funding and networking events. To do this, the place to go is their RSS page. Instructions on how to add these to your news feed are also given on this page

Main topics include:

To see the full list and subsets of those listed above, please go to the main RSS page and find all the relevant RSS news feeds for you.

 

NERC Call for participants: Using natural processes to reduce flood risk workshop

NERCNERC, the EA and Defra are interested in identifying the key environmental research priorities related to using natural processes to reduce flood risk, with a view to potentially developing a collaborative research programme in this area. To support this process a scoping workshop will be held on 09 June 2016.  This is a great opportunity to contribute towards a potential funding stream at its inception.

For more information please see the following webpage: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/latest/events/list/flood/

British Academy Small Grants next call

Funding opportunities

british_academy_logoThe British Academy have informed us that the next round of BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants is now open and will be closing at 5pm on Wednesday 11th May.

They have written to us to say that during the last round they received a large number of applications (UK wide) with obvious errors that should not have been approved by the employing institutions.  They’ve provided updated BA scheme notes for applicants and BA FAQs which are also available on e-GAP and have asked that all applicants read the documentation carefully before starting their application.  BA receive 900-1,000 applications for each round of this competition and so will not correct errors but will instead withdraw the application from the competition.

If you’re interested in applying to this call then please inform your Funding Development Officer by 13th April.  We usually have a high demand for this call and so we will need to ensure that we have scheduled you in for costings and approvals, particularly as BA require RKEO to check your application and to electronically submit it on your behalf.  Therefore, the BU internal deadline for this call is 4th May.