Tagged / BU research

BU research-based film to be directed by Josh Appignanesi

Rufus Stone, a film by Josh Appignanesi

A film about love, sexual awakening and treachery, set in the bucolic countryside of south west England, and viewed through the lens of growing older.

Josh Appignanesi, London-based filmmaker, script writer and director, has been chosen to direct a short film based on three years of research at Bournemouth University.  The film, Rufus Stone, will tell the story of being gay and growing older in the British countryside.

Appignanesi recently directed and script edited the comedy feature film, The Infidel, written by David Baddiel and starring Omid Djalili and Richard Schiff, was released internationally in Spring 2010.  He has written and directed several short films, most notably Ex Memoria (2006) which stars Nathalie Press and Sara Kestelman in a study of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, funded by the Wellcome Trust; and Nine 1/2 Minutes (2003), a romantic comedy starring David Tennant.

Rufus Stone is to be produced as the key output of the three-year research project, “Gay and Pleasant Land? – a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales “. The Project is a work package in the New Dynamics of Ageing Project, “Grey and Pleasant Land?: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Connectivity of Older People in Rural Civic Society” and funded by the British Research Councils.

Dr Kip Jones, Reader at the School of Health & Social Care and the Media School, who is the project’s Principal Investigator and Executive Director of Rufus Stone said, ‘We are very fortunate to secure Appignanesi’s involvement in this important output resulting from our three year’s of research efforts. Our hope is that the film will dispel many of the myths surrounding ageing, being gay and life in British rural settings.  By engaging Appignanesi, the film and the results of this important, in-depth research will have significant impact on a wide variety of audiences’.

Champions Answer the Call!

Several champions have stepped forward to help define the BU Research Themes.  You may recall I asked for people to help frame these themes and encouraged as many people as possible to step forward with their thoughts.  In fact the more views we have for each theme the more debate we can generate. 

To help this debate we are posting the detail from the templates on a special part of blog – the Themes page.  I encourage everybody to engage and to comment on the text as it is posted.  If you feel inspired then fill in a template as well!  The more people that get involved with this debate the stronger the definition of each research theme will be.  So please have your say!

For the template, please see my previous Research Themes post.

Matthew Bennett

PVC (Research, Enterprise and Internationalisation)

Champions Answer the Call!

BU Challenges, Research themes

Several champions have stepped forward to help define the BU Research Themes.  You may recall I asked for people to help frame these themes and encouraged as many people as possible to step forward with their thoughts.  In fact the more views we have for each theme the more debate we can generate. 

To help this debate we are posting the detail from the templates on a special part of blog – the Themes page.  I encourage everybody to engage and to comment on the text as it is posted.  If you feel inspired then fill in a template as well!  The more people that get involved with this debate the stronger the definition of each research theme will be.  So please have your say!

For the template, please see my previous Research Themes post.

Matthew Bennett

PVC (Research, Enterprise and Internationalisation)

Search for a Champion? Or BU Research Themes

Thank you to all those people who responded to the online questionnaire about the BU Research Themes.  There were 273 responses!  On this basis we can reduce the short list of twelve societal themes down to ten as set out in the briefing paper (available from  – I:\CRKT\Public\RDU\Research themes\Paper.docx).  The ten are:

  • Health and wellbeing
  • Recreation and leisure
  • Culture and society or Society & Social Change
  • Environmental change and biodiversity
  • Green economy and sustainability
  • Creative and digital economies
  • Aging
  • Learning and public engagement
  • Entrepreneurship and economic growth
  • Technology and design

We urgently need some champions to ‘flesh-out’ these themes to help scope them and allow us to ‘road test’ them further.  I am looking for as many views as possible for each theme; just fill out the template (available from  – I:\CRKT\Public\Research themes\Form.doc) and e-mail it back to me.  The idea is to then distill these views and produce a scope for each; if there are no champions forthcoming then we may be able to reduce the list further.  I need the templates back by the 27 May if possible; thank you!

Matthew Bennett

PVC (Research, Enterprise & Internationalisation)

(The documents are saved to the I-drive. If you are on-campus then you need to copy and paste the file pathway into an internet browser. If you are unable to access them please contact Julie Northam who will email you the documents).

Market Research Group Update and Overview

Awarded & submitted bids

Current news:  we have just moved our data entry facility to Talbot Campus reuniting the group on one site (DG10, ground floor) we have also updated our scanning equipment and software to make data processing faster and more accurate. Some good teamwork with IT services and Estates made the move possible, while handling a record amount of data for this time of year.

 Our ongoing projects include:

  • Dorset County Council panel surveys, providing data for the ‘Big Society’ and various staff surveys
  • RDO European Time Share research.
  • Data processing for two Bangor University, healthcare research projects with Health and Social Care.
  • Data processing for Kings College London, healthcare research with Health and Social Care.
  • Renaissance South East – Research into museum and gallery visits by primary and secondary school children in the SE region.
  • Data processing and analysis for North Staffordshire NHS, Maternity Patient Surveys a joint project with Health and Social Care.
  • The National Trust Countryside visitor research – a survey of 60 countryside areas managed by the organisation.
  • The National Trust visitor research – a survey of 180 properties in the United Kingdom, providing monthly market intelligence and feedback to properties and analysis to guide strategic decision making at a national level. The research includes and investigation of specific topics including, community engagement and drivers of visitor enjoyment.
  • Countryside and leisure research, sponsored by the National Trust to investigate drivers of countryside visit behaviour and motivation.
  • Hindhead Common, Surrey, impact of road new road route and tunnel.
  • Wareham St Martin Community research project this will provide analysis feedback for the development of community projects.
  • Research support for the Digital Hub HEIF 4 research managed by Philip Alford.
  • Research support for the GIS HEIF4 research programme managed Mark Dover, Applied Sciences
  • Research support for the Boscombe Surf Reef Project managed by ICTHR and Applied Sciences

The value of projects in the ‘order book’ at present is around £400,000 but of course this value is much enhanced by the value of case studies and research material to support the curriculum.

We also have a number of bids in progress including  Bournemouth Arts Festival, the Pembrokeshire Tourism Survey and research for the Northern Constabulary.

Vice-Chancellor’s Award: Research/Enterprise Project of the Year

The Design Simulation Research Centre (DSRC) in the School of DEC won the Vice-Chancellor’s award for the best research/enterprise project. The research, led by Prof Siamak Noroozi, Dr Philip Sewell and Bryce Dyer, is detailed below.

Members of the DSRC have used the results of previous research, funded by EPSRC and the medical charity REMEDI, to develop a research collaboration with Chas A Blatchford & Sons Ltd, the UKs leading prosthetics supplier.  This has resulted in the team being awarded an EPSRC CASE Award (£86k) to design and develop a ‘Smart Socket’ to provide lower-limb amputees with increased mobility and improved quality of life.  This collaboration has also led to the development of research to evaluate the performance of prostheses used by athletes in elite sport.

The underlying technology developed has other applications in civil, aerospace and marine engineering resulting in the initiation of two research projects with BAE Systems (PhD matched-funding – £26k and an EPSRC CASE Award – £95k).

IP rights have been negotiated with both companies meaning that a proportion of the income generated form any products developed will come to BU.

The research into the ‘smart socket’ and prosthetics fit has seen widespread public interest as the socket will help soldiers returning to active duty who had been injured in combat.  This has resulted in the following publications in the international press:
– Soldiers could get back to active duty with the help of a ‘smart’ prosthesis” was published in the Guardian, January 2011.
– Ahhh…Comfort! UK Research Takes Next Generation “Smart Limb” to New Level” was published in the International Magazine OandP Edge (Vol. 9, No. 5), May 2010.
– Amputee mobility fix is socket science” was published in the Engineer, February 2010.

The parallel stream of research in the ethical use of sports prostheses saw one of its researchers invited to join the International Paralympic Commitee Sports Equipment Working Group. This advises on legislation of equipment used by athletes at the Paralympic Games. Along with this, invitations in this area resulted in several keynote speeches on the centre’s research at international conferences in both Germany and Spain during 2010.  The team won the research prize at the Paralympics GB National Conference based on this research.

The findings from both projects and the resultant innovations will inform an area which has seen little attention historically.  As a result of this research the team was nominated for ‘Outstanding Engineering Research Team of the Year’ at the Times Higher Education Awards in 2010.

The research into prosthetics fit and the smart socket will potentially transfer into widespread practitioner health practise through Blatchford’s 30 UK prosthetic centres. As a result this will influence how amputees are rehabilitated both from treatment within the NHS but also specialised private clinics such as Headley Court which addresses military personnel both retired or seeking return to service.

The research into the prostheses in sport has resulted in across school collaboration between DEC and the School of Tourism. This relationship investigated novel ways of assessing amputee motion. One of the researchers was invited to join a working group within the International Paralympic Committee which will help inform the sports stakeholders and the wider community ahead of the 2012 London Paralympic Games.

Congratulations to the Design Simulation Research Centre! 😀

The Graduate School story part I…

Professor John Fletcher founded BU’s Graduate School in 2002. Here he reflects on what life was like before the Graduate School and where we have come to so far…

This blog is a reflection of the BU Graduate School story so far as the first incarnation of the Graduate School makes way for a new vision. When I was asked to set up the Graduate School in November 2002 as 0.2FTE of my time, it was in the wake of two RAEs where BU had been criticised for its lack of institutional support of its PGRs and a stream of complaints from our postgraduate researchers via the Student Union.  The first step was to examine the processes and systems in place across both campuses which quickly revealed that the seven Schools had seven different sets of processes and systems and, even more challenging, it transpired that we had somewhere between 80 and 147 PhD students but nobody quite knew how many.  When looking at the qualification rates at that time BU was only managing to get 11% of its PGRs through within 4 years and some researchers had been registered for more than 13 years!  Eight years on the Graduate School has implemented a Code of Practice and a set of processes that are now common across BU’s six Schools, overseen the introduction of new and innovative doctoral programmes and help improve our qualification rates. The systems that the Graduate School has put in place were deemed to be so effective that members of the panel that came to BU for the institutional audit contacted the VC to ask if they could adopt the BU model for their own institution.  BU was also one of the first handful of universities to introduce a credit bearing training programme for its supervisors, something that is now becoming commonplace across the sector. 

The support provided by the Graduate School to our PGR students has reduced the isolation and the complaints received from PGRs but there is still a long way to go to ensure that we have the correct systems in place to create a best practice research environment.  The introduction of myBUILD as an online research student log and compliance system met with considerable resistance but was innovative at that time and BU was one of the first institutes across the HEI sector to introduce an online log.  The lack of resources has meant that it was not possible to continue to develop the platform as the numbers of researchers increased but even though myBUILD has probably long gone past its “best before” date, it is vastly superior to the varied and somewhat unusual mixture of record keeping that was found in the individual Schools. There is an urgent need to redevelop the online system to make it more intuitive and better integrated with the other platforms across BU.

BU now has well over 300 PhD students and the qualification rates, particularly those of our part-time researchers, is vastly superior to that of 2002.  The Graduate School introduced the Annual PGR Conference which has been enormously successful and was an integral part of the Special Audit of PGR programmes, a working member of the EUA’s programme on improving the quality of doctoral programmes across Europe and was the hub for BU’s application to ESRC and AHRC for doctoral support bids (the former falling foul of the spending cuts but the latter achieving success). It is hoped that Graduate School will move from strength to strength as the importance of the postgraduate segment of our student body becomes more significant as we move forward in the 21st century.

Vice-Chancellor’s Award: Collaborative Research Project

Dr Richard Shipway (School of Tourism) won the Vice-Chancellor’s award for the best collaborative research project for his ESRC-funded project – The Sport Tourism Opportunities for Research Mobility and International Networking Group (STORMING) Initiative.

The grant award formed part of the ESRC’s ‘International Training and Networking Opportunities Programme’. The project supported seventeen early career researchers across eleven higher education institutions throughout the UK, through the provision of a series of international networking opportunities for emerging researchers with a commitment to supporting and further developing sport tourism research. All aspects of the delivery, organisation and external leveraging of the project were managed by Richard. The project has delivered a series of international research outputs and positioned the School of Tourism at the heart of emerging research in this area. Richard has also maximised opportunities from this project, including an invitation to serve on the ESRC Peer Review College, reviewing grant applications in the social sciences.

Richard received the award for having made a substantial impact in collaborative working within BU, and securing external funding to create an innovative research network involving internal colleagues and external institutions. The research undertaken by the network has led to high impact outputs.

Congratulations Richard! 😀

Vice-Chancellor’s Awards – research project winners!

The Vice-Chancellor’s Awards took place last night and the winner’s of the two research awards were:

Collaborative research / enterprise project of the year: Dr Richard Shipway from the School of Tourism

Research / enterprise project of the year: Design Simulation Research Centre led by Professor Siamak Noroozi from the School of Design, Engineering & Computing

Congratulations to all staff involved! 😀

We will be featuring both of the award winners in future blog posts!

Dave Parham and Paola Palma – Swash Channel wreck

Dave Parham and Paola Palma (School of Applied Sciences) have been researching the Swash Channel Wreck which lies in approximately 7m of water in the Swash Channel in the approaches to Poole Harbour. The site was discovered as a side-scan sonar anomaly as a result of a geophysical survey conducted by Wessex Archaeology on behalf of Poole Harbour Commissioners and Poole Borough Council. The site has since been designated as a Historic Wreck.

The ship is the subject of a major excavation by BU, supported by English Heritage. It has been dated to around 1630 and includes the earliest ship carvings ever found in the UK, including a mysterious wooden merman, and much of the evidence found on the wreck suggest that it would have been a relatively high status ship for its period.

The wreck has been featured on the One Show (6 April 2011) where presenter Dan Snow took part in a dive on the wreck in the mouth of Poole Bay alongside a team of BU Marine Archaeologists, led by Dave.

Dave will also feature in the fourth episode of Britain’s Secret Seas, The Bustling South, on 29 May at 8pm on BBC2.

After conservation, finds from the Wreck and all the information from the excavation will be passed on to Poole Museum Service to be displayed to the community.

PGR Poster Events

Guidance

Post Graduate Researcher Poster Events

At School level we will shortly be holding a Post Graduate Poster event on the 18th May. This was an initiative that started five years ago following a suggestion from a PGR student representative. Various poster events are organised specifically for PGR only participation, at national level such as the young engineer of the year competition at the Houses of Parliament, at university level organised by the Graduate School and at academic group level such as the new Psychology event. It is worth thinking about these activities and the value to the academic community at various levels.

Our PGR poster event is organised with the help of a small number of staff but the main decision making regarding the format of the event is driven by the PGR community itself. The posters compete for a small cash prize within year groups and are judged externally by invited high-profile industrialists and academics. Participation level has been high during the four events to date and the event ownership for the participating PGR’s has been maintained. External participation to judge the posters has been appreciated by the PGR’s as the economic and practical benefits of research are seen as valued. In addition, the enthusiasm for the research projects from the external competition panel act as a real motivation to students and supervisors. Our key values that keep the poster conference successful are retaining the PRG ownership concerning format and external engagement via the competition judgment of the posters.

Prof Mark Hadfield

Deputy Dean – Research and Enterprise

School of Design, Engineering and Computing

REF event 19 & 20 May 2011 – REGISTRATION IS OPEN!!

Research assessment

REF logoBU is hosting a two-day REF event on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 May 2011. All staff are invited to attend.

The event is of interest to BU academic staff and anyone who will be involved in the BU submission to the REF.

There will be three separate sessions:

Session 1
Thursday 19 May 9am-2pm
This session will be open to BU staff and external delegates.
There will be presentations from the REF team at HEFCE, REF impact pilot panel members, and a REF impact pilot institution (University of Plymouth).

Session 2
Thursday 19 May 2pm-5pm
This session is only open to BU staff.
This session will provide BU staff with the opportunity for internal networking, followed by a demonstration of BU’s new publications management system and a presentation on preparing a publication profile for the REF.

Session 3
Friday 20 May 9:45am-4:30pm
This session is only open to BU staff.
The focus of this session is the development of the BU impact case studies. There will be presentations of the impact case studies being developed at the moment.

All sessions will take place in Kimmeridge House and Poole House, Talbot Campus.

You must register separately for each session you will be attending.

See our previous REF Event blog post for further details. The provisional programmes are available on the registration forms (see links above).

BU Research opinion polls!

Guidance

You may have noticed our new opinion poll section on the BU Research Blog homepage.

We are interested to know what you think about RESEARCH – whether that’s research at BU, the external research environment, good practice for undertaking research, particular research projects… Basically anything to do with research!

Responding to the poll takes seconds and responses are anonymous. Once you have responded to the poll you can see how other BU staff have also responded!

Once a poll has finished we will be writing a blog post about the results. Depending on the poll question, the results could impact on how we manage and administer research at BU in future.

We will be changing the poll question every few weeks. The first poll is now up and running and asks whether journal impact factors are a good indicator of quality.

If you would like to suggest a topic/question to be added to the poll then let us know by commenting on this blog post!

To read more about journal impact factors, read Anita’s excellent post on impact factors.

REF event 19 & 20 May 2011 – SAVE THE DATE!

Research assessment

REF logoBU will be holding a two day Research Excellence Framework (REF) event on 19 and 20 May to which all staff are invited to attend.

Day 1 (open to BU staff and external delegates)
9am-2pm – this will be an external event supported by HEFCE to which all HEIs in the South of England will be invited. The focus will be on developing and assessing impact for the REF. There will be speakers from HEFCE, an academic from one of the impact pilot institutions (University of Plymouth), and some of the impact pilot panel members. The event is aimed primarily at academics likely to be submitted to the REF and UOA Leaders. It will provide a forum for networking and discussion around preparations for the impact element of the REF.

Day 1 (open to BU staff only)
2pm-5pm – There will be an opportunity for internal networking, a demonstration of the publications management system BU will soon be implementing, and a talk by Prof Matthew Bennett on building a publication profile for the REF.

Day 2 (open to BU staff only)
9am-4:30pm – the focus of Day 2 is the development of the BU impact case studies. The day will open with a presentation by Prof Matthew Bennett on what impact actually is, followed by presentations of the impact case studies being developed at the moment (3 per Unit of Assessment). These will run in 9 concurrent sessions with 4 presentations taking place in parallel during each session. The main aims of Day 2 are to get academics thinking about the impact case studies in a structured way, to identify resource requirements to maximise potential impacts, and the engage staff from M&C with the case studies being developed. In addition this is a great opportunity to showcase the excellent research that is undertaken at BU, to meet colleagues from other Schools, and to stimulate ideas for future research collaborations.

The event is free to attend but booking is essential. Booking will open next week – further details to follow!

Future BU research themes – have your say!

Following the current refresh of Vision & Values led by the Vice Chancellor Professor John Vinney the intention is to look again at the research and enterprise strategy for BU.

There are likely to be two big elements of change: one is a shift to talking about research as an all embracing term for not only the creation of knowledge but also its dissemination through enterprise and professional practice, and the other is a move towards a more outward facing approach led by the large societal themes both of the day and of the future.  This will position BU to respond more effectively to the big research questions; those associated with the funding and societal impact.  As the first step towards this we are trying to identify a series of broad themes or communities of interest around which we can focus and foster a more collegial and collaborative research mission. 

Identifying these themes or communities is something we wish to engage all staff in.  In the short term these themes and communities will be used to promote our research via the web through a shift to a more narrative based approach rather than one based on our internal structures as at present. 

To start this process off we looked first at the key funding themes for the research councils and other large funders and then ‘road-tested’ them via the BU Professoriate to come up with a long list of possible research themes or communities of interest.  I am now seeking your input via a survey; what themes speak to you? What themes would your research fit under? What are we are missing?  The survey takes less than two minutes to complete. Your participation is very much appreciated and will help directly shape not only the way in which we promote our research via the BU website but also our future research strategy.

To complete the survey click here!

 The survey is open until Monday 2 May.

 

Matthew Bennett

PVC (Research, Enterprise & Internationalisation)

Employee wellbeing consultancy package offered to health-conscious businesses

typical workplace

The Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) awarded by HEFCE to English HEIs as an annual block grant to support the development of a pervasive enterpreneurial environment through sustained engagement in enterprise activities. Prof Steve Ersser and Dr Ann Hemingway (HSC) were internally awarded HEIF-4 funding to collaborate with academics across BU to develop a consultancy package to promote wellbeing and humanisation in the workplace, building on the success of the cross-School Centre for Wellbeing and Quality of Life (CeWQoL). We caught up with Project Manager Dr Ann Hemingway to find out how the project is going…

The funding is to enable BU to develop a multi-dimensional consultancy package to help businesses improve the wellbeing of their employees.

“Organisations are more dependent than ever before on well-trained, highly qualified and motivated staff,” said Dr Ann Hemingway. “60% of adult waking hours are spent at work, yet 175 million working days are lost to illness, so organisations need to tackle head-on issues around absenteeism but also sickness presenteeism – employees still turning up for work despite ill health and complaints that can so often result in future sickness absence.”

Dr Hemingway continued: “Our research on workforce health and wellbeing has enabled us to achieve a new understanding of health at work which encompasses physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing and the social determinants of health.”

CeWQol has received £250,000 from the University’s HEIF) grant to support commercial and public sector firms and charity organisations in their quest to be recognised as healthy workplaces – and achieve formal accreditation through external agencies such as Investors in People and the Royal Society for Public Health.

The package focuses on wellbeing and humanisation – a term being championed by the University (building on the work of Prof Kate Galvin and Prof Les Todres) around the importance of people-centred processes that support wellbeing and the concern with helping employees feel valued.

Organisations will have the unique opportunity to draw on the University’s wide-ranging research expertise from across all the schools in the university. This includes human resources management (recruitment and retention), occupational health and safety, healthier communities (nutrition, exercise and sport), and the design of working environments and stress alleviation.

As such the project involves five academic schools – Health and Social Care; Business School; Design, Engineering and Computing; Media School; and Applied Sciences – and the BU Wellbeing Enterprise Network in collaboration with the Centre for Practice Development and the Centre for Qualitative Research.

As part of the grant BU has developed a Collaborative Research Space at the Lansdowne campus in which staff can engage in collaborative activity and deliver consultancy training for external organisations.

“What we are offering organisations is our multi-disciplinary expertise to help them organise their work, their environment, and the communication and social opportunities for their staff.”

Anyone interested in finding out more about the wellbeing and humanisation in the workplace consultancy package should contact Dr Ann Hemingway at BU’s Centre for Wellbeing and Quality of Life on 01202 962796 or aheming@bournemouth.ac.uk.teamwork

Bournemouth University staff involved in the project are: Professor Steven Ersser; Dr Ann Hemingway; Dr Paul Stevens; Dr Fiona Cowdell; Professor Les Todres; Professor Kate Galvin; Mr Clive Andrewes; Professor Yannis Georgellis; Professor Thomas Lange; Dr Eloise Carr; Professor John Edwards; Mr Joe Flintham; Dr John Hallam; Associate Professor Heather Hartwell; Dr Sarah Hean; Dr Ian Jones; Dr Elizabeth Norton; Ms Julie Robson; and Colin Hewitt Bell. 

For further information please see project page on the CeWQoL website.

Bids: Good Luck & Congratulations Week Ending 1 April 2011

Awarded & submitted bids

Last week was a modest week for bidding but Media School was the exception with bids going to the British Academy from Carrie Hodges and Darren Lilleker.  Hugh Chignell and Vanessa Edwards have also put in sizable bids last week.   Congratulations are due for three bids from the Creative Enterprise Bureau (Mike Molesworth, Dan Jackson, Liam Sheridan) and another small success from Mike Molesworth for work with On The Wild Side.  In Applied Science Adrian Newton put in a large bid to the New Forest Higher Level Stewardship Board and Mark Dover secured another small enterprise contract for GIS work.  All good stuff!

Matthew Bennett

Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research, Enterprise & Internationalisation)