Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Congratulations to BU’s Equality and Diversity Adviser James Palfreman-Kay whose application to HEFCE’s ‘Catalyst Fund: Tackling hate crime and online harassment on campus‘ has been successful. He is one of 40 academic recipients of funding at universities and colleges throughout England. Applications have been assessed by a panel of HEFCE staff and external experts from across relevant areas of knowledge particular to student safeguarding.
Congratulations!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
The deadline is fast approaching for the HEIF-6 funding call – 23rd July.
HEFCE provide Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) to universities to facilitate a broad range of knowledge-based interactions between them and the wider world, which result in economic and social benefit to the UK. The current round of funding is referred to as HEIF-6 and runs from August 2017 to July 2022.
An internal call is now open for applications from BU colleagues who wish to develop innovative projects. Funding will be awarded to those applications that clearly demonstrate how new/existing collaborations will be developed and how societal/economic impact will be achieved. Interdisciplinary and/or cross-Faculty/PS proposals are encouraged, as are proposals with international collaborators.
We anticipate making awards of £10k-100k per project per year. Projects should be between one and three years in duration and must align to one of BU’s HEIF-6 themes:
Colleagues wishing to apply should read BU’s HEIF-6 strategy and the HEIF-6 FAQs before completing the HEIF-6 application form. These documents can be found on the i-drive (I:\R&KEO\Public\HEIF 6). Applications must be supported by the Project Lead’s Faculty and signed by the relevant Deputy Dean (Research and Professional Practice). Any queries should be sent to Julie Northam (jnortham@bournemouth.ac.uk) in the first instance.
Completed applications should be sent to Rebecca Edwards (redwards@bournemouth.ac.uk) by midnight on Sunday 23rd July. We aim to confirm the outcomes within a fortnight of the closing date.
HEFCE provide Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) to universities to facilitate a broad range of knowledge-based interactions between them and the wider world, which result in economic and social benefit to the UK. The current round of funding is referred to as HEIF-6 and runs from August 2017 to July 2022.
An internal call is now open for applications from BU colleagues who wish to develop innovative projects. Funding will be awarded to those applications that clearly demonstrate how new/existing collaborations will be developed and how societal/economic impact will be achieved. Interdisciplinary and/or cross-Faculty/PS proposals are encouraged, as are proposals with international collaborators.
We anticipate making awards of £10k-100k per project per year. Projects should be between one and three years in duration and must align to one of BU’s HEIF-6 themes:
Colleagues wishing to apply should read BU’s HEIF-6 strategy and the HEIF-6 FAQs before completing the HEIF-6 application form. These documents can be found on the i-drive (I:\R&KEO\Public\HEIF 6). Applications must be supported by the Project Lead’s Faculty and signed by the relevant Deputy Dean (Research and Professional Practice). Any queries should be sent to Julie Northam (jnortham@bournemouth.ac.uk) in the first instance.
Completed applications should be sent to Rebecca Edwards (redwards@bournemouth.ac.uk) by midnight on Sunday 23rd July. We aim to confirm the outcomes within a fortnight of the closing date.
My name is Oliver Cooke and I am currently in my third year of study on the BA Honours Media Production course. As part of my Graduate Project, I am developing a media package in order to showcase a number of projects that have been awarded Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF).
My experience with HEIF comes from the time on my work placement that I undertook last year. I worked within the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO) as the Student Engagement Co-Ordinator. I learnt about many initiatives at BU including HEIF; so whilst reflecting on my time in RKEO and ideas for my Graduate Project, it was clear to me that there are many interesting projects at BU. It also struck me that here was an ideal opportunity to create some really engaging media content in order to showcase the innovation journeys and provide more information about innovation and knowledge exchange at BU.
The media content I will be producing will include a short video documentary, web content that can be integrated with the BU Research Website and a social media campaign. This will aim to highlight the people involved with HEIF at BU, as well as the research.
I have just started filming and the first footage has been shot involving Andrew Whittington (PI) and BU student Christopher Dwen who are working on the project: “Sherlock’s Window: improving accuracy of entomological forensics at post-mortem criminal investigation using combined cuticular hydrocarbon and internal metabolite analysis.”
(Sherlock’s Window was also featured in the latest edition of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle: Edition 6, January 2017, Page 22.)
It hardly feels like the dust has settled on the results from the last Research Excellence Framework, yet here we are again – almost half way through another research assessment cycle with HEFCE proposing potential changes to the next exercise. It feels like I’ve been transported back to 2009 when HEFCE were running bibliometrics and impact pilots to inform REF2014. I have to remind myself that it is in fact 2017 and things have moved on. We are now talking about REF2021 (how time flies!) and HEFCE have launched a consultation on how this exercise might work. Whilst citations and impact are still on the agenda for discussion, they are joined by other substantial changes that, if adopted, will transform the shape and potentially outcome of the next exercise.
The proposed changes have been informed by Lord Stern’s independent review of the REF which was published last July. This made 12 recommendations on how the next REF could be strengthened, whilst reducing the bureaucracy and cost of running the exercise (read Jane Forster’s overview of the recommendations – Stern review of the REF: what next?). These recommendations have now been reviewed by the four UK HE funding bodies and, prior to Christmas, HEFCE published proposals to amend the REF to incorporate the recommendations. HEFCE’s proposals are now open for consultation with the sector.
The document itself is fairly lengthy and dense, and over 40 questions are put forward for consideration. The key proposals are:
There are some excellent summaries available online, many of which provide thoughts on what the proposals could mean in practice. The following summaries are particularly informative and worth reading: HEFCE launches consultation on REF2021, Soft Stern or Hard Stern and Implementing REF2021.
BU will be submitting an institutional response to the consultation before the deadline of 17th March. As these are significant proposals, all staff will have the opportunity to contribute to the response. As a number of the key questions would benefit from a discipline-level response, UoA teams (UoA leaders, impact champions and output champions) are calling meetings within Faculties to hold discussions related to their own UoA. These will take place over the next month or so. Contact a member of your UoA team for further information. Staff not based in Faculties are also invited to comment on the proposals and can do so via their Director/Head of Professional Service.
The are various REF-focused conferences and events taking place over the next few months, organised by HEFCE, ARMA, etc. Interesting news from these will be posted to the Research Blog. HEFCE are anticipating significant sector-wide engagement with the proposals and have committed to reading all feedback received. It is anticipated that, following the consultation, the initial decisions regarding the shape of REF2021 will be published in summer 2017.
HEFCE have launched a new portal which aims to support higher education institutions to continuously improve their practice in the areas of knowledge exchange.
This includes sections on:
HEFCE will continue to populate these pages are further information becomes available.
If you have any queries about the portal and its contents, or wish to discuss any elements of knowledge exchange, please do not hesitate to contact Rebecca Edwards.
We would like to welcome Dr Caitlin Potter who joined our Eco-Coding team from Bangor University on the 31st October. Her previous work has been on microbial communities of peatlands using metagenomic techniques and she will bring expertise and experience to the Eco-coding project.
Now that Caitlin is with us we look forward to the next stage of the project; discovering what our urban pollinators have been feeding on.
Click here for more information on this project and check out our new project page on the BU Research Website.
The newly launched Pollinator Exchange is your one-stop resource
With pollinator numbers in decline in rural areas, there has been increasing focus on the many ways in which towns and cities can be made more pollinator-friendly. Urban green spaces such as amenity grassland in parks, gardens, verges or roundabouts offer plenty of opportunities for pollinators, provided they are managed correctly.
While much academic research has gone into this field in recent years, this is not always readily available to the people in charge of managing urban green spaces. Local councils, highway agencies and other authorities need clear, evidence-based practical advice to turn our towns and cities into places abuzz with pollinators.
The Pollinator Exchange website, www.pollinatorexchange.org developed by Bournemouth University, fulfils this role. It provides an interactive database of the latest research, practical guidance and projects connected to pollinators in urban areas. All resources come with a brief summary of their main points, allowing those with limited time to follow recent developments and implement key recommendations. Website users can browse the existing catalogue and also add their own resources, thereby contributing to ongoing knowledge exchange on this important topic.
Gill Perkins, Chief Executive at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, was one of many staff from conservation and land management organisations who generously gave their time to help test and develop the website. She said: ‘Bumblebee Conservation Trust recognises that urban environments are becoming crucially important to reverse the decline in pollinators. The Pollinator Exchange site will facilitate communication and knowledge exchange between groundsmen and contractors, biodiversity officers and everyone who influences decisions on what to grow, making it a vital resource for all to learn best techniques.’
The Pollinator Exchange was funded through the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s knowledge exchange programme: the Higher Education Innovation Funding scheme. (HEIF 5+1 August 2015 – July 2016.)
Please visit www.pollinatorexchange.org for a closer view.
For more information on this project please contact the Project Lead Kathy Hodder.
Then we want to hear from you!
The University is currently compiling the data for the annual Higher Education – Business & Community Interaction survey (HE-BCI) due to be submitted to HESA shortly. 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 between 1 August 2015 and 31 July 2016.
Event types that should be returned include, but are not limited to:
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:
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.
HEFCE and Research Councils UK have published a review of the interdisciplinary research landscape in the UK, supported by a report examining 10 institutional case studies in English universities.
The studies complement work recently published by the British Academy, the Global Research Council and HEFCE with the Medical Research Council.
The reports will form part of the discussion at the conference: ‘Interdisciplinarity: Policy and Practice’ on Thursday 8 December 2016, co-hosted by HEFCE, the British Academy and Research Councils UK.
The reports provide an overview of the current interdisciplinary research landscape in the UK, drawing on a survey of over 2,000 participants, workshops, interviews and case studies.
The findings reflect researcher, strategic leader and funder perspectives, highlighting interdisciplinary research (IDR) as a crucial part of the UK research landscape.
A desire to achieve broader impact, the challenges associated with peer review and evaluation, the importance of institutional support and the value of flexible funds featured as common themes.
The case studies identified good practice in a range of institutions seeking to grow, sustain and embed interdisciplinary practice in their research cultures.
The importance of balancing top-down and bottom-up approaches, the role of flexible funding, and institutional infrastructure that prioritises high-quality research were identified as some potentially beneficial features in successful institutional IDR environments.
The reports also highlighted that:
The evaluation of interdisciplinary research outputs, and their impact, were highlighted by Lord Stern’s Independent Review of the Research Excellence Framework as areas for further development.
Subject to the views of our respective Ministers, the UK higher education funding bodies intend to take this forward in a consultation, to be launched before the end of 2016.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England invites applications for its catalyst fund: innovation in learning and teaching. This supports small-scale projects to develop innovations in learning and teaching for university provision.
The council is particularly interested in proposals which:
•develop curriculum innovations from interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary professional practice or both;
•respond to employer demands for advanced skills or knowledge;
•develop use of learner analytics for particular pedagogic purposes.
Click here for more information.
If you are interested in submitting to this call you must contact your RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.
For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, you can set up your own personalised alerts 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.
If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.
As HEIF 5+1 funding came to an end on 31 July after a run of 12 months , there is no time to stop for breath as the wheels of knowledge exchange continue to turn and HEIF 5+1+1 gears up – running from 1 August 2016 until 31 July 2017.
Following a competitive call, (with an increase in applications from previous years) twelve projects have been identified to accelerate the ethos of knowledge exchange and innovation at BU.
Progress updates will be posted by the projects teams during the year and you can follow their progress on a number of channels including the research blog . A list of the projects has been included at the bottom of this post.
For further information about knowledge exchange opportunities including HEIF feel free to contact Jayne Codling within RKEO.
Media and Journalism students Chelsea Nwasike and Grace Brewer have developed an interactive documentary to illustrate the project including the two recent workshops that are helping to transform approaches to psychiatric genetic counselling.
Genetic counsellors and researchers who attended the European and international workshops were interviewed and included in an interactive platform, along with videos from Dr Kevin McGhee and a ‘mental health jar’ demonstration video.
Dr Kevin McGhee explained: “By expanding healthcare professionals understanding of genetics and mental illness and providing a way for people around the world to view these discussions from the workshops, we want to raise awareness and encourage people to take better care of their mental health.
Funded by the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) find out more about this project on the BU Research Website.
konfer has been developed to faciliate easier access to the university sector for the business community, by collating a large amount of information all on one platform. UK universities are bursting with innovation and world-class academics who are keen to collaborate with industry, charities and the public sector.
konfer was created by the National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB) to make this astonishing wealth of expertise and resources more accessible. Working in partnership with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Research Councils UK (RCUK), konfer brings knowledge and growth to businesses, valuable exposure for university talent, and future prosperity for the UK.
When a business owner spots an opportunity, konfer supports the journey from finding a research partner and funding to planning and co-creation. It does this by giving direct access to:
konfer brings knowledge and growth to businesses, valuable exposure for university talent, and future strength for the UK economy.
NCUB want konfer to be as useful as possible, so access to the Alpha version of the site is available. No need for passwords or user names – just dive straight in. https://konfer.online
This means things may be a little rough around the edges and there may be some bugs to be squished ! But, hope by sharing the site early, hope to consider suggestions fro improvements. Planned live date is erly in the New Year. Feedback can be emailed konfer@ncub.co.uk . For more information on this platform and NCUB in general contact Jayne Codling within RKEO.
The project team from the Faculty of Science & Technology has received Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) to undertake a series of activities aimed at encouraging university and the public sector to harness the benefits of advanced assistive technologies. (The HEIF project started last year and is due to finish at the end of July.)
The nature of HEIF funding encourages knowledge exchange and support to develop a broad range of knowledge based interactions between universities and colleges and the wider word, which result in economic and social benefit to the UK. In current clinical practices, urinary output measurement and supervision are prevailing medical intervention treatments for patients suffering from critical illness, aging bladder, post-surgery urination difficulties and long-term bedridden. However, the urinary output is still measured and monitored manually by healthcare staff, which is extremely time-consuming and prone to undesirable human errors commonly, arose in these repetitive and monotonous tasks. The project aims to invent an automatic device for remotely monitoring of urinary output, which features real-time remotely wireless catheter fall-off and flow rate monitoring, urinary output minute-by-minute monitoring and real-time states visualization.
The project team is made up of a number of researchers and students from multidisciplinary domains in addition to academics. The team (Prof Hongnian Yu, Mr Arif Reza Anwary; Mr Daniel Craven, Mr Muhammad Akbar, and Mr Pengcheng Liu) has recently presented their three developed prototypes at the collaborator’s site (Royal Bournemouth Hospital). The feedback and comments from the hospital staff are very positive. Dr Simon McLaughlin, the project collaborator from the Royal Bournemouth Hospital, said ‘The project looks to have progressed well. The work is excellent and the one of the prototypes is almost ready to deploy.’
The team hope to continue to consolidate the current developed prototypes and build on top of them to invent the commercially acceptable products.
Friday 1 July is the deadline for applications to be submitted in response to the latest HEIF funding call.
Quick tips if you have yet to submit your final proposal.
Next steps
Based on the call schedule:
| Action | Date |
| Call w/c – applications open | w/c 06/06/16 |
| Proposal deadline – applications close | 01/07/16 Friday |
| Proposal review process | 04/07/16 – 18/07/16 |
| Successful projects announced | w/c 18/07/16 |
| New project funding starts | 01/08/16 |
For all details on the latest HEIF call click here.
Good luck!
Research shows that HEFCE funding for university knowledge exchange (KE) activity delivers significant and increasing return for public investment. The return on investment from £1 of Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) is currently estimated at £9.70 in benefits for the economy and society, and may deliver even higher returns in future.
Why not apply for the next round of HEIF funding available?
These results reflect the way universities overall are gaining greater expertise in KE, using HEIF more effectively and developing stronger partnerships, particularly with businesses. The research studies demonstrate the range and breadth of KE activity, and the significant benefits it brings to the economy and society.
The research studies describe positive feedback from businesses and social and community groups working with universities, on the benefits they have received from KE activities. Businesses feel that universities have become much more willing to engage and that higher education KE delivers value for money.
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