Tagged / research

RKE Development Framework: Pre-award Finances workshop on 2 November!

This informative session held in the Fusion Building will introduce researchers to Full Economic Costs (fEC), transparant approaches to costing (TRAC) and BU Financial Regulations. Guidance will be offered on how to cost projects in a way that funders will find acceptable. Training will be provided on producing the ‘Justificaton of Resources’ document required by many funders.

By the end of this session you will be able to:

  • Understand why costs are produced using fEC
  • Gain an understanding of what are reasonable costs on applications
  • Understand why costs must be fully justified.

Please book your place on the Organisational Development webpage here.

As this session starts at 12.00 noon to 1.00 pm, please feel free to bring your lunch.

rkeo-rke-pre-award-at-bu

PhD student visiting

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“[…] collaboration is more important than the competition.”

Bertrand Russell

 

Eduardo Martínez-Carbonell Guillamón is a PhD student from the faculty of Health and Sport Science at University Catholic of San Antonio in Murcia, a lovely city in the south of Spain.

Collaborating with Université Catholique de Louvain and School Top Trades Du Sport, Eduardo is developing a research named “Bone mineral density in a population of the region of Murcia and its relationship with physical exercise”.

His aim is to search for risk factors of osteoporosis and then find a prevention plan based on physical exercises.

From September Eduardo joined our University as a visiting PhD student collaborating with PGR Francesco Ferraro, on the relationship between trunk muscles training and balance, under the supervision of Professor Alison McConnell, Professor Tom Wainwright and Dr. James Gavin.

Working together at the Orthopedic Research Institute is being a gratifying experience.

We both are aware that falls prevention is a sensitive topic that required an interdisciplinary approach.

To accomplish and maintaining a high-quality standard for our volunteers, we are working side by side to get the best out of this experience and actively collaborate in the field of elderly health care.

From this collaboration we hope to improve our knowledge and networks for research to come.

Research & Knowledge Exchange Development Framework: Getting started on applying for research funding – Tomorrow 27 Oct at 12.00 noon!

The first session for the ‘Pre-Award at BU’ pathway called ‘Getting started on applying for research funding’ will be held tomorrow in Poole House, PG10!

This session will explore how best to adapt research in response to the changing external environment. The workshop will provide information on the best routes to funding based upon career stages and also introduce who in RKEO can support you.

By the end of this session you will:

  • Understand how best to access help with research proposals at BU
  • Identify appropriate funders for different areas of research.

Please book your place on the Organisational Development webpage here.

As this session starts at 12.00 noon to 1.00 pm, please feel free to bring your lunch.

rkeo-rke-pre-award-at-bu

Influencing Public Policy Workshop

Calling all researchers! Would you like your research to influence policy?

BU’s Policy Advisor, Jane Forster, will be running a workshop this Thursday 27 October to help you to use your research to influence policy makers.

Working alongside policy makers is a useful tool to get your research recognised and used by professionals in your relevant field, which can then have an impact on society.

Influencing policy is a great way of raising the profile of the research, this can also help benefit society and help raise the profile for the academic behind the research. This also creates room for new partnerships and future collaborations, for both the research and the academic.

Research is a useful tool to influence policy, as this provides evidence based change or amendment to legislation. This is a powerful way of developing research impact. As this can be a complex process, Jane Forster will explain the process of influencing policy and how your research can influence policy makers.

The workshop will run from 09:30-11:30 on Lansdowne Campus. You can find out more information here or you can complete the booking form here.

 

EU award for PhD student Preeti Mahato

international, PG research, Publishing, student research

FHSS PhD student Preeti Mahato in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) has been awarded a funded place on the COST Action Training School BEYOND BIRTH COHORTS: from study design to data management.  This training school will run from 23-15 November in Spain.

eu-flagCOST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is a unique platform where European researchers can jointly develop their ideas and initiatives across all scientific disciplines through trans-European networking of nationally funded research.  Preeti pal has been awarded the sum of 500 euro to cover the cost of attending the Training School and travel and accommodation costs.    Preeti’s PhD project is on maternity care provision in  Nepal. Preeti’s research focuses on the quality and equity of service available at birthing centres. In Nepal, birthing centres act as first contact point for the women seeking maternity services especially the basic obstetric care. She is supervised by Dr. Catherine Angell, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen and BU Visiting Faculty Prof. Padam Simkhada (based at Liverpool John Moores University).

Preeti has already published the first PhD paper ‘Birthing centres in Nepal: Recent developments, obstacles and opportunities’ in the Journal of Asian Midwives (JAM) [1], whilst another was published in the Nepal Journal of Epidemiology [2].  Furthermore, a more general health and development paper was published this year in Health Prospect [3].

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

References:

  1. Mahato, P., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Angell, C. (2016) Birthing centres in Nepal: Recent developments, obstacles and opportunities, Journal of Asian Midwives 3(1): 17-30.
  2. Mahato, P.K., Regmi, P.R., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Angell, C., Sathian, B. (2015) Birthing centre infrastructure in Nepal post 2015 earthquake. Nepal Journal of Epidemiology 5(4): 518-519. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/NJE/article/view/14260/1157
  3. Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., Simkhada, P., Sharma, S., Mahato, P. (2016) Sustainable Development Goals: relevance to maternal & child health in Nepal. Health Prospect 15(1):9-10. healthprospect.org/archives/15/1/3.pdf

FHSS Dr. Vanessa Heaslip awarded Florence Nightingale Travel Scholarship

Awarded & submitted bids, international

florence-nightingale-foundation-2016Dr. Vanessa Heaslip in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences (FHSS) has been awarded a Florence Nightingale Travel Scholarship. She will be using this prestigious award to travel to New Zealand and various locations in the United Kingdom. She is hoping to learn from New Zealand, which is decades ahead in tackling these issues, to establish, adapt and develop principles for implementation in the UK.  Vanessa’s study funded by the Florence Nightingale Foudation is called: “Towards addressing health inequalities of marginalised communities; using Gypsy Roma Travellers (GRT) as the model.”

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

CMMPH disability & childbirth research

Publishing

Last month’s press release for the latest study in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) was picked up by the Journal of Family Health.  disability-pregnancy-2016The study ‘Human rights and dignities: Experience of disabled women during pregnancy, childbirth and early parenting’ appeared under the heading ‘Maternity care failing disabled women, charity warns’ in the Journal of Family Health.  The charity in question is Birthrights which funded the survey of women with physical or sensory impairment or long-term health conditions and their maternity care experiences.  The research was conducted by midwifery researchers Jenny Hall, Jillian Ireland and Vanora Hundley at Bournemouth University and occupational therapist Bethan Collins, at the University of Liverpool.

rcm-disabilityLast month this important study had already been reported by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) on their webpages (click here to read more).  On the RCM website  Louise Silverton Director for Midwifery at the RCM said: “It is deeply disappointing to hear that women with disabilities are not getting the maternity care they need and deserve. Although this is only a small survey, it does provide a very valuable insight into the realties of the care these women have received while pregnant.  The RCM believes that maternity services should treat disabled women like every other woman, while ensuring that the care provided does not ignore or overreact to their specific wishes and aspirations.”

 

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Webinar: Emotional Processing Scale from Prof Roger Baker 6th Oct 2pm

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Professor Roger Baker, the lead author of the Emotional Processing Scale, is running a webinar on Thursday 6th October 2-3pm, hosted by Hogrefe UK.

Roger Baker is a clinical psychologist and has taught clinical psychology at BU.  He specialises in emotions and the treatment of anxiety disorders and has worked as a researcher and clinical psychologist at several universities and NHS Trusts.

Please follow this link to sign up to the webinar:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7941554061013769986

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The Emotional Processing Scale is a questionnaire measure of a person’s emotional processing style, their typical way of processing emotional situations and it can be applied to mental health, pain, medical conditions and psychosomatic conditions.  For more information please visit: http://emotionalprocessing.org/

Research in post-Brexit Britain “New Neighbours – Old Friends”

Posted on behalf of Matt Bentley, Deputy Dean – Research & Professional Practice

Now that the shock and post-referendum gloom has faded a little, we face the reality that for Higher Education in the UK, as well as in a host of other areas, things will never be the same again. Theresa May has now made it clear that she and her government will enact Article 50 by March 2017 to trigger Britain’s exit from the EU, which is likely to be complete by 2019. The next three years will be a critical period for research in UK HEIs including BU. In the Faculty of Science and Technology we have achieved some notable recent successes in both EU and RCUK funding across our seven Research Centres, and bidding activity has seen a marked increase over the past two years. We cannot afford to turn our back on our EU collaborators and must hope that the bonds of collaborative research will be stronger than the ties offered by EU funding. The government is attempting to mitigate the impact of loss of EU funding by underwriting existing research commitments and also by offering new funding routes through the Global Challenges Research Fund. It will be important to keep our relationships with our old friends in Europe warm.

At the same time we will find ourselves with new neighbours on the global research stage. BU has made great strides over the past year in fostering global relationships though the Global BU, whilst principally the focus has been on education and mobility, there are fantastic opportunities in research. In a thought provoking article published on the BBC website-pre-Brexit Could the UK be the Atlantic Singapore? Karishma Vaswani, the Asia Business Correspondent highlights how Singapore’s success has depended on building relationships with its neighbours through ASEAN. Britain might find that working with new neighbours will be key to its future success, in research and other areas.

As I prepare to leave BU at the end of this month to take up a new position in Higher Education in Singapore I have mixed feelings. I have loved my time here over the past two years and seen BU make significant steps forwards in all areas of activity, not least in research. Also I am excited about the challenges that for me are ahead. I would be very keen to maintain links with BU after I have left and if I can help foster research links in Singapore I should be very pleased. Please do keep in touch!

Latest Funding Opportunities

Funding opportunities

coins money

The following is a snap-shot of funding opportunities that have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:

Cancer Research UK

Tobacco advisory group project grants

TAG is looking for project grant applications for policy research and policy advocacy activities in tobacco control. Maximum Award: £20000 – 50000 per year for 1 or 2 years Deadline: 1 December 2016

Academy of Medical Sciences

Springboard – health of the public 20140 grant scheme

The Academy’s ‘Health of the Public in 2040’ initiative aims to identify the main health challenges the UK population will face by 2040 and recognises that, in order to solve many of these issues, a multidisciplinary approach will be required.

Maximum Award: £25000 – £50000 Deadline: 12 December 2016

Medical Research Foundation

Child & young adult mental health

A key aim of this call is to encourage researchers already working in associated areas or on other relevant clinical research to re-prioritise these topics and enable the exploitation of existing resources and cohorts to develop hypotheses exploring the underlying biology and psychology of either of these diverse mental health conditions.

Maximum Award: £300000 Deadline: 31 January 2017

Director-General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology, EU

Pilot project for developing use of new technologies and digital tools in education

The aim of this pilot project is to identify existing digital learning solutions that can support teachers in the classroom and parents at home with pupils having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and/or concentration problems, and to provide good practice examples where technology has been successfully used in daily classroom activities to help pupils with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and concentration problems.

Maximum Award: Unknown, total budget for call is €400000 for 2 years Deadline: 14 November 2016

Directorate-General for Educatio & Culture, EU

European co-operation projects

These support the capacity of the European cultural and creative sectors to operate transnationally and internationally, and to promote the transnational circulation and mobility of cultural and creative works.

Maximum Award: €200000 for small projects and €2 million for large projects Deadline: 23 November 2016

If you are interested in submitting to any of the above calls 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.

New THET project paper published

international, open access, Publishing, Training

thet-needs-assessmentToday saw the latest publication on our BU-led THET in Nepal.  The paper ‘Needs assessment of mental health training for Auxiliary Nurse Midwives: a cross-sectional survey’ was published the Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences [1].   This paper reports on a quantitative survey with nearly all Auxiliary Nurse Midwives in Nawalparasi District in the southern part of Nepal. The findings illustrate the lack of training on mental health issues related to pregnancy and childbirth in this group of health workers. Thus the paper’s conclusions stress the need for dedicated training in this field.logo THET

This is the third publication linked to our mental health and maternity care project. In Nepal mental health is generally a difficult to topic to discuss. THET, a London-based organisation, funded Bournemouth University, and Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and Tribhuvan University in Nepal to train maternity workers on issues around mental health.  This latest paper and the previous two papers are all Open Access publications.  The previous two papers raised the issue of women and suicide [2] and outlined the THET project in detail [3].

np-thet-2916-jilly

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

References:

  1. Simkhada, B., Sharma, G., Pradhan, S., van Teijlingen, E., Ireland, J., Simkhada, P., Devkota, B. & the THET team. (2016) Needs assessment of mental health training for Auxiliary Nurse Midwives: a cross-sectional survey, Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences 2(1): 20-26. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/JMMIHS/article/view/15793/12738
  2. Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen E., Winter, R.C., Fanning, C., Dhungel, A., Marahatta S.B. (2015) Why are so many Nepali women killing themselves? A review of key issues Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences 1(4): 43-49. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/JMMIHS/article/view/12001
  3. van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Devkota, B., Fanning, P., Ireland, J., Simkhada, B., Sherchan, L., Silwal, R.C., Pradhan, S., Maharjan, S.K., Maharjan, R.K. (2015) Mental health issues in pregnant women in Nepal. Nepal Journal of Epidemiology 5(3): 499-501. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/NJE/article/view/13607/11007

New paper Dr. Catherine Angell on CPD in Nepal

Centre for Excellence in Learning, Fusion, international, Knowledge Transfer, open access, Publishing, Training, writing

nnaCongratulations to Dr. Catherine Angell (FHSS) who just had her paper ‘Continual Professional Development (CPD): an opportunity to improve the Quality of Nursing Care in Nepal’ accepted in Health Prospect.   The paper is co-authored with BU Visiting Faculty Dr. Bibha Simkhada and Prof. Padam Simkhada  both based at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), Dr. Rose Khatri  and Dr. Sean Mackacel-logo-weby (also at LJMU), Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery and Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), and our colleagues in Dr. Sujan Marahatta and Associate Professor Chandra Kala Sharma. Ms. Chandra Kala Sharma is also the president of the Nepal Nursing Association (left in photo).  Health Prospect is an Open Access journal, hence freely available to anybody in Nepal (and elsewhere in the world).

dsc_0124This paper is first of several based on a study aiming to improve CPD in Nepal and it is partly funded by LJMU and partly funded by BU’s Centre for Excellence in Learning (CEL).  The CEL-funded part of the project centres on focus group research with representatives of the Ministry of Health & Population, the Ministry of Education, the Nepal Nursing Association and the Nursing Council, and Higher Education providers of Nurse Education (both form Government-run universities and private colleges). The focus group schedule will include starter questions to initiate discussions around the kind of CPD nurses in Nepal need, its format, preferred models, the required quality and quantity, and ways of  checking up (quality control). In addition we will be asking a subgroup of nurses registered in Nepal about midwifery skills as midwifery is not recognised as a separate profession from nursing in Nepal. Hence there will be three focus groups specifically about midwifery CPD: one at MIDSON (the Midwifery Organisation of Nepal), one with nurses providing maternity care in private hospitals and one with nurses doing this in government hospitals.

The research is a natural FUSION project in the field of nursing & midwifery as it links Research in the field of Education to help improve Practice in Nepal.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Reference:

  1. (CPD): an opportunity to improve the Quality of Nursing Care in Nepal, Health Prospect (Accepted) 

 

 

Horizon 2020 Funding for virtual factory research at BU

Awarded & submitted bids, international

European Union - Horizon 2020Uber, Amazon, AirBnB, Netflix… The Internet has had many impacts to the economy. Not only to the consumer market, but widely across the service sector. There is a large amount of integration and automation to enable things like instant order confirmations. Work in these aspects of business processes is quite well established in the service sector.
Manufacturing is a key part of the economy. To remain competitive or become even more so, automation that supports innovation is also essential for the manufacturing sector. BU will be leading, under direction of Drs L. Xu and P. de Vrieze, an international consortium on a project receiving €1.2 mln in funding to address these challenges.

Advanced ICT supported manufacturing is currently gaining a lot of traction with initiatives such as Industrie 4.0 in Germany, Factory of the Future in Italy and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult the UK. Part of this development is advanced coordination of manufacturing allowing for increased flexibility and reduced costs. A virtual factory ensures exchange of data between smart machines, systems, software and design within the manufacturing chain. Manufacturing processes become more simple through plug-and-play techniques.

To enable this, the “vF Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion” (FIRST) project provides new technology to describe manufacturing assets and to compose and integrate existing services into collaborative virtual manufacturing processes. The project will see collaboration between internationally recognised academics and industry in Europe and China. As such the consortium will take advantage of it various backgrounds to address the issue from a variety of perspectives.

The FIRST consortium is a competitive consortium with large know-how and expertise in complex software systems and manufacturing automation. The research base of the academic partners will be used as foundation for innovations to contribute to virtual interoperation of smart manufacturing in the area of Factory of the Future/Manufacturing 2.0 to improve the competiveness of our industrial partners and sustainability of the European manufacturing sector. Within this research programme, 6 industrial researcher will get the opportunity to gather knowledge in academia while 22 academic researchers will absorb knowledge in industry. The consortium will provide new knowledge for GK, an enterprise software vendor and KM, a manufacturing software vendor, inform newer training in the area of big data, cloud computing to both GK and KM, and promote innovation, while the academic partners will translate their research to facilitate better understanding virtual factories.