WELLCOME GRANT OF £0.8 MILLION TO DEVELOP NOVEL APPROACHES TO MALARIA CONTROL

The Wellcome Trust has awarded Professor Paul Eggleston, Professor Hilary Hurd and Dr Frederic Tripet, in the Centre for Applied Entomology and Parasitology, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, a major grant of £803,794 for a three year programme entitled "Genetic engineering of refractory mosquito vectors for the control of malaria transmission". In collaboration with Professor Sekou Traore and Dr Mamadou Coulibaly at the Malaria Research and Training Centre of the University of Bamako, in Mali, West Africa, the programme will seek to develop novel approaches to malaria control and to build capacity for these technologies in Mali.

This challenging programme represents the first use of genetically modified mosquitoes in Africa and will be the first to involve scientists from a malaria endemic nation. It has attracted significant interest from key researchers in the field and will do much to raise Keele's research profile in an international context.

Malaria, as a disease, is caused by single-celled parasites that infect the red blood cells, with the most serious form of the disease caused by Plasmodium falciparum. These parasites spend part of their life history within Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes and are transmitted between humans when infected mosquitoes bite to take the blood that they need to produce eggs. Traditionally, disease control has involved controlling the mosquito populations that transmit the parasite. However, these methods are failing, largely due to the spread of insecticide resistance and socio-economic factors. New control methods are urgently required and research groups, including the group at Keele, have been developing the technology to genetically manipulate mosquitoes so that they are unable to sustain parasite development.

These techniques are advancing rapidly in the laboratory and the time is now ripe to test them in an African setting, using local mosquitoes and parasites, and to involve scientists from endemic countries. This proposal involves technology transfer and capacity building with colleagues in Mali, who have ideal facilities for performing molecular biology and well-researched field sites. The project will seek to genetically engineer local strains of mosquito so that they produce anti-parasite molecules in specific tissues.

The impact of these molecules on parasite transmission through the mosquito will then be assessed, together with an analysis of the genetic fitness of the modified mosquitoes in competition with wild mosquitoes from the same collection sites. This will be a first test of the feasibility of replacing local mosquitoes with populations that cannot transmit malaria.

Malaria causes 2-3 million deaths annually and imposes a significant negative impact on the economic development of endemic countries. The scale of the problem is apparent when we consider that this devastating disease kills a child every 30 seconds in sub-Saharan Africa.

KEELE STUDENTS TAKE PART IN SINGAPORE SUMMER SCHOOL

Six Keele students studying Music, Music Technology or Media, Communications and Culture have spent a month at the Singapore Polytechnic studying Recording and Mixing Techniques and chose a range of options from Performance, Arranging, Digital Video Production Techniques, Processes in Asian Music, Music and Sound for Moving Images and MIDI.

They joined classes of the Diploma in Music and Audio Technology in the School of Media and Information Technology. Four of the students conducted a Music Technology Workshop at National Junior College and there was a public performance at the Esplanade Café.

The Summer School culminated in a performance by the Keele and Singapore Polytechnic students. Among the audience were two Keele Alumni, Aileen Tang and Chesed Wong. Aileen graduated from Keele in 1996, having studied Music and English, and now teaches Music at National Junior College, which the Keele students visited.

The one-month Summer School was partly funded by the Prime Minister Initiative 2 and will strengthen our relationship with Singapore Polytechnic, which is sending their first student, Jemie Soh, to complete her degree in Music and Music Technology at Keele in September.

Mike Vaughan, Professor of Composition, accompanied the group for the first week of their stay and Dr Diego Garro, Senior Lecturer in Music Technology, prepared the academic programme for the students.

£1/3 million STFC grant

Professor Mark Ormerod, Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics, has been awarded three grants worth a total of £334,000 from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), with colleagues from Glasgow University, to carry out inelastic neutron scattering spectroscopy measurements at the ISIS Neutron Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The awards complement existing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and previous STFC (CCLRC) awards aimed at gaining a molecular level understanding of the formation of deactivating hydrocarbonaceous overlayers on catalyst surfaces and using this insight to develop new novel catalysts for more sustainable conversion of methane, and in particular for the conversion of waste biogas into useful chemicals and for the development of solid oxide fuel cells running on waste biogas. The awards represent the first in situ study of the formation of a hydrocarbonaceous overlayer on a catalyst surface using inelastic neutron scattering. 

Recognition for Keele medievalist

The work and energy of Dr Kathleen Cushing, Reader in Medieval History, has been recognised this summer by two key bodies in her field of medieval canon law. At the XIII International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, under the auspices of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University at Esztergom in Hungary, she was elected president of the Zurich-based Iuris canonici medii aevi consociatio (Society for Medieval Canon Law), the key international and interdisciplinary body uniting scholars researching and writing in the field. She has also been appointed to the advisory board of the Stephan Kuttner Institute of Medieval Canon Law in Munich. Her co-edited work Bishops, Texts and the Use of Canon Law Around 1100 was published by Ashgate in June.

Research grants

Dr Angus Dawson, Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, has been awarded £4,925 by the Wellcome Trust for a one-month project titled "Ethical issues in TB Prevention, Control and Treatment".

Professor Barbara Kelly, Research Institute for Humanities, has been awarded £3,680 by the British Academy for an 11-month project titled "Leon Vallas, musical biography and criticism in regional perspective".

Dr Les Rosenthal, Research Institute for Public Policy and Management has been awarded £4,375 by the British Academy for a project titled "Economic Efficiency, Nuisance and Chancery Law: Sewage Pollution, 1850 – 1900".

Academic appointment

The following academic appointment commenced in post this week:

School of Law

Mr David Hunter, Lecturer in Ethics, who was previously a Lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Ulster.