Research

Grant Charity Funding for Age-Related Hearing Loss Research

A cheque for £39,000 was presented to Dr David Furness, of ISTM, by Dr Sandy Stewart on behalf of the Freemason's Grand Charity last Friday.  The presentation took place in the Huxley Building despite the number of attendees being depleted because of the inclement weather.  The visitors were greeted by Dr Peter Thomas, deputy head of the School of Life Sciences.

The award is for Dr Furness to continue his work on age-related hearing loss and the use of stem cells to try to prevent it.  It follows a previous three-year award by the same charity through Deafness Research UK.

Medical Institute Awards for Staff and Students

Staff and students from Keele attended a prize giving event at North Staffordshire Medical Institute to formally receive grant and performance awards.

Staff awards went to Dr Bernadette Bartlam, Dr Linda Machin and Professor Julius Sim who are developing work identifying vulnerability in grief.  Their work touches on some of the most important issues in research being pursued with the Research Institutes for Social Sciences and Primary Care and Health Sciences.  People who are vulnerable in their grief (by whatever cause) are significant users of health and social care services.  The effective identification of such individuals and the appropriate targeting of interventions and resources are crucial, therefore, to both high quality care and cost efficent services.  This innovative research seeks to validate the Adult Attitude to Grief Scale, devised and developed by Dr Machin, as a measure providing evidence of such vulnerability.  The importance of this work was acknowledged in the award of a development grant by NSMI of £4,500.

Dr Sue Sherman and Professor Michael Murray, RI for Social Sciences, with colleagues from University Hospital of North Staffordshire, were awarded £9,703 to "identify and promote best practice in communicating to patients the results of cervical screening history reviews following diagnosis of cervical cancer".

Many women who devlop cervical cancer will have had cervical smears.  It is a national requirement that all women are offered the results of a complete review of their cervical screening history following a diagnosis of cervical cancer.  However, up to 20% of patients can have incorrectly reported screening tests, which may have prevented the earlier detection and treatment of their cervical cancer.  Despite the potential for these review meetings to cause distress or conversely to be an opportunity for transparency, this is the first research to be conducted exploring patient' experiences.

Two medical students were also presented with awards: 2011/12 Year 2 Medical Institute Prize for Best Performance in the Summative Assessments Eleanor Johns; 2011/12 Year 4 Medical Institute Prize for Best Performance in the Year 4 OSCE Assessments Laura Davis.

Royal Society Grant

Dr Aleksandar Radu of the Birchall Centre and EPSAM cluster, has been awarded Royal Society Research Grant of £8,990.

The grant will help development of exciting research on application of hybrid materials in chemical sensors.

The long term goal of the research is to develop "smart" sensors whose functionality can be modulated using external stimulitherby enabling users to adapt their sensors to the demands of analysis.

This project would examine the ability of ionic fluids to tune the functionality of ionophore-based sensors.  The focus will be on synthesis of tunable ionic liquids and elucidation of mechanisms under which they influence the response of these sensors.

Three new AHRC Awards for Keele Management School

Leverhulme Trust Research Award

A collaborative project between the Research Institute for Humanities at Keele, Southampton University and King's College London has secured a Leverhulme Turst reseaerch awrd of £247,692 to continue and complete a digital edition of the records of English administration in medieval Gascony.

In 1360, following Edward III's military victories, Aquitaine was transferred to the English crown in full sovereignty, and become a lordship akin to Ireland covering much of south-western France.  The project explores this important protoempire through innovative web-based presentation and analysis of the Gascon Rolls held in the National Archives in London.  Dr Simon Harris, currently at the Universite de Bordeaux 3, will join colleagues in History for the next two years to complete the critical editorial process of transcription and translation of the Latin texts.  These form the essential foundation of a digital edition combining text, maps, images and interpretation designed to reach an international audience, and reflect Keele's longstanding reputation in medieval palaeography.

Keele's Arthritis Research UK Centre of Excellence Status Renewed

Keele's Arthritis Research UK Centre of Excellence status has, following extensive external review, been renewed for a further five years with funding of £2.2million.

The five-year strategy for the Centre is to produce research that will underpin a shift in the way musculoskeletal disorders are managed in primary care management; away from a narrow focus on disease and reactive treatments (dealing with today's problems as presented by patients), to an increasing emphasis on:

• pro-active, positive approaches to seeking out patients needing more support for self-management, as well as those needing more input from doctors or other health professionals, and developing and testing new ways of organising primary care which better meets these needs and takes the physical, psychological and social needs of patients into account

• using our research into which physical, psychological and social factors predict what impact that musculoskeletal pain has on their every-day lives to define groups of patients with similar characteristics, and to match these patients with appropriate treatments, thus making sure that the right patients get the right treatment in a timely manner.

Professor Elaine Hay, Director, Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre at Keele, said "We will achieve this through three research programmes, addressing the two most common musculoskeletal problems (osteoarthritis and chronic musculoskeletal pain), and the two most common inflammatory diseases (gout and polymyalgia rheumatica) presenting to primary care.  Each programme brings together our clinical expertise in primary care with our strengths in observational research, clinical trials and qualitative research."

International award for Keele Researcher

Dr Matthew O'Brien, of the Lennard-Jones Laboratories and SMC cluster, has received a Thieme Chemistry Journal Award for 2013.

This international award recognises promising chemistry researchers, particularly in the field of synthetic organic chemistry, at an early stage in their academic career.  Awardees are chosen by the distinguished editorial boards of the Synthesis, Synlett and Synfacts journals.

Criminologists to research mentoring in prisons and the community

A team of criminologists from Keele has been awarded funds to conduct research into a ground breaking project on mentoring for women in prison or Youth Offending Institutes and community settings.  They are: Professor Anne Worrall, Dr Mary Corcoran, pictured, and Dr Julie Trebilcock with Ms Gillian Buck. 

Gill Buck's doctoral research on peer mentoring by former prisoners is supervised by Mary Corcoran and Professor Ronnie Lippens.   All are members of the Research Institute for Social Sciences.

The 'Youth in Focus – Sisters Project', which is operated by the charity, Spurgeons, is funded by the Big Lottery.  The project aims to recruit and develop a network of mentors who will befriend, motivate and support young women in custody and through their transition to release and afterwards.   The research, which will last for 22 months, will be conducted in several locations including a Youth Offending Institute and prison for adult women in the West Midlands. The researchers will investigate all aspects of the project including the recruitment and retention of mentors and mentees, the characteristics of mentoring relationships and outcomes for altering the circumstances of women being mentored.

The Keele team brings to the project combined expertise on women in the criminal justice system, the development of mentoring in criminal justice settings, partnerships between voluntary sector and statutory agencies and work with vulnerable people in custody.

Innovations in international outreach methodology

Keele and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India have been successful in securing a competitive grant to pioneer an 'International Outreach Methodology' in social and legal research to locate/develop pathways for relevant postgraduate and doctoral level education which will draw on action research, reflective practice and community engagement.

The UKIERI Innovations in Research grant will provide £50k to support lead applicants; Dr Jane Krishnadas, pictured, as Director of Legal Outreach, Keele, and Professor Lakshmi Lingam, as the Deputy Director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences' new UG and PGT campus in Hyderabad, to pioneer an 'International Outreach' project which will design, evaluate and model a research and teaching methodology in social and legal studies at the intersection of academic and practitioner engagement.
 
This multi-disciplinary and multi-level project will provide opportunities for  research scholars to undertake short term exchange visits to increase their internationalisation skills through their encounters with researchers and scholars, gaining real-world experiences in their work with community partners and make a valuable contribution to their independent research. A major element of the exchange will be the opportunity to work within the organisations of the community partners on a range of social-legal issues such as homelessness, intimate/societal violence, asylum and immigration, poverty and debt.
 
Dr Krishnadas has been supported in this at Keele by Alison Brammer (Law) and Jane Boylan (Social Work) and the programme also builds on the community partnerships cemented through the Community Legal Outreach Collaboration at Keele.

An exchange arrangement with IISER Pune, reported in last week's edition, involved two students coming to Keele for two months earlier this summer, working in the research labs of Professor Pat Bailey and Dr Mike Edwards on the synthesis of compounds of medicinal interest. Later in the summer, two 2nd year students from Keele spent a similar amount of time at the University in Pune, again working on medicinal chemistry projects. The funding will also allow the exchange of academic staff, and it is planned for this to take place in 2013.

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Grant

Dr Divya Chari, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, with Dr David Furness, has been awarded a grant of £304,000 by the British Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to support a project entitled "Magnetic nanoparticle mediated delivery of neurotherapeutic genes to multipotent neural stem cell transplant populations".

The work will build on proof-of-concept data generated under a BBSRC New Investigator Award made to Dr Chari in 2008, with the development of rapid, high throughput methods to study stem cell-nanomaterial interactions being a major goal for the project.
Dr Chari is currently delivering a series of scientific lectures in India. She has spoken at a range of prestigious research institutions including the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), both in Bangalore.