Research

£3200 Royal Astronomical Society Award

Jacco van Loon (Astrophysics, EPSAM) has been awarded £3,200 by the Royal Astronomical Society, in support of continued collaboration with Iranian astronomers at Alzahra University and at the Institute of Physics and Mathematics (IPM), both in Tehran.

The collaboration is based around studies of a nearby spiral galaxy, Messier 33 (Triangulum), to learn more about galaxies similar to our own (The Milky Way). The RAS money will be used to fund visits of Iranian astronomers to Keele in 2011.

£80,000 Research Fellowships

Two scholars within Music, Professor Barbara Kelly and Dr Alastair Williams (Research Institute for the Humanities) have been successful in securing prestigious Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Fellowships, worth a total of nearly £80,000. These fellowships allow a scholar time to develop or complete a major piece of research.

The principal output from Dr Williams' project is a monograph entitled 'Music in Germany since 1968', which devotes principal chapters to the composers Wolfgang Rihm (who was featured at the Barbican this year) and Helmut Lachenmann, while also highlighting younger talents, such as Matthias Pintscher and Isabel Mundry. Moving away from the post-war avant-gardes, this project reveals how contemporary composers have re-engaged with figures such as Schubert and Schumann from the Austro-German tradition.
 
Professor Kelly is completing a monograph on French Musical Modernisms: aesthetics and criticism. The project examines French music after Debussy's death until World War II. It is a period that is often neglected in discussions of musical modernism, in favour of the more famous 'fin-de-siecle'.

Professor Kelly traces the continuities between the pre-war and interwar period, in particular, in relation to vocal and ensemble writing, chamber works and dramatic music. She examines issues of consensus, resistance to aesthetic norms and the role of the press in shaping musical taste. She is interested in exploring how a particular generation articulates its musical, aesthetic and stylistic priorities. The project addresses the historical, political and cultural distinctiveness of the interwar period, placing music at the centre of its enquiry.

£24,000 Low Pay Commission Award

Professor Gauthier Lanot, Research Institute for Public Policy and Management, has been awarded £24,017 by the Low Pay Commission for a project on "the minimum wage and human capital accumulation of young low paid workers during an economic downturn".

£78,000 from Institute of Orthopaedics and Beryl May Taylor Research Fund

Dr Jim Middleton, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine (ISTM), has been awarded two grants totalling £78,000 by the Institute of Orthopaedics. One award, from the Beryl May Taylor Research Fund, is for a project titled "New knowledge concerning cancer metastatis" and the second, from the Rheumatology Trust Fund, for a project titled "Chemokines and the route of leukocyte transendothelial migration".

£30,000 from Henry Smith's (KC) Estate charity fund Award

Dr Dave Furness, ISTM, has been awarded £30,000 by the Henry Smith's (KC) Estate charity fund for a project titled "a novel strategy for preventing age-related hearing loss using cochlear fibrocyte replacement".

£10,220 NESTA award

Dr Paul Roach, ISTM, has been awarded £10,220 by NESTA for a project titled "Listening in on cellular communication – what can biology tell us?"

£7363 British Academy Award

Dr Renata Stenka, Research Institute for Public Policy and Management, has been awarded £7,363 by the British Academy for a project titled "lobbying in the international accounting.

£210,000 Grant Brings Kalle To Keele

Angus Dawson (School of Law, RI Law, Politics & Justice) will be supervising a post-doctoral research fellow, Dr Kalle Grill, after a successful application for a Marie Curie training grant through the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research on a project entitled 'The moral limits of public health policy'. Kalle will be based at Keele for two years (most likely from September 2011) and will then return to Stockholm University for a third year.

The project will involve writing a series of papers relating to the goals of public health policy, an exploration of the values relevant to such policies, and discussion of the legitimacy of government use of incentives and penalties to manipulate behaviour. The grant is for a total of £210,000.

£200K Grant for Sustainability Teaching

Keele has won a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship Scheme Project grant of £200k from the Higher Education Academy, to develop the wider inclusion of environmental issues in undergraduate learning. The scheme is open only to proposals led by National Teaching Fellows, and three of these (Professor Pat Bailey, Dr Stephen Bostock and Dr Peter Knight) worked with Professor Mark Ormerod and Dr Zoe Robinson on the bid, entitled 'Hybrid PBL; a scalable approach to sustainability education?'.

Whilst Keele is the lead university, other strands of the project will be run at Staffordshire and Manchester universities, which have strengths that neatly complement those at Keele. The project will develop materials based on existing modules, but using a range of learning approaches to improve the learning experience and increase uptake by students.

£25,000 in Grants from the British Academy

Four members of the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice have been successful in grant applications to the British Academy.
 
Dr Rosie Harding, in collaboration with Dr Elizabeth Peel, Aston University, has been awarded £7,391 for a project entitled 'Duties to Care: A socio-legal exploration of caring for people with dementia', a pilot study intended to explore carers' experiences of accessing health and social care services for people with dementia.

Dr Jonathan Hughes has been awarded £7,107 to run a workshop on ethical policing. The workshop, to be held in November, will bring together key figures from the police establishment along with leading academics in applied ethics and criminology and will provide an opportunity to review current thinking in this area and to establish priorities and develop plans for future collaborative research.

Dr Deirdre McKay has been awarded  £7,452 for a project titled 'Everyday Objects: the making and unmaking of Filipino crafts as art '.

Dr Robert Ladrech was awarded £3,193 for a project called 'Social Democratic Parties and Climate Change'. It pays for support for interviews with select social democratic party MPs in Sweden, Germany, Greece, Spain and the UK and attempts to ascertain the level of concern in balancing commitments to social justice with the costs of adaptation to climate change.

£40,000 in time on Diamond Synchotron

Professor Trevor Greenhough, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine (iSTM), with Dr Annette Shrive, has been awarded 15 shifts on the Diamond synchotron by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, worth £40,000, for the Keele-led Midlands UK Protein Crystallography Consortium.

This award supports a diverse array of medically important research, including the structural immunology programme in iSTM, at the universities of Keele, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham and Birmingham.

£386,000 award to study Doemestic Violence

Dr David Gadd (Criminology), and Dr Claire Fox (Psychology), together with Ian Butler, Professor of Social Work at the University of Bath, have been awarded £386,000 by The Economic and Social Research Council to conduct a major new research study on what can be done to stop more young men becoming perpetrators of domestic violence in later life.

The research study will run over the next three years and be based in North Staffordshire. The research involves a mixed methods design, including a quasi-experimental study of children exposed to a relationship education programme, focus groups and in-depth interviews. The award includes a Linked Studentship addressing violence perpetrated by women and/or against men, a visiting professorship and a programme of knowledge transfer events addressed to the subject of working with children at risk of violence.

£77,100 for study on Probation Officers

Emerita Professor Anne Worrall (RI for Law, Politics and Justice) and Dr Rob Mawby (Leicester University) have been awarded £77,119 by the ESRC for a research project entitled 'Probation officers, their occupational cultures and offender management'.

Professor Worrall said: "The demands of the probation officer role have changed dramatically in the past twenty years and, while a great deal has been written about the historical and policy changes that have shaped that role, there has been little research on occupational cultures and the ways in which probation officers themselves experience the impact of changes to their role."

£221,495 for Research into Mosquito-Borne Disease

Professor Paul Eggleston,  Professor Hilary Hurd and Dr Frederic Tripet, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, have been awarded £221,495 by the European Union FP7-Infrastructures Programme to support their research into novel technologies for the control of mosquito-borne disease. The funding is part of a major €8M international initiative entitled INFRAVEC - "Research Capacity for the Implementation of Genetic Control of Mosquitoes", which is co-ordinated by Imperial College and involves 31 international partners from Europe and Africa.

The aim is to bring together the expertise and facilities of the participating institutions into a new and widely accessible European Infrastructure that strengthens research capability and fosters scientific excellence in novel approaches to the control of mosquito-borne disease.

INFRAVEC will draw together the leading experts in mosquito biology, genetics, epidemiology, genetic engineering, ecology and population biology. They will seek to develop a series of infrastructures to facilitate the research, including facilities for the mass rearing, genetic modification and confined release of mosquitoes, together with state-of-the-art bioinformatics facilities.

£14,960 to study sea-level change

Dr Katie Szkornik, Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics, has been awarded a Royal Society grant of £14,960 for a project titled "Holocene sea-level change in the Dyfi Estuary, west Wales".

£12,000 to Reconnect the disconnected

Professor Mim Bernard, Research Institute for Life Course studies, with Professor Tom Scharf and Emma Head, has been awarded grants totalling £12,000 by Manchester City Council and the Beth Johnson Foundation for a project titled "Reconnecting the disconnected: Implementing Manchester City Council's strategic plan for developing intergenerational practice".

£7100 to study antimalarial agent

Dr Paul Horrocks, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, with Professor Steve Allin, Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics, has been awarded £7,100 by the North Staffs Medical Institute for a project titled "Synthesis and evaluation of Buchtienine as a novel antimalarial agent".

£300,000 Welcome Grant for new equipment

Dr Gordon Hamilton, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, with Dr Frederic Tripet, Professor Richard Ward, Dr Daniel Bray and Dr Rhayza Maingon, has been awarded nearly £300,000 by the Wellcome Trust for new analytical equipment and associated technical support to identify the chemicals that insect vectors of human and animal disease use to communicate with each other and to gain information about their environment.

It replaces equipment originally bought with Wellcome Trust funding 15 years ago and which is now effectively obsolete.

Dr Hamilton, pictured above, said: "We need to replace this equipment with modern versions that will allow us to continue existing projects and bring additional benefits, such as improved sensitivity, data-processing and enhanced access. These improvements will facilitate and enhance ongoing and planned projects over the next 5 -10 years."

£157,000 Marie Curie Award For Multidisciplinary Collaboration

The Paediatric Medical Trust (PMT) research project at Keele is being funded by the Marie Curie Individual Fellowships Scheme, which is part of the Research Executive Agency of the European Union.

The project is a £157,000 multidisciplinary collaboration among Professor Ken Rotenberg (Psychology/ RI Life Course Studies), pictured, Dr Serena Petrocchi (a Post-Doctorate Fellow, School of Psychology), Professor Warren Lenney (University Hospital of North Staffordshire/ RI Science and Technology in Medicine), Dr Sally Sargeant, (Psychology/ RI Life Course Studies), Dr Lesley Rimington (Health and Rehabilitation/ RI Life Course Studies) and Ms Jenny Versnel (Executive Director, Research and Policy, at the Asthma UK Health Organisation).

The aim is to obtain qualitative and quantitative research findings regarding the effects of interpersonal trust (as well as other psychosocial factors) on the treatment of children with serious illnesses. The research will help to establish guidelines for establishing and maintaining trust in the treatment of children with serious illnesses for use by physicians and other health professionals.

The research represents the first comprehensive and quantitative examination of the role that interpersonal trust plays in the treatment of children with serious illnesses. The PMT project will also help redress the scarcity of professionals in Paediatric Medical Psychology.

£970,000 HIEC Success for Keele

Professor Andy Garner, Dean of the Faculty of Health, has led a successful bid to create one of the country's Health Innovation and Education Clusters (HIEC) to be based on the Staffordshire and Shropshire health economy.

The grant of £970,000 will support set-up costs over the next three years. The 25,000 word application to the Department of Health was a lengthy process spanning 12 months that involved local, regional and national short-listing, prior to a lengthy interview by a 15-strong international awards panel chaired by Hefce Chief Executive Sir Alan Langlands.

HIECs were conceived by Lord Darzi to complement the AHSCs announced last year.  Fit for the Future, the project that is redesigning delivery of healthcare in the region, will provide a framework for the HIEC which will focus on evaluation of the 25-plus new care pathways, provision of an appropriately trained workforce to support transfer of care into the community, and implementation of innovative approaches to support education, training and reaccreditation.

Professor Garner commented that he was extremely pleased to see Keele competing successfully on the national stage for what are seen as prestigious centres for establishing health services research, evaluation and training.  He is particularly keen to build on the momentum created by the HIEC bid to enhance partnerships between local NHS Trusts and between academia and the health service in North Staffordshire and the West Midlands.

He also praised colleagues from across the Faculty and local NHS who contributed to the bid, including John Johnson Faculty of Health Business Manager, Professor Peter Croft (RI Director Primary Care), Dr Kay Mohanna (Director of Postgraduate Medicine), Gavin Russell (Medical Director at UHNS) and Graham Urwin (Chief Executive of Stoke PCT).

£195,373 grant for Parkinson's Disease Study

Dr Rosemary Fricker-Gates and Dr Monte Gates, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, have been awarded £195,373 by the Parkinson's Disease Society UK for a three year project  titled "Generating midbrain dopamine neurons from stem cells using novel contact-dependent signalling proteins".

The project, co-ordinated by the two PIs in the Keele Group for Brain Repair, seeks to identify new proteins that signal immature cells to become specific nerve cells that can manufacture the chemical dopamine. These are the nerve cells lost in Parkinson's disease.

The ultimate goal of the project is to use the novel proteins that they find to influence the maturation of stem cells into dopamine nerve cells, as a potential cell therapy for Parkinson's disease. A postdoc supported by the grant is Dr Rowan Orme.

They have also received a donation from the Worcester and District Parkinson's Disease Society branch for £3,700, to purchase three items of lab equipment to support this research.