Research

Award from Arthritis Research UK for a five year research programme into osteoarthritis

ARUK has awarded £713,417 for a five year research programme into osteoarthritis.  Cell therapy research teams at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic and District Hospital NHS Trust will work on specific projects aimed at driving forward a new treatment for osteoarthritis.

The first project is investigating patients who have had cell therapy for cartliage damage and will research the factors which enhance recovery to see if it has delayed the start of osteoarthritis more than other treatments.  Later a clinical trial will be run comparing the use of bone marrow stem cells with the alternative treatment of implanting cartilage cells.

Keele is a key player in the collaborative ARUK TE Centre, led by Newcastle University and involving York and Aberdeen and launched in early October.  This is the second ARUK Centre in which Keele is involved, the first being its Primary Care Centre which opened in 2008.

EPSRC Award to investigate the formation of hydroxyaluminosilcates

Dr Chris Exley has been awarded £291,631 for a three year project to investigate the formation of hydroxyaluminosilicates, in particular with respect to the role this chemistry plays and has played in biochemical evolution.  The project will involve developing a computational modal of the kinetics of hydroxyaluminosilicates formation.  Hydroxyaluminosilicates are critical secondary minerals in the biochemical cycles of both aluminium and silicon and thus this chemistry plays an important role in the biological availability of silicon and aluminium, keeping aluminium out of biota and thus acting as a natural antagonist to the potential toxicity of aluminium.

Award from NERC New Investigator Grant

Dr Brian O'Driscoll has been awarded a NERC New Investigator Grant of £81,550, the first such award under this scheme to be made to iEPSAM.  The project, in collaboration with scientists from University College Dublin, the University of Maryland (USA) and SCRIPPS Institute for Oceanography (USA) will examine the manner in which evidence of the formation and destruction of an ancient ocean (Iapetus) is preserved in the underlying oceanic mantle.  To achieve these goals, very precise measurements of platinum-group elements (including osmium isotopes) will be made on samples of ophiolites (which represent fragments of ancient oceanic mantle) that occur in both Scotland and Norway.

Arts & Humantities Research Council award for collaborative project Medical Histories

Dr Alannah Tomkins, Research Institute for the Humanities, and Dr Mark Webster, Staffordshire University, have been awarded nearly £30K by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their collaborative project 'Medical Histories: stories about health, illness and medicine in North Staffordshire'.

Their work will bring together creative writers, Staffordshire residents, industrial representatives, primary care trusts and charities to explore aspects of the local history of medicine, via a series of creative-writing workshops. The first workshop will be held in March 2012.  

Each workshop will be run by a local writer living and working in North Staffordshire, with experience of publishing or performing regionally, nationally or internationally, supported by at least one academic from Staffordshire University and at least one from Keele. The writings will form part of a touring exhibition to be shown at venues around North Staffordshire, but participants will be able to stay involved after the events by checking the project website, uploading creative writing, and contributing to the 'medical histories' blog.

The aim of the project is to generate momentum in advance of applying to fund a 'writer in residence' at one of the partner organisations.

Philip Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Scholar

Dr Peter Adey, School of Physical and Geographical Sciences and the Emerging Securities Unit, is one of only two UK Human Geographers to be awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize this year.

The award was given on the basis of Peter's contribution to cultural and political geography, specifically in the study of security and the advancement of the new mobilities paradigm.

The prizes, with a value of £70,000 each, are awarded to outstanding scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and where the expectation is that their greatest achievement is yet to come.

Peter will use the prize towards developing a series of research activities around the study of evacuation and its cultures and politics.

He is expecting that this will take him to sites in Japan, the US, New Zealand and Haiti, while developing further collaborative projects with colleagues in Durham, London, Swansea,Philadelphia, and the University of California.

Wellcome Award for Field trials of synthetic sex pheromone to reduce visceral leishmaniasis (VL) transmission by Lutzomy

The Wellcome Trust has awarded Dr Gordon Hamilton, Centre for Applied Entomology and Parasitology/ Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, and co-applicant Dr Orin Courtenay, Warwick University, £2,562,995 for a Strategic Translation Award, "Field trials of synthetic sex pheromone to reduce visceral leishmaniasis (VL) transmission by Lutzomyia longipalpis in Brazil".

The 40 month project follows a successful University Translation Award awarded to Dr Hamilton in 2007, which demonstrated the feasibility of using sex pheromone as part of a "lure-and-kill" approach for controlling the sand fly L. longipalpis in the field.

Among parasites transmitted by insects, single-celled parasites of the genus Leishmania are second only to malaria parasites (transmitted by mosquitoes) in terms of their impact on health. Leishmania parasites cause the potentially fatal disease, visceral leishmaniasis, which affects half a million people worldwide each year.

Currently the disease is controlled by the use of therapeutic drugs. These can have unpleasant side effects for the patient because they are toxic, they are expensive, which limits availability, and may be difficult to administer because of poor health care infrastructure. There is also evidence of the parasite becoming resistant to drug treatments.

The strategy adopted by Dr Hamilton and his team has been to achieve vector control through an innovative 'lure-and-kill' approach, which targets the female sand flies. The Strategic Translation Award will allow Dr Hamilton and his colleagues, in collaboration with colleagues and agencies in Brazil, to determine if wide scale deployment of synthetic sex pheromone, with an appropriate insecticide treatment, will reduce the population of L. longipalpis and therefore VL incidence and infectiousness. The project will devise new ways to synthesise, formulate and present the sex pheromone and then measure the effects of a wide-scale intervention on sand fly abundance and disease incidence in a 3-arm cluster randomised trial. A significant additional commercial objective of the award is to develop the innovation to the point where it can be commercially exploited as a healthcare product.

Prestigious Arthritis Research UK Clinician Scientist Fellowship Award

Professor Christian Mallen has been awarded an Arthritis Research UK Clinician Scientist Fellowship award (three years funding of £411,000) to develop a new programme of work on identification and improved management of polymyalgia rheumatica, within the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre at Keele. 

It is the first time that this prestigious award has been made to an academic General Practitioner - indeed, the first time that the Clinician Scientist Fellowship has been awarded to a non-lab based scientist, illustrating the scale of Professor Mallen's success. The award also supports the Primary Care Research Centre to develop an important new area of research.

He was recently appointed as Professor of General Practice (Research) within the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre.  Professor Mallen first joined the Centre in 2001 as a GP Academic Training Fellow, undertook a research Masters at the same time as completing his clinical training in general practice, gained MRCGP with distinction and was awarded the first Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Fellowship. This award supported his PhD study, following which he gained promotion to Senior Lecturer in 2009.

In addition to an extremely strong research track record in general practice management of musculoskeletal pain, Professor Mallen has taken the lead in establishing the Keele Clinical Academic Research Training Scheme, which is widely seen as one of the most successful models in the country. Throughout, he has continued his commitment to patient care as a partner at the Kingsbridge Medical Centre.

ESRC Award for Reducing energy consumption through community knowledge networks

Professor Andrew Dobson with Dr Philip Catney, Dr Sherilyn MacGregor, Profesor Mark Ormerod, Dr Zoe Robinson and Simon Moss (Marches Energy Agency), have been awarded £476,793.00 jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

The project focuses on knowledge networks in two types of community,l called 'switched-on' and 'hard-to-reach'.  The aim is to compare and contrast the energy reduction challenges in these two types of community, and to see which strategies work best in each of them.

STFC Award for High precision studies of extrasolar planets and low-mass stars

Dr John Taylor, Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics has been awarded a prestigious Advanced Fellowship, worth £417,884, by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, for a five year project entitled "High precision studies of extrasolar planets and low mass stars".

The primary aim of this proejct is to measure the properties of each of the known transiting extrasolar planets, in order to understand their formation and evolution.  Whilst many of the known transiting extrasolar planets have exising high-quality follow-up observations, some lack this and are consequently poorly characterised.  Dr Taylor will also conduct an observing campaign to fill in this gap in our knowledge, using the successful telescope-defocussing technique which he has pioneered.

British Beekeepers Association Award for Improving honeybee health by enhancing the palatability of food supplements

A £80,000 study that aims to improve the taste of artificial diets fed to honey bees has been awarded annual 'seed-core' funding from the British Beekeepers Association.  The BBKA/s £17,600 grant has enabled Keele University to obtain more than £60,000 from the Perry Foundation, to award a four-year post graduate scholarship to former student, Richard Bridgett.

The project will study methods to enhance honey bee health by looking for substances in pollen that stimulate bees to feed.  The team will launch a full investigatyion into determining which compounds are responsible for the palatability of pollen to the honey bee, studying compounds from various pollen sources to determine if these compounds are common or specific to a plant species.  These natural compounds can then either be isolated, or synthesised, and mixed in with pollen substitutes to increase their palatability.

The ultimate aim is to produce more artificial bee diets containing all the essential nutrients and ensuring these stimulants are fed to the honey bees via the most palatable means.

AHRC Award for Towards Structured Interactive Immersive Musical Experience

Professor Rajmil Fischman has been awarded a Fellowship of £96,211 to enable musci performance by using natural hand actions, furthering the possiblities afforded by game controllers.  It will implement a self contained "Manual Actions Expressive System" (MAES) consisting of a digital glove controlled by specialised software for the creation of musical gestures, resulting from tracking and analysing hand position, rotation and fingerbending.   The technology will allow the performers to concentrate on natural actions from daily use of hands.  Thus, it will allow individuals who would not have had the opportunity otherwise to engage actively in music making.

EPSRC Award for Regenerative Medicine - A new IMRC

Keele University is partner in an EPSRC Innovative Manufacturing Research Centres (IMRC) with Loughborough and Nottingham universities. The IMRC is focused on Regenerative Medicine and will receive around £5 million over five years. The aims are to carry out world-leading research, test and implement ideas in clinical and industrial settings, create next generation platforms for manufacturing regenerative medicines and inform business models, policy and public debate.

The programme is led at Keele by Professor Alicia El Haj, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, linked to Professor James Richardson and the Clinical Cell Therapy Programmes at Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic and District Hospital, Oswestry.

NIHR Clinical Doctoral Fellowship

Andrew Finney has been awarded a Clinical Doctoral Fellowship by the National Institute for Health Research. The research fellowship award of £303,683 will enable Andrew to undertake a PhD focusing on "Multi-disciplinary support for self-management of Osteoarthritis (OA) in primary care".

The PhD will review and evaluate treatments delivered by health care professionals for OA in primary care, whilst evaluating whether a multi-disciplinary approach can be successfully implemented. Andrew will be seconded from the School of Nursing and Midwifery on a full-time basis for three years and will undertake the PhD at the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre. The award is a fine example of collaboration between the Research Institute for Primary Care Sciences, the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the Haywood Hospital.

West Midlands Nursing, Midwifery and AHP Research Training Fellowship

Julie Green has been awarded a West Midlands Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professional Research Training Fellowships to continue with her PhD studies.

Julie is currently coming to the end of the second year of her PhD on a part-time basis which, to date, has been funded by an innovative two year Link Fellowship programme between the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the Research Institute of Primary Care and Health Sciences. This significant award, worth £116,295, will enable Julie to complete her patient centred study entitled: 'Does a patient focus to consultations in chronic venous leg ulcer care improve patient satisfaction and health related quality of life?'

MRC Award for Experiencing and managing HIV/AIDS in later life: social support, mental health and quality of life

Dr Dana Rosenfeld, in conjunction with colleagues at the University of Westminster, South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre, the Health Protection Agency and Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, has been awarded £211,316 by the Medical Research Council. The study, which will draw on expertise from colleagues in social science, medicine and the HIV/AIDS community, will investigate the issues surrounding the quality of life, mental health and social support needs of people living with HIV/AIDS and how their different histories and circumstances shape how they experience and manage HIV/AIDS in later life. The new knowledge gained will then be used to develop interventions to improve these aspects in the lives of older people living with HIV/AIDS

Royal Society grants for two ISTM teams

Two teams in the Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine have been successful in the Royal Society Research Grant scheme. The grants are modest but important in enabling pilot projects in new areas to start their first experimental work. They were won in a climate of increasing national competition in the UK, and start immediately.

Dr Paul Horrocks and Dr Sandra Hasenkamp have been awarded a project entitled "Development of a rapid, simple and sensitive luciferase-based growth assay for the high throughput screening of antimalarial drugs". This project aims to exploit the recent development of a genetically engineered Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite species responsible for the most virulent form of human malaria, which expresses a luminescent protein as it multiplies in erythrocytes. This bioluminescent assay offers a range of attractive attributes that will facilitate a more rapid screening of anti-malarial compounds being developed in collaboration with colleagues in Keele and the USA.

Dr Sarah Hart's project is to develop "A Novel Differential Proteomics Strategy to Extend Detection Capability, Utilising Fluorescence Spectroscopy, Two-Dimensional High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) & Tandem Mass Spectrometry". A large part of her award will be spent on buying fluorescence spectroscopy equipment, for use with mass spectrometry and HPLC equipment worth over £200,000, which has been loaned to Keele by Thermo Fisher Scientific and Dionex. Sarah will tag proteins from normal and cancer cells using coloured dyes. She will then use physicochemical separations and tandem mass spectrometry, to discover, identify and understand changes in the amount or behaviour of particular proteins which may cause diseases such as cancer.

Award for Spatial Enigmas

The Emerging Securities Research Unit has won part of a major research network grant to sustain the four-year Espace et Territoire, an international and interdisciplinary network of projects between universities in France, UK, Belgium, Brazil, and Spain, worth 210,000 Euros and funded by the Agence Nationale De La Recherche.

Leading the UK node of the project with a team of anthropologists and designers at Cresson in Grenoble, Dr Peter Adey and Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Research Institute for Social Sciences, will work on the Spatial Enigmas theme, worth around 32,000 Euros. Focusing on public mobility infrastructures, the team will use experimental site-visits to examine the experience of everyday security and surveillance practices and techniques, threats and risks. The exchange of PhD students and possible research student funding will also be allocated from the project.

Pay-as-you-go Justice scholarship

Professor Barry Godfrey, Research Institute for Social Sciences, has been awarded £22,800 for a PhD scholarship for a project entitled "Pay-as-you-go justice?: Out of court disposals and the future of the Magistracy", funded by the Magistrates Association and supervised by Professor Godfrey, Dr Helen Wells and Dr Mary Corcoran, all from the Centre for Social Policy.

Award from Research for Patient Benefit Programme

The Department of Health has called for NHS clinical services to gather data related to the quality of care they provide. However, at present a simple core-set of standardised outcome measures for patients with musculoskeletal problems is not available, which limits the routine evaluation of clinical outcomes for these patients. Recent research suggests that in addition to clinical audit feedback about the quality of care provided, substantial patient benefits are achieved if individual patient factors are monitored for their progress over the course of treatment.

A team of researchers from the Keele-based Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre, led by Dr Jonathan Hill, has received funding of £173,623 for a two-year project by the Research for Patient Benefit programme of the National Institute for Health Research, which aims to involve patients, clinicians, experts and NHS managers to develop and validate a new clinical tool that can perform both of these tasks, monitor patient progress and provide routine clinical outcome data to enable service quality evaluation

Award for geothermal project

A geothermal project at Keele has been awarded major funding from the Government's Deep Geothermal Challenge Fund's second round.

The fund was set up to help organisations carry out exploratory work needed to find viable sites for this technology and Keele has been allocated £500,000 to drill a 1200m borehole to provide geothermal heat for the proposed sustainable campus.

Professor Pat Bailey, Dean of Natural Sciences, pictured, said: "The DECC funding provides crucial support for setting up geothermal energy delivery to the Keele campus, as part of the ambitious plans to reduce dramatically our carbon footprint over the next five years.

"Out of 12 applications, Keele was one of only three successful bids to the Deep Geothermal Energy fund, winning the largest grant (£0.5M) from DECC. With the opening of the Sustainability Hub Building in the summer (the Home Farm refurbishment), and the new recycling scheme launched a couple of months ago, Keele is really demonstrating its commitment to become a 'deep green' campus."

Deep geothermal energy uses the natural heat found kilometres underground to produce electricity and heat at the surface. Geothermal energy is non-intermittent, low-carbon, renewable and could be a valuable technology in diversifying the UK's energy mix and reducing the UK's dependence on imported fuels.

Award of facility time for Astrophysicists

Keele PhD students Mandy Bailey and Masha Lakicevic, with their supervisor Dr Jacco van Loon, pictured left,each won an award of six nights of observing time on the European Southern Observatory's 3.5m New Technology Telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile.

Mandy will measure absorption of starlight by molecules residing in the bubble of warm gas through which the Solar System currently travels, while Masha will image the emission from iron and molecular hydrogen in the gas remnants of recent supernova explosions in the Magellanic Clouds.

STFC Advanced Fellow John Taylor was awarded four nights on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope at La Palma and five nights on the 3.5m telescope at Calar Alto, both in Spain. John will measure the variations in velocity of stars that orbit each other and for which the Kepler satellite has shown that they eclipse each other, thereby obtaining very accurate measurements of the properties of these stars.

Professor Rob Jeffries and Dr Pierre Maxted were awarded four nights on the Nordic Optical Telescope, at La Palma, to investigate a population of very young stars that have been found as a by-product of the SuperWASP survey for transiting extrasolar planets.

Dr James Reeves and PhD student Jason Gofford were awarded 336 kilo-seconds of time on the XMM-Newton satellite, overcoming an over-subscription of approxIimately 7:1. The aims of the program are to perform X-ray spectroscopy of the outflow from the super-massive black hole in the quasar MR 2251-178. The observations will be co-ordinated with previously approved Chandra and HST observations.

Professor Nye Evans, pictured left,with PhD student Sarah Day, got nine shifts of beamtime on beamline I11 at the Diamond Light Source. The project is to use the intense X-rays available at Diamond to study CaCO3 formation in non-aqueous environments by solid-gas carbonation of silicates. This has relevance to the formation of carbonate particles in astrophysical environments, such as the early Solar System, planetary surfaces and evolved stars.

The financial value assigned by STFC to the groundbased facility time for the purposes of RAE/REF metrics, is £377,000.

Double HEA Grant Success

Colleagues in the School of Physical and Geographical Sciences have been awarded two grants from the Higher Education Academy, Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences subject centre. Drs Deirdre McKay, Lisa Lau and Peter Knight, pictured, with Dr Emma Dawson, from the LDU, have been awarded £ 10,300 for a two year project, 'Reading the World: Innovative strategies for building textual skills in the undergraduate Geography curriculum'. The project, engaging both Human and Physical Geography, will identify and resolve problems of incorporating of literary techniques in Geography undergraduate training and provide a template for curriculum redesign. It builds on existing projects and broadens the range of introductory-level assessments to better prepare students for upper-year modules, and will provide key employability skills for graduates.

Dr Jamie Pringle has been awarded £ 4,250 for a project entitled, 'Developing a Geoscience e-trainer Open Educational Resource to provide a stimulating and effective learning environment'. This project will tap into current student interests in virtual gaming technologies to provide a complementary learning tool to more traditional course materials and learning styles. Developed with Luke Bracegirdle (Pharmacy) and Dr Stephen Bostock (LDU) overseeing student evaluation, users will work through geoscientific investigations of a forensic search for a clandestine burial of a murder victim that Jamie has recently worked on. The key learning outcomes include engagement with applied real-world investigative problems and solutions, and the project will provide many employability skills, including showcasing virtual placement experience for job interviews.

AHRC Research Network Success

Professor David Amigoni (English, RI Humanities) has been successful in AHRC's Research Network competition.   The network, 'late-life creativity and the 'new old age': arts & humanities and gerontology in critical dialogue', will be developed and hosted in partnership with Professor Gordon McMullan (Kings College London), and will build strategically on the expertise in arts and social/critical gerontology possessed by both institutions.