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Top Prize for paper

Dr Nick Forsyth, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, collaborated on a paper which has won the runner-up prize for the paper of the year in one of the leading aging journals; Aging Cell, which is published by the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

"Comparative biology of mamalian teleomeres: hypotheses or ancestral states and the roles of telomeres in longevity determination" was published in the October 2011 issue of Aging Cell.

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.

Public Engagement and Humanities Research - AHRC Award

The Humanities Research Institute has been awarded an AHRC Collaborative Skills Development Award for the student-led strand.

The project will be led by Jo Taylor at Keele and Kerry Astbury at Liverpool, and supervised by David Amigoni, pictured, and Liverpool's Matthew Bradley.

Entitled 'Crossing the bar: Public Engagement and Humanities Research', the project will develop the skills necessary for establishing mutually-beneficial public engagement relationships between postgraduate and early career Humanities researchers and community partners.

Two workshops will provide researchers in the North West with models of public engagement, and the skills necessary to build and sustain similar models in their own research practices.

The provisional partners include Staffordshire Archive Service, Johnson Birthplace Museum, Gladstone's Library and the Wordsworth Trust.

UK-India Education and Research Initiative Successes

Keele has been incredibly successful in bids to the UK-India Education and Research Initiative securing five awards and boosting the University's broader internationalisation and social responsibility agenda.

The University has been successful with one for stem cell research with Dr Nick Forsyth, ISTM, and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi; one for medicinal chemistry with Professor Pat Bailey and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, and three with Tata Institute of Social Sciences for law/social work.

The UKIERI funds activity aimed at establishing educational relations between the UK and India and the funding stream has been available since 2006. The current programme of funding is aimed at producing systematic changes in India and will provide opportunities for professional and leadership development of schools, higher education institutions and vocational institutions, support partnerships and develop student mobility and skills development programmes.

Keele and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences have been successful in securing a competitive grant to support a programme of study exchange in Law and Social Advocacy.

The UKIERI Study Mission grant will provide £50k to support Lead Applicants, Dr Jane Krishnadas, 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 Hyperabad, to pioneer a study exchange of social and legal curriculum in collaboration with professional partners from the social and legal sector in India UK. The project prioritises the fostering of mobility of students across the UK and India, and all the UKIERI funding is allocated to secure the most equitable exchange of students from each institution. Over the two year programme this will enable a total of 32 students to embark on exchanges between the UK and India.

This was a very competitive funding call and the success of the application is a product of the relationships that have been developed since 2007 and the recent signing of a memorandum of understanding between the two institutions. The grant will support Keele PGT students who wish to visit TISS as part of their programme and for Keele to welcome an increased number of TISS PGR students to Keele. The opportunity to place our relationship with TISS on a much more sustainable basis will enhance the attractiveness of each institution's programmes to students wishing to take up these opportunities and the exchanges will provide a platform for future programme development and research collaborations.

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 CLOCK (Community Legal Outreach Collaboration Keele).

The UKERI grant will fund Dr Boylan to visit TISS in 2013. The visit will foster the building of strong and sustainable teaching and research relationships in child care and gerontology; exploration of the potential for student exchange, joint course development and the possibility of a joint international summer school; understanding the UK infrastructure, processes and procedures relating to teaching and learning in the field; developing collaborative relationships with social work research and joint curriculum development; exploring the possibility of developing joint programmes in social work; internationalising social work programmes, and opportunities to explore work with post qualifying and doctoral students.

Nurse Researcher wins two awards

Julie Green, Lecturer in Nursing and part time PhD student, has been awarded two prestigious awards for her research into the experiences of patients with chronic venous leg ulceration.

WoundsUK, the organisation that supports the largest wound care conference in the UK, awarded Julie the winning prize in their 'Patient Wellbeing' category for research into the patient experience, which was sponsored by Smith and Nephew.

Julie was also awarded the Society for Academic Primary Care (North) Conference Award for 'Best in Research' for her presentation at their recent conference in Kendal. Julie is part of the Health Services Research Unit and is supervised by Professor Robert McKinley, Professor Rebecca Jester and Dr Alison Pooler.

Deafness Research UK Award

Dr Michael Evans (Life Sciences and ISTM), has been awarded £8,250 from Deafness Research UK over 18 months for a project called 'Properties of the hair cell acetylcholine receptor during development'.

The co-applicant is Dr Helen Kennedy, University of Bristol, and the funding will be divided between the two universities.

The acetylcholine receptor is a component of an inhibitory pathway that influences how the auditory receptors (hair cells) detect sound and also, possibly, how they form appropriate and lasting neural connections during development.

This pathway could potentially provide a future therapeutic method to modulate how we hear but at present more research is needed to understand its normal function.

EPSRC Fellowship

Stuart Jenkins, from the Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine (ISTM), has been awarded an EPSRC Landscape Fellowship (E-TERM, Engineering Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine).

This two-year Fellowship (award £200,000) was awarded following interview by a panel of biotechnology industry experts and is affiliated with the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Regenerative Medicine (www.dtcregen-med.com) held by the Regenerative Medicine group at Keele.

The project aims to develop methods to optimise magnetic nanoparticle-mediated gene delivery to neural transplant cells, with the goal of augmenting regeneration in the central nervous system. Stuart recently completed his PhD on this topic in Dr Divya Chari's laboratory at the ISTM, where the fellowship will be based.

BBSRC Grant for research on human malaria parasite

Dr Catherine Merrick, Biology, has won a grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council for research on the human malaria parasite.

The award will support a study of the unusual structure of telomeres - the ends of chromosomes - in the malaria parasite. Dr Merrick is interested in telomeres because many of the parasite's virulence genes lie at these sites. These genes help to maintain chronic malaria infections and contribute to severe disease. A better understanding of the parasite's telomeres may also help scientists to identify new drug targets in this important human pathogen.

This is the second Research Council award to Dr Merrick, who joined Keele in September 2011 and won a new investigator grant from the Medical Research Council in June 2012.

ERC starting grant for Keele academic

Dr Raphael Hirschi, Astrophysics group, iEPSAM, has secured a prestigious 1.4 million Euro starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC) - the first awarded to a Keele academic. This builds on his European funding profile as scientist in charge for a Marie Curie IIF and associate partner for the EUROCORE Eurogenesis programme.

The ERC starting grant will fund a 5-year multi-disciplinary project entitled SHYNE (Stellar HYdrodynamics, Nucleosynthesis and Evolution), which starts this month. The grant will enable Dr Hirschi to build a team of two post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students, all based at Keele, and to acquire a dedicated computer cluster comprising 1000+ CPU cores. The computer cluster will have 288 cores virtually sharing memory through the innovative hardware developed by the Norwegian company Numascale. The SHYNE team will collaborate with Numascale in order to determine the best balance between shared and distributed memory architectures, adding an inter-sectoral component to the project.

The SHYNE project will develop an innovative software suite that draws upon numerical techniques from several disciplines, with the goal of extending them in their application to produce state of the art theoretical models of stars. This software suite will produce comprehensive datasets of stellar evolution models that will provide a theoretical framework of analysis for astronomical observing facilities (ESO VLT, E-ELT & ESA GAIA). This project will also use stellar models as a virtual nuclear physics laboratory to guide and boost the return on investments in large nuclear physics experiments (e.g. FAIR at GSI, D).

This project will tackle many challenging questions and unsolved problems: How are the elements we are made of created? What are the properties of the most massive stars and what is their fate? Do electron-capture supernovae exist? What are the most important nuclear reaction rates and what precision in nuclear physics experiments is desirable for astrophysics applications? How does one improve 1-dimensional models using modern computers and multi-dimensional simulations? What is the best computer platform for medium- and large-scale simulations? The SHYNE project will thus have a wide ranging impact on the various disciplines involved and also build a promising bridge with a high-tech company.

Investment in new neuroscience equipment

The purchase of a new stereomicroscope with imaging equipment by Keele's neuroscience researchers in the Research Institute for Science & Technology in Medicine has enabled them to replace facilities which have served them well for the last 40 years.

Investment of £17,000 came from the Higher Education Funding Council capital fund and will benefit several current, well-established neuroscience projects. These include work on neural stem/precursor cell transplantation therapies to promote repair in central nervous system disease and injury, such as spinal cord injury, demyelinating injury (as occurs in diseases such as multiple sclerosis); Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease, stroke, as well as deafness caused by degeneration of the cochlea.

Newer areas to benefit from the new equipment include modelling of neurodegeneration, and several novel biomedical and tissue engineering strategies such as magnetic nanoparticle mediated gene delivery, and implantation of nanofabricated polymer scaffolds to promote neurological regeneration.

The competitive bid for the HEFCE capital funds was led by Dr Divya Chari on behalf of eight project leaders in the neuroscience field, who tested stereomicroscopes from a variety of manufacturers prior to purchase and installation."

Microwaves Boost Material Chemistry Research

Dr Vladimir Zholobenko, Lennard-Jones Laboratories, has acquired a CEM microwave reaction system MARS-6.

This system will be utilised at Keele to enhance research in the area of nano-structured catalytic materials, which should provide a new insight in the formation mechanism of nano-materials and a better understanding of their structure and functionality.

The instrumentation can also be used for the digestion and analysis of a wide range of solid samples for environmental and biomedical applications.

The funding for this equipment, £14,000, came from his long-standing collaboration with industrial partners.

Charity cash for study into Killer Disease

NEW research into a killer chest illness is about to be launched – partly thanks to cash donated by a Burslem charity.

The project by experts from the University Hospital of North Staffordshire and Keele University is into possible causes of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

Formerly called emphysema, it is one of the top three conditions resulting in death in the UK.

The project, led by paediatric consultant Professor Warren Lenney, aims to find which factors in childhood are the most important in increasing the likelihood of developing COPD in adults.

It is being funded by research grants from the charity, the Breath of Life, and the centre of excellence department at Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK).

Charity co-ordinator Jon McVey said: "It used to be thought that COPD was just caused by smoking but there is now lots of evidence that many other factors are involved and can be identified in early childhood.

"The illness is costly to manage and ideally we need to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

"Professor Lenney, working with Dr Anand Pandyan at Keele University, will employ an experienced research fellow for one year to review the international medical literature on it.

"We are delighted to support this research. It is a common condition locally and understanding what factors make people more susceptible will help reduce much suffering."

Arthritis Research UK Grant

Professor Elaine Hay, Professor Krysia Dziedzic and Professor Danielle van der Windt, (Ipchs, Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre), have been awarded a clinical studies grant of £144,272 by Arthritis Research UK as a first tranche of funding for a randomised controlled trial in primary care investigating the clinical and cost effectiveness of steroid injections and night splints for the treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) is a very common condition which essentially traps nerves in the hand and wrist, causing symptoms of pain and tingling. It generally affects adults aged over 30, and particularly affects women. It is a major cause of upper limb pain, sleeping problems, difficulty with day to day tasks and reduced capacity to work and as such has a major impact on both quality of life and work performance.

The multi-centred trial will be conducted nationally and represents a successful collaboration between the Centre at Keele and members from the network of General Practitioners of the Primary Care Rheumatology Society headed by Dr Graham Davenport. This is the first study to directly compare commonly used treatment options for CTS in a primary care setting. The results of this trial will inform clinical management as well as future research into treatment options for patients with CTS.

Santander Research Scholarship for Spanish Graffiti Project

Dr Andy Zieleniec, lecturer in Sociology and Media Communication and Culture, from the School of Sociology and Criminology has been awarded a £5,000 Keele Santander Research Scholarship for his project on the Paradox and Playfulness in Spanish Urban Street Art.

Through the scholarship Andy will make visits to Spain's three largest cities, (Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia) to conduct ethnographic research and record the various styles, role and function of contemporary graffiti and to develop relationships with academics, artists and writers interested in this area of urban and cultural research.

National Award for Keele Lecturer

Dr Jonathan Hill, lecturer in physiotherapy, has been awarded the 2012 Arthritis Research UK prize in physiotherapy for his trial which explored the effectiveness of back pain treatments.

The physiotherapy prize, a joint prize with the British Health Professionals in Rheumatology, is one of four prizes from Arthritis Research UK open to nurses and allied health professionals working with patients with arthritis and related musculoskeletal conditions for an outstanding piece of work.

Studentship to explore the impact of two landowning families in Staffordshire

Article in the Sentinel dated 15.8.6 concerning the recruitment of research studentship to explore the impact of two landowning families in Staffordshire. The research will be undertaken over the next three years and will involve the exploration of the impact of the social and economic policies of the Leveson-Gowers on 19th century life.

EC Award for Keele Academic

Dr Maria A. Heckl, Mathematics/ Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics, has secured a major European grant for a four year project called TANGO - Thermo-acoustic and Aero-acoustic Nonlinearities in Green combustors with Orifice structures.

The new Marie Curie Initial Training Network, TANGO, is funded by the European Commission under Framework 7. TANGO, which starts in November, is a large network involving academic and industrial partners; nine full partners, based in: UK, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and India; eight associated partners, based in: Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Germany, France, Netherlands and Sweden. There will be 15 funded research positions: 13 PhD positions (two at Keele), one post-doc position (at Keele) and one eight-month postgraduate position.

TANGO is motivated by the need for cleaner combustion technologies and reduced emissions. The research in TANGO will focus on combustion instabilities; these are a serious problem in combustion-driven devices, such as gas turbine engines and domestic burners. Combustion instabilities arise from the three-way coupling between sound, combustion and vortices in a combustion chamber, and can cause very expensive damage. TANGO is a multi-disciplinary project providing research training in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, mechanical and control engineering, all from an analytical, numerical and experimental perspective.

The Falklands Ward and its aftermath

Dr Helen Parr, SPIRE, has been awarded BA/Leverhulme small grant for her project on 'The Falklands War 1982 and its aftermath'.

The award expands on an initial project to examine the experiences and impacts of the Falklands war from the perspectives of combatants, and also of their families.

This research will contribute to a wider project to re-evaluate of the ways in which the Falklands war has been written about in British political history.

The grant will fund Helen and research assistant, Emma Murray, currently a PhD student in SPIRE and Criminology, whose work is with veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, to conduct interviews with Falklands veterans and family members and also to undertake some archival work as the archives open after 30 years.

NEW ELECTROPHORESIS EQUIPMENT

The purchase of new Pulsed-Field Gel Electrophoresis apparatus will directly benefit the research of two of the newest recruits to the Research Institute for Science & Technology in Medicine.

The Faculty of Health's allocation of capital funds from the Higher Education Funding Council for England has enabled £11,400 to be spent on the equipment, which is currently being commissioned in the Haldane Laboratory in the Huxley Building.

Dr Catherine Merrick, who joined Keele in 2011 as Lecturer in Biology, and Dr Mark Skidmore, who came to Keele in 2010 as Lecturer in Biochemistry, will both use the equipment in their latest projects, for which substantial grants are being sought from the Research Councils.

Although initially educated and trained in the UK at Cambridge University and Cancer Research UK, Catherine Merrick has already enjoyed a varied career which has included the Harvard School of Public Health in the USA, where she began to study the epigenetic control of virulence genes in the malaria parasite, and a field study at the Medical Research Council's Institute in The Gambia, West Africa, investigating clinical phenotypes and the expression of virulence genes in patients with malaria. At Keele the new equipment will enable her to employ karyotyping techniques as well as molecular genetics to improve our understanding of the basic biology of the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and the impact of this biology on virulence.

Mark Skidmore has built up a range of industrial and academic links for his research, following degrees at Imperial College London and Liverpool University. His research interest is carbohydrate chemistry/biochemistry, in particular the role of anionic carbohydrates. The major focus of his current research is the study of carbohydrate:protein structure-functions, in particular the development of new tools and technologies for elucidating protein-carbohydrate interactions and their application to biomedical sciences, biological sciences and medicine."

New Studentship for PhD in Philosophy

The Keele Philosophy Programme is to receive a new Graduate Student Teaching Scholarship from the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation in
Berlin, to fund a doctoral student researching the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

The grant, secured by Dr. Sorin Baiasu, will contribute towards a three-year scholarship to be held at Keele, which covers EU fees and includes
a salary for undergraduate teaching, as well as editorial and research-related work for the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation.

MRC Partnership Grant

Professors Danielle van der Windt and Peter Croft are collaborators in the PROGRESS Partnership on Prognosis Research, which was recently awarded a major 3 year MRC Partnership grant worth £807,000. The PROGRESS Partnership is led by Prof. Harry Hemingway from UCL and also involves partners at Oxford, Birmingham and the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Compared with research on the diagnosis and treatment of health conditions, research into prognosis (the likely future outcome of a condition) is lacking in terms of quality of methods, reporting, and in particular clinical impact. Very few studies have investigated the validity, usefulness and impact of prognostic information in clinical practice (translational evidence). Hence, there is a clear need for high-quality prognosis research which can lead to better communication of prognosis to patients, better use of prognostic information to support clinical decisions regarding further investigations and treatment, and use of prognostic information to support better targeted or individualised care. The aim of the PROGRESS Partnership is to develop and apply methods and recommendations regarding prognosis research across different disease areas in order to enhance the translational impact of prognosis research. The activities of the Partnership include a novel programme of research to provide illustrative examples in several disease fields, and a programme of dissemination, teaching and training. The Partnership will be fundamental in building a wider network of national and international partners in prognosis research across different disease topics, and in the design of new collaborative research, led by Keele and focusing on our key areas of research in pain and arthritis.

National Institute for Health Research

Professor Elaine Hay, Director of the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre at Keele, has been appointed as a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator. Senior Investigators are the NIHR's pre-eminent researchers and represent the country's most outstanding leaders of clinical and applied health and social care research. Senior Investigators are fundamental to the formation of the NIHR Faculty. Professor Hay was one of 25 new appointees announced after the latest annual competition. A total of 54 Senior Investigators were appointed, including 29 re-appointments, bringing the number up to 208. The competition received 177 applications, including many from current senior investigators wishing to continue in the role for a second and final term. An independent expert panel advise on the appointments, which are made according to criteria of quality and volume of internationally excellent research, its relevance to patients and the public, impact on improvements in healthcare and public health, impact of their individual research leadership, engagement of patients and the public and engagement of healthcare policy makers and planners with their research.

BBSRC Award

Dr. Stanislaw Glazewski, with colleagues from Aston University, has secured substantial funding of around £800,000 from the BBSRC, with around £345,000 coming to Keele, for a three year collaborative research project entitled, ‘The role of astrocytes in experience-dependent plasticity’. The project will look, amongst other things, at how the healthy cerebral cortex operates and how it responds to changes in the environment.

North Staffordshire Medical Institute Award

The North Staffordshire Medical Institute has awarded Dr. Neil Telling £10,000 to conduct a project to explore a new type of hyperthermia mediator based on magnetic nanodiscs. This 24 month study will use state of the art fabrication, characterisation and testing facilities within the Research Institute for Science Technology and Medicine to assess the potential of nanodiscs for hyperthermia treatments by studying heating effects, induced cancer cell death, and biocompatibility.

EU FP7 Health-2012-Innovation-1

Professor Shaughn O’Brien is part of an SME-targeted collaborative project being led by University of Cork. The consortium consists of a partnership of world leading experts from four SMEs and eight academic institutions from across Europe. The project will develop blood tests for all first time mothers during early pregnancy to determine pre-eclampsia. Through a multi-centre hospital-based study, representative of different healthcare models, a high calibre pregnancy bio-bank for European pregnancy researchers will be established. A dual strategy of distinct but complementary cutting edge platforms to measure novel metabolomic and proteomic biomarkers which have been previously identified as predictive of disease. These measurements, combined with basic maternal clinical data will be used to determine risk status. The development of such a personalised medicine approach, that offers first time mothers accurate risk assessment for pre-eclampsia, will radically impact the provision of antenatal care, both in Europe and the rest of the world, and will reduce the clinical complications of the leading cause of maternal death in Europe.

BBSRC award

Dr. Divya Chari and Dr. Dave Furness have been successful in obtaining a grant of around £304,000 from the BBSRC to fund a three year project to develop methods to use magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) to deliver genes coding for therapeutic molecules to stem cells (that will then be used for transplantation). Different strategies will be assessed to optimise uptake of MNPs coated with genes into stem cells and establish if this procedure has adverse effects on the survival and development of the cells. The repair enhancing potential of the engineered stem cells will be tested in a ‘living’ 3D slice of the spinal cord, which can function well as injured ‘host’ tissue for transplant cells. This method provides a robust alternative to the use of surgical transplantation to study cell transplantation therapies in living animals, thereby significantly reducing animal usage and suffering in experimental research.

MRC Award: Mechanism of toxicity of aluminium-based adjuvant (ABA) nanomaterials

The MRC has awarded Professor Chris Exley, Professor of Bioinorganic Chemistry, £324,984 to conduct a project that will focus on the burgeoning interest in human exposure to what have been called nanoparticulates. It has become apparent that sub-micron sized particles are able to enter the body and potentially accumulate in tissues and organs. These nanomaterials are both novel materials which are being developed for myriad purposes and they are materials which are 'naturally' present in many different environments as the products of both natural and man-made phenomena. While there is evidence that such nanomaterials are becoming more widespread it is also clear that very little is understood about their potential modes of toxicity. One such form of nanomaterial has been used by humans for decades and are the aluminium-based adjuvants which are used in approximately 80% of all human vaccinations. While these materials are highly biologically reactive we still do not understand fully how they work and we believe that they would be an extremely useful model system for understanding the toxicity of nanomaterials. The objectives of the research are to obtain a thorough understanding of the physical and chemical properties of these nanomaterials and then investigate how these influence their biological reactivity. Professor Exley hopes to explain how they work as adjuvants and in doing so help in the design of future safe and effective adjuvant materials. In addition, it is hoped the research will optimise the toxicity of such materials such that they might be used to kill tumour cells in cases of malignant brain cancer. None of these objectives can be achieved without an understanding of the mechanisms of toxic action of these nanomaterials, which is the primary objective of this research.

ESRC International Partnership and Networking Grant

The network builds on substantial international collaborations across major research groups in Europe, Hong Kong and North America. These provide complementary expertise in applying longitudinal data sets to the analysis of urban change. The collaboration also has significant experience studying communities subject to both rapid urban change as well as economic and social deprivation. A key aspect of the work of the network will be bringing together relevant international data resources to analyse their strengths and limitations for developing research applied to understanding issues facing older people in urban areas. These will include longitudinal studies in the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, the USA as well as the UK.

Leverhulme Trust Award

Prof. Clare Holdsworth has secured a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to allow Dr. Matthew Benwell from University of Liverpool, to come and work at Keele for three years to explore the South Atlantic territorial dispute through the perspectives of young people from Argentina, the Falklands Islands and the UK. It will address key issues set to characterise global geopolitics in the 21^st century, such as the status of contested postcolonial territories (and their defence in the face of severe cuts to military spending); resource exploitation and/or the potential for cooperation in politically and environmentally challenging places; the representation and standing of emerging Latin American nations such as Argentina within global institutions and future access to potentially resource-rich polar regions. The research will listen to the voices of young citizens who inherit, reproduce and/or re interpret geopolitical discourses in order to understand how this sovereignty dispute and its associated challenges will be understood by future generations.

ESRC Award for research - Visual Criminology: Crime, Criminal Justice and the Image

Professor Ronnie Lippens and Dr. Tony Kearon, together with colleagues from Exeter, Leicester and City Universities, have been awarded an ESRC Seminar Series Grant on 'Visual Criminology: Crime, Criminal Justice, and the Image'.  In this seminar series, the research team are proposing a systematic exploration of the role played by images, not just in reframing criminological inquiry, but also in the practice of crime control and criminal justice. The seminar series will bring together criminologists, representatives from other Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines and institutions, as well as officials and practitioners in the field of crime control and criminal justice.

Keele Academic in £2.5m UK Research Council Grant Success

Dr Sami Ullah, Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics and the School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, is part of a successful consortium grant titled "Analysis and simulation of long-term/large-scale interactions of C, N and P in UK land, freshwater and atmosphere".

This consortium project, worth £2.5 million, is a joint project of eight national institutes including Keele, NERC's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Lancaster, British Geological Survey, Liverpool University, University of Lancaster, University College London, Rothamsted Research and James Hutton Institute.

Out of the total £2.5 million grant from NERC, £270,868 is directly awarded to Keele to investigate the impact of landscape position and land use type on soil denitrification rates (sequential reduction of mineral nitrogen to N2O and N2 gases) in the Ribble and Conwy River watersheds in UK. Dr Ullah says that in a global change and food security context, mineral nitrogen as a fertilizer and as a water and air pollutant have significant ecological and socio-economic implications. Therefore, knowing the impacts of fertilizers and land use changes on soils nitrogen pools and fluxes with the atmosphere through denitrification at landscape scale is of critical importance to fill in data gaps for simulating long-term and large-scale nitrogen budgets together with that of C and P in the UK.

Three AHRC Awards for Humanities and Social Sciences Academics

Academics in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences have secured three new grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council:

James Peacock, Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures, has been awarded a prestigious AHRC Early Career Fellowship for his research project, 'Brooklyn Fictions: the Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age.' The major outputs will be a monograph of the same name; a long article intended for a general readership which includes material from a number of author interviews; and a public interview with the author Jonathan Lethem at Pomona College, California in 2013. The monograph is best viewed as a work of "literary sociology": it takes literary representations of place as symbolic cues to attitudes to local and regional community identities in a contemporary world supposedly dominated by global forces and movements. Using Brooklyn – "a small town in the world city" – as a case study, it examines the close relationship between capital and community formation.

Marie-Andree Jacob, Lecturer in Law, has been awarded a prestigious AHRC Fellowship for her research project 'Judging the Medics' Science: Misconduct and Research Culture in Disciplinary Proceedings since 1990.' It aims to offer the first comprehensive analysis of General Medical Council's casework about scientific misconduct in medical research, for the period 1990-2010; and to understand what constitutes misconduct, ethics, and integrity in medical science, taken in their cultural contexts. The fellowship falls under the AHRC Highlight notice "Science in Culture."

Alannah Tomkins, Senior Lecturer in History, pictured, and Nigel Tringham, Senior Lecturer in History and editor of the Victoria County History of Staffordshire, have secured an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award to support a studentship on 'Staffordshire landed estates and the development of urban communities in the long nineteenth century'.

The studentship will be a collaboration with Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent and Archive Service and will explore and compare the impact of the social and economic policies of two major Staffordshire landowning families on the development of urban working-class communities over the 'long nineteenth century'. This Collaborative Doctoral Award will provide a student with privileged access to a currently uncatalogued collection, rigorous training in the principles and methods of archival cataloguing, and the opportunity for sustained public engagement through the Staffordshire Archive's web-pages, regular 'road-shows' and other events.

BBKA Award

BBKA funds Keele Research on pesticide residues in bee colonies

Grants for Kantian Philosophy Research

Dr Sorin Baiasu, Reader in Philosophy and Philosophy Programme Director in SPIRE, has made a successful application, with Christine Lopes, from the University of Southampton, for a grant to fund the United Kingdom Kant Society's (UKKS)Annual Conference.

Dr Baiasu is the Secretary of the UKKS. The grant of £600 was awarded by the Mind Association, the principle association for the support and promotion of research excellence in philosophy in the UK, and the conference will be jointly organised by the UKKS and the Centre for Idealism and Neo-Liberalism based at the University of Hull.

Dr. Baiasu has also recently secured an annual grant of £500 for the European Consortium for Political Research Kantian Standing Group.

The mother of all strikes

Professor Pnina Werbner, School of Sociology and Criminology, has been awarded $18,900 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, for a continuation of her study of the Manual Workers Public Service Union in Botswana. The title of her successful project application is 'The Mother of all Strikes: Politics, Law and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Botswana Public Service Unions' Activism'. The grant allows for travel and fieldwork expenses in Botswana for a period of up to four months.

Prestigious EC Award

Professor Gordon Hamilton and Dr William Kirk, Centre for Applied Entomology and Parasitology/ Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, have been awarded a European Commission FP7 Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) to support a new research collaboration, the "Europe Australasian Thysanoptera Semiochemical (EATS) Network".

The objective of this prestigious international collaboration, which has a total award value for the European partners of €58,800 (ca. £52,000), is to develop novel semiochemical-based tools for sustainable thrips pest management and border detection. Keele's main role is to use a "mass spectrum library tool" currently being prepared here as part of a European Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowship on "Pheromone Identification for Environmentally Responsible Control of Thrips" to carry out an initial identification of the male-produced aggregation pheromone of two Australasian thrips pest species. The four-year award enables travel for meetings and sample collections between Keele and its partners in the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, New Zealand and Australia.

EU Marie Curie Research Fellowship

Dr Richard Stephens and Dr Jim Grange, of Keele's School of Psychology / Centre for Psychological Research, have secured an EU Marie Curie Research Fellowship to allow Dr Lauren Owen from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, to come to Keele for two years to carry out research assessing the cognitive consequences of the alcohol hangover.

Despite being the most prevalent and commonly recognised problem experienced in relation to alcohol, alcohol hangover has been a neglected part of the alcohol research scene until recently.

The funding, worth £148,975, will allow important research to be carried out improving the understanding of the alcohol hangover.

Dr Owen will take up her post in August 2012.

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for Shameless study

Dr Beth Johnson, lecturer in Film and Television Studies from the School of Humanities, has been awarded an 18 month Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for her project entitled 'Shameless: Aesthetics, Style & Putting 'cool' into the TV Classics Canon'.

Through the fellowship, Beth will complete a monograph that will provide a unique study of both the original BAFTA winning British series of Shameless and the recent (2011) American remake.

Devoting chapters to the origins of the series, format, aesthetics, social realism, representations of sexuality, nation, state and love, the study will address the socio-political and thematic issues that punctuate the heart of the show, critically considering what Shameless has to say about contemporary society and analysing the original, edgy and 'cool' cinematographic culture of the show.

NICE Social Care Fellowship

Dr Mo Ray, Research Institute for Social Sciences and School of Public Policy and Professional Practice, has been awarded a National Centre for Clinical Excellence (NICE) Fellowship.

NICE has expanded its role into social care standards and to acknowledge and support this role has extended its Fellows' programme to include a Fellowship for senior social care professionals.

The three-year fellowship attracts high profile social care professionals with the capacity to influence practice, who are committed to evidence and research based practice, as well as advising NICE as it develops its social care programme.

Mo qualified as a social worker in 1990 and has had many years of experience as a social work practitioner and manager focusing on services for older people. Since coming to Keele she has remained a registered social worker and has been Director of the MA Social Work programme at the University for four years.

Her teaching focuses on social work with adults and she has developed a range of CPD initiatives with, and for, the social and health care workforce. Her research interests focus on practice development and applied research, which aims to challenge traditional cultures of care and improve quality of life for older people, particularly with high support needs.

She starts her Fellowship next month.

GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY AWARD

Dr Jamie Pringle, Lecturer in the School of Physical Sciences and Geography, has been awarded the William Smith Fund for 2012 from the Geological Society of London (founded in 1807).

This is an award recognising excellence in published contributions to applied and economic aspects of Geology within ten years commencement of the recipient's career.

Networking and Exchange grant

Dr Anthony Carrigan, English/ RI Humanities, has been awarded a Research Networking and Exchange grant under a joint initiative by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to enable collaboration between UK and Dutch researchers.

The network addresses 'The cultural politics of catastrophe: (Post)colonial representations of Southeast Asian and Caribbean disasters, 1800-2012' and pertains to the research councils' shared strategic theme of 'Sustainable Communities in a Changing World'.

Developed and hosted in partnership with Dr Alicia Schrikker (History, Leiden University), it will explore how historical perspectives on, and cultural responses to, natural disasters in areas with British and Dutch colonial histories can contribute to understanding the challenges of sustaining community in the context of catastrophe. The network will be organised around four workshops hosted alternately at Leiden and Keele between January 2013 and March 2014, and will draw on expertise in both institutions alongside internationally renowned academics from the humanities and social sciences, cultural sector workers, and charity representatives. The network will be interdisciplinary in scope and method, and will also provide a forum for postgraduate and early-career researchers to establish bilateral connections and build on the potential for sustained cross-empire and intra-empire work on this theme.

Grant awarded from the Training and Development Agency

Dave Miller, School of Public Policy and Professional Practice, has received a grant of £5,000 from the Training and Development Agency to support the use of Information and Communication Technology in Initial Teacher Training.

Over the next year he will work with colleagues in Stoke-on-Trent authority and local secondary schools looking at the use of Pupils Response Systems (handheld voting systems), iTouches and iPads in mathematics lessons. The work will be launched on 9 February at a one day conference at Keele. During the next 12 months it will be followed through in about 30 schools and extended to cover some secondary school lessons in English.

AHRC Award for project to establish the Re-Valuing Care Research Network

The ReValuing Care Research Network will be an international, interdisciplinary network of academics and related third sector professional working together to interrogate contemporary and future approaches to conceptual and normative understandings of care. Members of the network will include academics working on issues related to care from a variety of different sites, disciplines and contexts, including healthcare, childcare, eldercare, environmental issues, animal welfare and other related fields.

NIHR Award for research into the effects of two additional therapies after stroke

Dr Sue Hunter, in conjunction with colleagues at the University of East Anglia, UCL, and Oxford, Nottingham, Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Birmingham universities, together with the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, has been awarded £152,794 by the NHS National Institute for Health Research. The study will investigate whether a new therapy, functional strength training (FST) can reduce weakness and thereby enhance outcome. All participants will receive standardised conventional physical therapy (CPT) and in addition will be randomly selected to receive either extra FST or extra CPT. The measures of the study will be used to compare the effects of the two additional therapies and also to increase the understanding of how the central nervous system recovers after stroke.

Chartered Society of Physiotherapy Award for project on self referral

Professor Nadine Foster has been awarded £199,249 by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy for a 24 month project which will look at how self-referral to physiotherapy improves patient choice about how they access services. Despite the many suggested benefits of self-referral and its introduction in other countries, progress towards self-referral in the NHS in England has been slow. This is likely related to the lack of long-term clinical and cost-effectiveness data from controlled trials. The evidence to date is limited to observational, uncontrolled and non-randomised studies from the UK and Netherlands. Self-referral needs to be evaluated in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) that considers the full range of patient and resource outcomes. A cluster RCT will be conducted to compare the clinical and cost-effectiveness of offering self-referral to physiotherapy versus continuing with usual GP-led care for musculoskeletal patients in primary care.

Prestigious Wellcome Trust Award

Professor Stephen Wilkinson has been awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, jointly with Professor Rosamund Scott at King’s College, London. The Award is worth £926,000, of which £636,779 will come to Keele, and will fund three post-doctoral research assistants for five years, as well as providing funding for replacement teaching for Professor Wilkinson and Professor Scott. The research that will be undertaken is of fundamental importance as our ability to transfer human reproductive materials, both to facilitate reproduction, and to underpin biomedical research, has grown dramatically in recent years. A coherent, comprehensible and philosophically defensible ethical framework with which to think about the donation and transfer of human reproductive materials is of highest importance. This programme aims to develop and to provide rigorous arguments for such a framework, and to examine its implications for practice, law, public policy and regulation.

MRC award for project studying novel glycotherapeutics for Alzheimer's disease

Dr Mark Skidmore and Dr Paul Horrocks (ISTM / School of Life Sciences / School of Medicine) and Professor Steve Allin (EPSAM / School of Physical and Geographical Sciences), with Dr Edwin Yates of Liverpool University, have been awarded an industrial CASE studentship worth £125,888 from the Medical Research Council, with industrial partner Charnwood Molecular, for a four year PhD project studying novel glycotherapeutics for Alzheimer's disease. The MRC funding totals £109,288, with a further £16,600 worth of funding from Charnwood Molecular. Charnwood Molecular provides medicinal chemistry support and chemical synthesis services, mainly to the pharma, agrochemical, and biotech sectors, and the PhD student will have an industrial supervisor, Dr Mike McKenzie, while visiting their premises.

STFC grant awarded to Keele Astrophysics Research Group

Keele’s Astrophysics Group has been awarded a new five year STFC Consolidated grant worth £1,048,698. The grant will fund three PDRAs, working on: (1) A study of winds from supermassive black-holes in distant galaxies, led by Dr James Reeves, based on 1500 hours of time won competitively on major international facilities such as the satellites Chandra, XMM and Suzaku. (2) A large survey of star-formation regions and young stellar clusters in our galaxy, led by Professor Rob Jeffries, based on 300 nights of time on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. (3) The WASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) search for extrasolar planets, led by Professor Coel Hellier, extending the WASP-South survey, currently the world's most successful search for transiting exoplanets. Of 15 UK astrophysics groups renewing their grants in this round at a time of reduced STFC budgets, Keele was the only group who did not have a reduction in PDRAs awarded.

AHRC award for project aimed to make a difference to society's understanding of social exclusion

Prof David Amigoni has been awarded an AHRC grant, as part of a project led by King’s College London, in association with colleagues from University of Leicester and Durham University. The study will allow a team of researchers from diverse geographical locations in the UK to develop ideas for a large study of ‘Social exclusion’ and the role of stories in people’s lives. Social exclusion occurs when people fail to take up educational opportunities and employment, and find themselves instead living lives in which anti-social behaviour, crime and poor health can come to play too large a role. “Whose Story?” is a project that aims to make a difference to society’s understanding of social exclusion, by placing storytelling and narrative at the centre of its research methods.

AHRC award for project to generate new create writings from North Staffordshire

Dr Alannah Tomkins has been awarded £20,892 by the AHRC, as part of an AHRC research networking grant being led by Staffordshire University. This project will generate new creative writings from North Staffordshire. Rooted in the occupational-health legacy of the past this network will bring together residents, employees and patients with poets and novelists on one hand, and medical practitioners and policy makers on the other, to reflect on experiences of health, illness and medicine in the region

Winston Churchill Award for Keele Student

Keele research student Hannah Moore has been awarded a prestigious Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship.

The final year PhD student, who is studying Chemistry (applied to Forensic Entomology), says the award is 'the opportunity of a lifetime' that will allow her to take her research to the USA.

Once her thesis has been submitted, she will travel to the USA for six to eight weeks, starting in Indiana where she will gain invaluable hands on entomological experience with renowned forensic entomologist, Dr Neal Haskell. She then moves to Massachusetts to work with the co-inventor of a new analytical instrument, Direct Analysis in Real Time.

Her final confirmed visit will be to Oregon to carry out a short project at the US Fish and Wildlife Service Forensic Laboratory. She hopes to round off her trip by presenting her findings to the FBI - but this has yet to be confirmed.

The Winston Churchill Trust - established in 1965 in memory of Sir Winston Churchill - awards annual grants to British citizens to travel overseas, enabling them to study areas of interest in order to gain knowledge for the benefit of their profession, community and the UK as a whole.

Ageing Without Children

Dr Mo Ray, RI for Social Sciences, and Mary Pat Sullivan (Brunel University) have been awarded a £3,000 grant by the Averil Osborn Fund to undertake some exploratory research exploring the experience of ageing without children. Childless older people have traditionally been regarded as uniquely disadvantaged when compared to older people with children. Recently there has been recognition that defining ageing without children as an undifferentiated and inevitably disadvantaged experience is inappropriate. Yet it is still the case that little is known about the diverse contexts in which people age without children or their possible implications. This exploratory study will use biographical interviews to investigate the experience of ageing without children. The impact, or otherwise, ageing without children has on the development and maintenance of social and support networks and personal wellbeing, will be explored.

Breast Cancer Campaign Funding

Professor Gwyn Williams, Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine / School of Life Sciences, has been awarded a three-year research project grant of £201,587 by the Breast Cancer Campaign.

The award will fund the work of Dr Mark Pickard investigating newly discovered mechanisms which control breast cancer cell survival and division.

This project forms part of the research programme of the Keele Apoptosis Research Group, which aims to identify novel mechanisms involved in the control of cell survival and to investigate their importance in breast cancer, leukaemia and other cancers.

This programme is intended to improve understanding of the genetic defects which result in cancer development and ultimately to produce improvements in cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Training and Development for an age friendly workforce

The Active Ageing project has been awarded a grant of £25,000 in partnership with Manchester Valuing Older People to develop an ageing studies in-service professional development programme.

The project has developed out of work already undertaken by the active ageing project with Manchester, including the development and delivery of a six week programme introducing social gerontology to older citizens.

The current project has developed an eight week, modular programme covering a range of topics and intended for an inter-disciplinary audience.

A successful pilot has now been completed which attracted over 100 applicants and included participants as diverse as the Education Director at the Halle Orchestra, storytellers, disability rights workers and community arts workers.

The project is due to report its progress over the course of the year and will subsequently be rolled out to a wider audience.

AHRC Award for project to Explore Personal Communities

Professor Mihaela Keleman has been awarded an AHRC Grant to undertake a project with the aim to explore the idea that personal communities contribute to the common good of society in terms of offering ways for negotiating individual and collective identity via individual engagement with democratic social processes. Existing written work will be analysed as well as engagement with volunteering communities from the Stoke on Trent area.

NIHR Award for clinical trial investigating memory and attention in Parkinson's disease

The National Institute for Health Research for Patient Benefit Programme has awarded £249,231 to Dr Nicky Edelstyn (Psychological Research Centre, Keele), Dr Simon Ellis (Department of Neurology, University Hospital of North Staffordshire [UHNS]), Dr Keira Watts (UHNS Research and Development Department), Professor Julius Sim (Research Design Service), Sharon Hurlstone (Neurology Department, UHNS) and Tom Shepherd (Psychological Research Centre, Keele).

The award will fund a clinical trial investigating the effects of two commonly prescribed dopamine agonists on memory and attention in Parkinson's disease.

Royal Astronomical Society Grant

Keele Astrophysics PhD student Mandy Bailey has won a grant from the Royal Astronomical Society worth £900, to support her attending the triennial General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, which takes place in Beijing in August.

She will present her thesis work on mapping the distribution of molecular gas in the diffuse interstellar medium.

Medical Institute Award

Dr Sue Sherman, School of Psychology, pictured above, (together with Mr Charles Redman, UHNS, Prof Michael Murray, School of Psychology, Ms Philippa Pearmain, NHS, and Mrs Paula Hadden, UHNS) has been awarded £9,703 by the North Staffordshire Medical Institute to pilot a project entitled 'Identifying and promoting best practice in communicating to patients the results of cervical screening history reviews following diagnosis of cervical cancer'.

The Traffic In Things

The Association of Southeast Asian Studies in the UK has awarded Dr Deirdre McKay (Geography) £2,500 to conduct field research in the Philippines. Her project, 'The traffic in things', will explore how the 'stuff' sent home by migrants in the UK is used by its recipients to express their own thoughts on globalization.

The research will track the ways people on the margins of global migration use things like clothes, household goods, souvenirs and decorations to respond to the perceived rise of China as a regional power vis a vis their nation's longstanding ties to the English-speaking world.

Low Pay Commission Research Tender

Professor Gauthier Lanot and Dr Panos Sounsounis, Keele Management School and Research Institute for Social Sciences, have been awarded a research tender by the Low Pay Commission.

The project, funded at just under £20,000, will enable Professor Lanot and Dr Sousounis to examine the effect of the National Minimum Wage on the allocation of labour between age groups with similar qualifications within sector and/or within firm.

British Academy Research Grant

Professor Scott McCracken, Research Institute for the Humanities, has received a British Academy Small Research Grant to fund a Research Assistant to work with him on the Collected Letters of the influential modernist writer Dorothy Richardson.

In the 1920s, Richardson was often compared with James Joyce and Marcel Proust as one of the first writers of 'stream of consciousness'. Recently, there has been renewed interest in her work as a writer, a pioneering feminist, and an early film critic.

The Collected Letters will make available her correspondence with other key figures of the time such as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and the poet Hilda Doolittle.

British Academy Research Grant

Dr Helen Oakes, Research Institute for Social Sciences, has received a British Academy Small Grants Award of £5,300 as Principal Investigator, examining the roles of accounting and marketing communications in supporting arts engagement.

The research involves collaboration with a Co-Investigator at the University of Liverpool Management School.

Keele Academics Win Prestigious HEA Grant Funding Awards

Two Keele academics are among the successful recipients of two new annual funding award programmes which will support the development of learning and teaching across UK higher education, announced by The Higher Education Academy (HEA) yesterday.

Dr Jonathan Parker, who teaches American politics and public policy in SPIRE, has been awarded an HEA International Scholarship. His research interests focus on education policy, particularly higher education.

Jonathan has actively promoted study abroad and internationalisation throughout his career, overseeing and expanding student involvement in programmes for American Studies and Politics at Keele. He led the development of short exchanges at Keele, such as a volunteering experience in Hong Kong and Thailand, as well as a field course on the role of sport in the United States.

His research for the HEA will involve studying the use of short study abroad programmes, such as summer schools and field courses, in the United States. Short experiences expand participation in study abroad, particularly for students who have heavier financial, family, or work commitments. Many American universities get almost 100% of students participating in an international experience, and some even require it. Jonathan will examine how the experience from the United States might help
expand study abroad in the UK.

Professor Clare Holdsworth, Professor of Social Geography, School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, and Head of the Centre for Social Policy, has been awarded an HEA Doctoral Programme award.

Clare's research and teaching expertise is in youth studies and she is particularly interested in the spatial context of youth transitions. She has carried out comparative research on leaving home, contrasting the experiences of young people in Britain, Spain and Norway. She has also written extensively on student experiences in the UK and has challenged the assumptions of 'going away to uni'. She believes it is important to recognise and celebrate diversity in student experiences, and that students who live at home while at university have an equally valid student experience, as well as those who move away.

Clare's doctoral award will extend her research on student volunteering through considering the contribution of work experience to degree programmes and to enhancing student employability. She is particularly interested in exploring the paradoxes in promoting employability criteria, such as work experience, volunteering work, placement or internships, to large numbers of students. Clare's doctoral award will investigate how best to integrate experience into the curriculum in order to promote employability through enhancing students' learner skills.

The recipients of the 2012 International Scholarship Scheme will undertake specific investigations outside of the UK and deliver specific outcomes for dissemination within the UK sector at the end of the scholarship. The HEA's Doctoral Programme awards form part of the HEA's strategy to undertake research to develop pedagogical knowledge and evidence-based practice in higher education. The research outcomes from the Doctoral studentships will be disseminated throughout UK higher education.

Excellence Award for Jamie

Dr Jamie Pringle, of the School of Physical Sciences & Geography/EPSAM, was this week awarded the 2012 William Smith Fund by the Geological Society of London, the oldest Geological Society in the world at President's Day.

The William Smith Fund is awarded for excellence in contributions to applied and economic aspects of Geology within the first 10 years of the recipient's academic career.

Festival Prize Winner

Visitation Adagio', a collaborative audiovisual work by Dr Diego Garro and Richard T. Nelmes, RI Humanities - Music & Music Technology, was awarded the Visionen Preis 2012 at the Festival for Sound and Moving Visual Arts in Hannover, organised by GEMART (Group for Experimental Music and Media Arts).

The video features quasi-familiar Keele campus landscapes and ominous soundscapes, re-contextualised into a musing voyage of re-discovery by a quizzical visitor and his arcane, glistening little companion.

'Ages and Stages' team awarded follow on funding

The Ages and Stages research team, led by Professor Mim Bernard, has been awarded a 12 month Follow-on Funding grant by the Arts & Humanities Research Council to the value of £114,579.

The additional financial support will enable the team to develop the research-led learning from the initial project and continue the collaborative work between the University and the New Vic Theatre. The next twelve months will be devoted to:

. Forming an intergenerational theatre company at the New Vic Theatre and bringing older and younger people together in creative, drama-based activities.

. Developing touring pieces(s) which will be taken out to audiences within, and beyond, North Staffordshire.

. Piloting an inter-professional training course aimed at developing practice capabilities and age awareness amongst teachers, health and social care professionals, arts practitioners and others interested in learning about, and including, intergenerational theatre/drama in their practice.

. Scoping out – with a range of partners – the possibilities for a wider 'Creative Age Festival'.

The follow-on project is led by Professor Bernard, working together with Ages and Stages Research Associate, Dr Michelle Rickett, and Head of Education at the New Vic Theatre, Jill Rezzano.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact one of the research team and/or take a look at the project website