Research Grant Award Highlights (Nov. 2011 Feb. 2012)

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Research Grant Award highlights (Nov. 2011 – Feb. 2012)

Social Sciences RI

Prof. Stephen Wilkinson (Centre for Law, Ethics and Policy, iSS)

Wellcome Trust, £636,779

Title: “The donation and transfer of human reproductive materials”

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.

Dr. Sue Hunter (Centre for Psychological Research, iSS / Health and Rehabilitation)

National Institute for Health Research, £152,794

Title: “Clinical efficacy of functional strength training for upper limb motor recovery early after stroke: neural correlates and prognostic indicators’ ”

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.

Humanities RI

Dr. Alannah Tomkins (History, Humanities)

AHRC, £20,892

Title: “Medical Histories: Creating Health Narratives”

Dr Alannah Tomkinshas 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.

Prof. David Amigoni (English, Humanities)

AHRC, £11,848

Title: “Whose Story?:Re-integrating self and community through narratives of social interplay and inclusion”

Prof David Amigonihas been awarded £11,848 by the AHRC, 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 behavior, 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.

EPSAM

Keele Astrophysics Research Group (EPSAM / School of Physical and Geographical Sciences)

STFC, £1,048,698

Title: “Astrophysics at Keele: the formation and evolution of galaxies, starts and planets”

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.

Dr Mark Skidmore, Dr Paul Horrocks(ISTM / School of Life Sciences / School of Medicine)and Prof. Steve Allin(EPSAM / School of Physical and Geographical Sciences)

MRC / Charnwood Molecular, £125,888

Title: “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. ISTM has held several similar awards from the Research Councils and is seeking further partners for biomedical projects for the next round of the CASE scheme in July.

iSTM

Prof. Gwyn Williams (ISTM / School of Life Sciences)

Breast Cancer Campaign, £201,587

Title: “Investigation of novel non-coding RNAs controlling breast cancer cell proliferation and survival”

Professor Gwyn Williams has been awarded £201,587 by the Breast Cancer Campaign for a three year project which will fund the work of Dr Mark Pickard, investigating newly discovered mechanisms which control breast cancer cell survival and division. The 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, to improve understanding of the genetic defects which result in cancer development and ultimately to produce improvements in cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Dr Mark Skidmore, Dr Paul Horrocks(ISTM / School of Life Sciences / School of Medicine)and Prof. Steve Allin(EPSAM / School of Physical and Geographical Sciences)

MRC / Charnwood Molecular, £125,888

Title: “Novel glycotherapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease”

Primary Care Health Sciences

Prof Nadine Foster

National Institute for Health Research, £875,719

Title: “National Institute for Health Research, Research Professorship”

Professor Nadine Foster has been awarded a highly prestigious five year NHS NIHR Research Professorship worth £875,719, one of only eight such awards. Nominations were invited from universities and NHS organisations in England for a limited number of these prestigious awards.The objective of these awards is to fund leaders in the early part of their careers to lead research, to promote effective translation of research and strengthen research leadership at the highest academic levels. Applications were invited from health researchers and methodologists with an outstanding record of clinical and applied health research and its effective translation for improved health.

Professor Foster’s research will support the development, piloting and testing of treatments and services for common and costly musculoskeletal problems in primary care, including lower back, knee and shoulder pain. She will develop and test the clinical and cost-effectiveness of different treatments and services, including early identification of musculoskeletal problems, support for patients of working age, and approaches that better match patients to the right treatments.

Prof Nadine Foster

Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, £199,249

Title: “Self-referral to physiotherapy for musculoskeletal problems in primary care: stepping up the evidence”

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. The project will be used to leverage additional funding to seamlessly increase the number of GP practices and physiotherapy services taking part in order to conduct the first large RCT of self-referral to provide NHS commissioners with the data they need for decision-making.

Recent Research Grant Applications (Nov. 2011 – Feb. 2012)

iSTM has recently submitted two applications to the new British Council UK-Israel collaboration in regenerative medicine. Several members of ISTM, led by Professor Alicia El Haj, attended the first UK-Israel Regenerative Medicine Conference which took place in late November 2011 at Ben Gurion University in Israel, and as a result two Keele teams were invited to take part in collaborative grant applications with the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa under the British Council's research and exchange partnership (BIRAX). The two applications were made at the end of January, one links Professor El Haj's group at the Guy Hilton Research Centre and Dr Samer Srouji at the Carmel Medical Centre in a project to create usable vascularised bone. The other project links Professor Sally Roberts' group at Oswestry and Emeritus ProfessorAlice Maroudas at the Biomedical Engineering departmentand proposes the use of liposomes to improve cartilage repair. Together the two applications total over £350,000 and the outcome will be known in a few weeks’ time.

Following discussion across the institution, iSTM hassubmitted an institutionalbid for £210,000 to the recent Wolfson Laboratory Refurbishment scheme call for investment in new facilities for Imaging research.After considering various options, iSTM has submitted an application, led by Professor Serguei Semenov. The bid focuses on relocating the novel equipment developed at Keele for Electromagnetic Tomography, so that the first work with patients and healthy volunteers can commence. The equipment has recently returned from a year in the USA where it has undergone extensive evaluation and has been re-installed in the Guy Hilton Research Centre. However, the facilities for interconnected laboratory and patient areas, commissioned in 2006, are already full and the best location for accessing patients is now to be found on the new hospital site, so the Wolfson proposal is to refurbish dedicated space there. The emphasis of the current work is soft tissue imaging, notably in breast cancer detection and stroke monitoring, so UHNS clinical colleagues Dr Paula Richards and Professor Christine Roffe are involved as co-investigators. The outcome of the application will be known in June.

Dr Raphael Hirschi(iEPSAM, Astrophysics) has been invited to the second stage ofthe prestigious and highly competitive European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC-StG) scheme. Dr Hirschi is only the second researcher at Keele to have reached the second stage and is now preparing to go to Brussels for interview at the end of April 2012. If successful at the end of the second and final stage, the grant will provide funding 1.5m Euros over five years. The goal of the grant is to build strong bridges across the disciplines of nuclear physics, astrophysics and high performance computing in order to achieve breakthroughs in our understanding of the structure and evolution of massive stars. In particular, the programme will study in detail the effects of and interaction between key input physics (nuclear reactions, convection and rotation). This programme will also build a bridge with industry by working in collaboration with a high-performance computing manufacturer, numascale.

An interdisciplinary team led by Professor Andy Dobson (iSS / SPIRE), including Professor Mark Ormerod and Dr Zoe Robinson (EPSAM / School of Physical and Geograhical Sciences) and Professor Chris Phillipson, Dr. Phil Catney, Dr. Sherilyn MacGregor, Professor Michael Murrary (iSS / Social Policy / SPIRE / Psychology) has submitted a bid for £4.93m to the EPSRC / ESRC Call for Research Centres of Excellence in End Use Energy Demand, based around Keele’s expertise in environmental citizenship, energy literacy and fuel poverty. The proposed Centre will focus on citizen engagement amongst the fuel poor in urban and rural contexts.

An interdisciplinary team led by Professor Chris Phillipson (iSS / Social Policy), including Dr Phil Catney (iSS / SPIRE), with colleagues from Manchester and Sheffield Universities and Manchester City Council, has submitted a bid for £2.4m to the AHRC / ESRC Connected Communities Research Programme. The bid focuses on community engagement in Stoke, Manchester and Blackburn and builds on ideas developed during an ESRC Seminar Series on small and medium-sized cities.

iSS and iHumanities colleagues are working on a number of grant applications, including British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships, ESRC Future Leader applications and Wellcome Trust Fellowship applications.

Professor Mark Ormerod, PVC Research and Enterprise

Ann Diskin, Donna Sumner, Caroline Pugh, Research and Enterprise Services

16th February 2012