Tag Archives: international

100 Commonwealth Early Career Travel Grants 2013 Announced

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The Association of Commonwealth Universities has announced 100 Early Career Academic Grants for staff at ACU member Universities. Although the details state this is focused primarily at Early Career Researchers, it also highlights that it will welcome anyone who fulfills the eligibility criteria. Applications are due by 31st May.

This scheme is predominantly aimed at early career academics that have not had the opportunity to work, study or travel outside of the UK.

  • Applicants will have discretion over what the grant is used for, but it must involve a visit to academic peers in a Commonwealth country outside their home region. In most cases, this will involve attendance at a recognised academic conference in their discipline. Potential hosts should be either an ACU member university in the country to be visited, or the organiser of a recognised academic conference.
  • Grants can be used to cover travel costs, conference fees, accommodation and subsistence, and, where appropriate, small-scale purchases of materials for use in future teaching or research.
  • Round 1 of applications is for visits to be made between August-December 2013.
  • Each Early Career Academic Grant will be up to GBP 2,000 in value.
  • Under no circumstances will the total value of the grant exceed that stated on the offer letter.
  • Grants will be paid in a single instalment to either the grant holder’s home institution, a host institution in the country to be visited (provided that the institution is an ACU member), or a named conference organiser. Successful applicants will be asked to nominate a recipient of funds.
  • Grant holders will be asked to provide an account of expenditure and a brief report (no more than 500 words) on how their grant has been spent.
  • The ACU reserves the right to publish the names of successful applicants on the ACU website and in ACU publications. By applying for a grant, the applicant gives consent for such publication in the event that his/her application is successful.

For more information, and to apply, please visit the ACU’s website or contact Research and Income Generation Support at Research and Enterprise.

Architecture student’s essay claims international Berkeley prize

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Sophia BannertA Lincoln student is celebrating international acclaim after winning the 2013 Berkeley Prize Essay Competition, awarded by the University of Berkeley in California.

Sophia Bannert, who is a third year Architecture student at the University of Lincoln, was named as a winner in the Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Design Excellence after submitting her essay. It was selected by judges out of 152 student entries from 26 different countries.

The international competition was established in 1998 by the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design, to promote the investigation of architecture as a social art.

Each year the Essay Competition focuses on a topic important to the understanding of the interaction between people and the built world. This year, undergraduate students around the world wrote on ‘The Architect and the Accessible City’, with Sophia’s winning essay entitled ‘A Day in the Life of a Wheelchair User:  Navigating Lincoln’.

Her innovative study explores the challenges faced by wheelchair users navigating around historical cities such as Lincoln.

Sophia said: “I am honoured to have won first prize in this prestigious competition, and I intend to pursue this topic further in my future career. There is a real need for architects and designers to address the problems of rapid and unplanned urbanisation and increased longevity.

“Architecture is an inherently social art and the changing social structures of our communities need to be reflected in our built environment. We need to cherish differences; not discriminate against them. “

Sophia is currently writing another paper on the topic with her tutor Dr Amira Elnokaly, Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln’s School of Architecture, which will be published by the Royal College of Art and presented at the international Include Asia 2013 conference in Hong Kong later this year.

Dr Elnokaly said: “At the Lincoln School of Architecture we are absolutely delighted with Sophia’s achievement. It is a fantastic accolade, and international competitions such as this enable our students to display their wide range of talents. They provide great opportunities for the students to explore new themes, and our presentation on inclusive design at the Include Asia 2013 conference will be another valuable experience for Sophia.”

For more information and to read Sophia’s essay on accessible architecture in Lincoln, visit: http://berkeleyprize.org/competition/essay/2013/winning-essays/bannert-essay.

Elizabeth Mitchell - PR OfficerElizabeth Mitchell - PR Officer
E-mail: emitchell@lincoln.ac.uk
Telephone: 01522 837650

 

University of Lincoln research: Land animals kept fish-like jaws for millions of years

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Right lateral aspect of the skull of a juvenile specimen of Orobates pabst. Credit: Dr Amy Henrici, Research has confirmed how early land vertebrates, which evolved from fish, developed weight-bearing limbs and other adaptations long before their feeding systems adjusted to a vegetation-based diet.

Now, for the first time, fossil jaw measurements have demonstrated this gap in evolutionary development.

Scientists from the University of Lincoln (UK), the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the University of Oxford (UK), examined the lower jaws of 89 fossils of early tetrapods (four-footed animals) and their fish-like predecessors.

The fossils ranged in age from about 300 to 400 million years old and the team were interested in how the mechanical properties of the jaws of these animals differed through time.

They used 10 biomechanical metrics to describe jaw differences. One of these, called mechanical advantage, measured how much force an animal can transfer to its bite.

Dr Marcello Ruta, from the School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, said: “Our study is the first of its kind to address changes in biomechanical properties of the lower jaw across the transition from fish to land vertebrates using a diverse range of extinct species. This work paves the way to in-depth analyses of the rates of evolutionary transformation in other anatomical structures during this major episode in vertebrate history. It also lays the foundations for integrative research that explores themes as diverse as the origin of the first terrestrial food webs, the impact of acquisition of new structures on the diversification of major animal groups, and patterns and processes of functional change.”

So it turns out that just moving into a new environment is not always enough to trigger functional adaptations.

The team discovered that the mechanical properties of tetrapod jaws did not show significant changes in patterns of terrestrial feeding until some 40 to 80 million years after the four-legged creatures initially came out of the water. Until then, tetrapod jaws were still very fish-like, even though their owners had weight-bearing limbs and the ability to walk on land.

In the paper, which has been published in an early online edition of the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology, the authors say the results may be explained by an earlier hypothesis: a shift from gilled to lung breathing in later four-footed animals was necessary before they could adapt their jaw structure to eating plants.

This finding suggests tetrapods may have shown a limited variety of feeding strategies in the early phases of their evolution on land.

Lead author Dr Phil Anderson, from the University of Massachusetts, said: “The basic result was that it took a while for these animals to adapt their jaws for a land-based diet. They stayed essentially fish-like for a long time.”

Dr Matt Friedman, lecturer in palaeobiology at the University of Oxford, said: “The thing that is really interesting is that the diversity of jaw function didn’t really take off until around the origin of amniotes – creatures that lay hard-shelled eggs on land rather than being tied to water for reproduction like fishes and amphibians. It is in amniotes and their closest relatives that we see the first evidence for dedicated herbivory – until that point tetrapods had basically been carnivores. So this means it took at least 50 million years of evolution after the origin of features like limbs, fingers and toes before tetrapods achieved dietary diversity that began to resemble what we see today.”

The statistical methods developed in this work could be used in future studies of more subtle biomechanical patterns in fossil animals that may not be initially clear.

The paper ‘Late to the Table: Diversification of Tetrapod Mandibular Biomechanics Lagged Behind the Evolution of Terrestriality’ Philip S.L. Anderson, Matt Friedman, Marcello Ruta can be viewed at http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/03/22/icb.ict006.abstract

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Marie Daniels - PR OfficerMarie Daniels - PR Officer
E-mail: mdaniels@lincoln.ac.uk
Telephone: 01522 886244

 

Identifying Afghanistan’s war dead

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Gillian Fowler, left, at the conferenceA forensic anthropologist has contributed to a special report which outlines steps Afghanistan can take to help identify the victims of the country’s 35-year conflict.

Gillian Fowler, from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln (UK), has been involved with the Afghan Forensic Science Organisation (AFSO) from its inception in 2010.

Set up as part of Physicians for Human Rights’ (PHR) project Securing Afghanistan’s Past, Gillian was asked to provide training in human osteology (the study of bones).

Gillian had previously spent six years working for the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala. While there she was involved in the exhumation of graves containing the innocent victims of the uprising against the military dictatorship in the 1980s.

She said: “The aims of the PHR/Afghan project were human identification and determining what is needed to build forensic capacity in order to investigate the atrocities that have taken place throughout the various conflicts.”

The report was presented during a conference Truth Seeking and the Role of Forensic Science held in Kabul, Afghanistan this April 2013.

Its overall objective is to provide Afghanistan’s government institutions, civil society organisations and the international donor community with critical information about the scientific and technical capabilities the country needs in order to document past abuses and undertake human identifications.

Since 2009, PHR has helped Afghans develop the local capacity to document and secure mass graves, while preventing the destruction of evidence; introduced forensic concepts of this work to government and civil society; and reported on steps needed to begin developing scientific and technical capabilities to identify the missing.

Stefan Schmitt directs PHR’s International Forensic Program and was the report’s lead author, previously working with Gillian in Guatemala.

He said: “Since 1978, Afghans have continuously lived through protracted cycles of violence that included massive human rights violations and war crimes with virtual impunity for many of the perpetrators. Healing such deep wounds is a complex and lengthy process.  What is needed from both the government of Afghanistan and the international community is a serious commitment to a vision for a better future — and that includes addressing the wrongs of the past.”

Key recommendations from the report, which can be read in full athttps://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/afghan-human-id-needs-assessment-April2013.pdf include:

•     The Afghan government must draft, enact, and implement legislation addressing the rights of the missing and disappeared, as well as their families, while criminalising enforced disappearances. Such legislation must include an acknowledgement that families have a right to know the truth about the fate of their missing relatives.
•     The Afghan government has yet to establish the scope or acknowledge the reality of the missing persons issue in the country in any meaningful way. The publication of the highly anticipated Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) Conflict Mapping Report would be a critical first step towards achieving this. This report yet has to be published. The AIHRC should convene a working group to define a comprehensive strategy for release of the Conflict Mapping Report, identifying key conditions that must be met to ensure its release.
•     The Afghan government needs to enforce existing legislation for the protection of mass grave sites, which must be preserved as crime scenes and protected from destruction until all relevant forensic evidence can be collected.
•     Afghan scientists and scholars have been isolated from modern education and the academic world throughout Afghanistan’s decades of conflict. International donors and the government of Afghanistan need to identify and prioritize funding for the increased and sustained development of Afghanistan’s higher education system, particularly for those who must play a role in its forensic future, such as judges, prosecutors, attorneys, scientists and medical professionals.

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Marie Daniels - PR OfficerMarie Daniels - PR Officer
E-mail: mdaniels@lincoln.ac.uk
Telephone: 01522 886244

 

 

Ultrasonic sounds of the rainforest

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A katydidResearch aimed at developing ultrasonic microphones with insect-like sensitivity is to continue in the rainforests of Colombia and Ecuador.

Following the discovery of a previously unidentified hearing organ in the South American bushcrickets’ ear, a scientist from the University of Lincoln (UK) will now study the role of this Auditory Vesicle in hearing sensitivity.

Dr Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, from the University’s School of Life Sciences, aims to understand how bushcrickets or katydids pick up on ultrasonic frequencies in their natural environment. The insects communicate using the highest-pitched calls in nature (130-150 kHz), which are not detected by humans. The male produces sound by rubbing its wings to attract distant females.

He said: “This animal can detect ultrasonic signals even at long distances. The problem is that at such high frequencies the sound travels in very short wavelengths which get diffracted, meaning the sound gets weaker as more obstacles are in the dispersive path. However, the bushcricket’s small ear is still able to detect this fading ultrasonic energy at long distances. I want to test how the bushcrickets manage to do that in a field environment. The fluid in the katydid ‘cochlea’, which I named the Auditory Vesicle, is the key element in the hearing process. We want to investigate why this is the case and the first step is testing its sensitivity in their natural environment and revealing the chemical composition.”

In mammals, hearing relies on three stages: an eardrum collecting sound, a middle ear impedance converter and a cochlear frequency analyser. Dr Montealegre-Zapata recently demonstrated that the bushcricket’s ear performs these steps in the hearing process, something previously unknown in insects.

The calls of the bushcricket are theoretically not suited for long-range attraction, as ultrasound suffers excess attenuation in rainforest environments. Therefore, the insect’s ears must have evolved to achieve sufficient sensitivity at such frequencies.

Dr Montealegre-Zapata said: “I want to find out how these insects mitigate the effects of sound degradation and how the female ear is structurally and functionally organised to detect distant calling males. The small ear will be used as a biological microphone to detect the sensitivity and hearing range of the female. In the future we want to produce microphones that work like this.”

The ears of these ultrasonic insects are extremely sensitive and have a clear size and sensitivity ratio advantage over equally responsive microphones.

In particular, condenser microphones (used in hearing research, plus the automotive and music industries) are expensive, mechanically fragile, susceptible to humidity and not very sensitive.

By constructing network analogues between mechanical (insect) and electrical (microphone) systems, this project can advance research into the design and construction of ultrasensitive microphones with unusual broad frequency responses.

Dr Montealegre-Zapata has received a grant from National Geographic for the field work, which will be carried out in collaboration with Dr Heiner Römer from the University of Graz, Austria.

A further grant from The Royal Society is being used to buy ultrasonic sensitive testing equipment for use in the research, which will be carried out at the Natural National Park Gorgona, Colombia.

Another aspect of the project to identify the auditory vesicle’s fluid composition is being undertaken by the University of Lincoln’s Dr.Jose Gonzalez-Rodriguez.

Dr Montealegre-Zapata’s research will also feature in a new biology book for students published by National Geographic Learning.

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Marie Daniels - PR OfficerMarie Daniels - PR Officer
E-mail: mdaniels@lincoln.ac.uk
Telephone: 01522 886244