Research successes: April 2010
April 2010
General news
Dr. Sanjo Nitschke successfully passed his PhD viva with only minor corrections. He was supervised by Evan Kidd and Ludovica Serratrice. The title of his PhD is "An investigation into structural priming of comprehension in first and second language speakers".
Rachel Calam from Clinical and Health Psychology (CHP), has been to Australia and New Zealand on invited visits. After delivering a keynote address to the international Helping Families Change Conference at the University of Queensland, she was then a guest of the University of Auckland, where she, Matt Sanders, and the other speakers were honoured with a traditional Maori welcome to the campus before giving their presentations. The event marked the inauguration of a new parenting research unit. The event was attended by government policy advisors in addition to a large audience of academics and practitioners.
Fiona Ulph (also CHP) made two presentations at the international conference: Sickle Cell: The Next 100 Years. The titles were "Communication of carrier status following universal newborn screening for sickle cell disorders: parents' experiences" and "Familial influences in sickle cell screening".
Grants
Alison Wearden (CHP) was awarded an NIHR grant of £224,000 for her research project "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME) interventions within the Primary Care Setting: Developing resources for support and self-management in primary care."
A group including Rachel Calam (CHP) has recently been awarded a Wellcome Trust Broadcast Development Award (£9,500) which has developed from ideas generated by a team including a TV producer, mobile communications specialist and public participation expert who met at a Wellcome Crossover event last November. These small awards are designed to prime the development of projects which encourage public participation in science, and the money will be used to develop a pilot for a TV programme on current research into happiness and well-being.
Anja Wittkowski (also CHP) was awarded a small research grant (of about £7500) by the British Academy to enable face to face meetings between herself and Matt Sander's team in Australia to discuss research projects that involve the use of Baby Triple P in women with mental health difficulties.
In Clinical Neuroscience and Language Disorders (CNLD), Paul Conroy (as first supervisor) and Karen Sage (as second supervisor) secured a studentship for final year Speech and Language Therapy student Lindsey Hull to undertake a PhD on the topic of 'Applying therapies and technologies to the treatment of dysgraphia: combining neuropsychological techniques and compensatory devices to enhance use of the internet in people after brain injury'.
Papers accepted
In CHP, Warren Mansell had his paper "Intrusive Memories and Images in Bipolar Disorder Behaviour Research and Therapy" accepted for publication in Behaviour Research and Therapy. Warren also had a paper accepted into "Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy" ("Cognitive Biases in Hypomanic Personality: Preliminary Findings Indicating the Relevance of Self-Versus-Other Encoding and High-Versus-Low Levels of Activation"; Pyle, A., & Mansell, W.). Interestingly the first author on this paper is a former undergraduate student from SPS. Further success in CHP came when Fiona Ulph had her paper ("A qualitative study exploring genetic counsellors experiences of counselling children") accepted by the European Journal of Human Genetics.
Anja Wittkowski (also CHP) had a paper accepted in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry ("One year outcome after preconception consultation in women with bipolar disorder."). Anja also had a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology ("An examination of the psychometric properties and factor structure of the Postpartum Bonding Questionnaire in a clinical inpatient sample", British Journal of Clinical Psychology 49, 163-172).
April was also a busy month for Audiology and Deafness. Wendy McCracken had her paper accepted into the Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities ("Hearing in Athletes with Intellectual Disabilities: The Need for Improved Ear Care). Also Catherine Siciliano on having her paper, "Resistance to learning binaurally mismatched frequency-to-place maps: Implications for bilateral stimulation with cochlear implants.", published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Chris Plack had a paper published in Journal of Acoustical Society of America (combining information across frequency regions in fundamental frequency discrimination) and a special congratulations to PhD student Daphne Garcia (supervised by Chris Plack) who had her paper published in NeuroImage. (The effect of stimulus context on pitch representations in the human auditory cortex).
Finally, Laura Rowlands and Nicola Smethurst (CHP students) have had the following article published in Health Technology Assessment: "A randomised controlled multicentre trial of treatments for adolescent anorexia nervosa including assessment of cost-effectiveness and patient acceptability - the TOuCAN trial."