Open House for Research | January 2025

At Open House this January, we invited Paula Wood, Postdoc in Civic Mission, to Chair the session and Paula did an excellent job even with many technical hitches! Moving forwards, we’ll be having a rotating Chair to give Early Career Researchers the opportunity to develop Chairing skills.  

Up first on Teams was Emma Randles, second year PhD researcher and Sessional Lecturer in Applied Science, who delivered a brilliant six minute talk on a very complicated topic. Emma is exploring the efficacy of finding novel urine and blood sample biomarkers for detecting bladder cancer. Emma explained a few key features of bladder cancer, with there being two types: Muscle Invasive (MI), and Non-Muscle Invasive (NMI). The former is usually more difficult to treat as the cancer has penetrated the bladder wall, whilst the NMI cancer is contained to the bladder wall. Unfortunately, 10-20% of those with NMI cancer can eventually develop MI cancer if untreated.  

Emma wishes to investigate whether detecting biomarkers can successfully help with cancer diagnoses/recurrences, ultimately reducing the burden on the patient who currently experiences numerous cystoscopies (an invasive procedure where a camera is inserted into the urethra for practitioners to look for bladder cancer tumours). Sometimes, surgeons may not see flat bladder cancer tumours on the cystoscope, and thus biomarker detection can potentially spot the signs of cancer.  

A great talk, Emma, thank you for that insightful look into your PhD research.  

Second up was Dr Karen Heald, Reader in Interdisciplinary Arts Practice, discussing the recently-established Arts in Health Research Group. Stemming from a successful Research Office Coffee Morning in the Art School, Regent Street, Karen set up the Arts in Health Research Group. It’s a slowly-growing space where all are welcome to discuss ideas around how various artistic or musical practices can help with health and wellbeing, alongside plan for collaborative research projects. 

The Research Group has had several meetings so far, and it encourages interdisciplinary researchers to join for knowledge exchange and networking. The Group consists of art, product design, health and wellbeing, education, and criminology lecturers; visiting professors, Postdoc researchers, and our professional services staff from the Research Office. The next meeting is on 18th Feb, 10am – contact karen.heald@wrexham.ac.uk if you’re interested in joining! 

Lastly, was a dynamic Education duo, Lisa Formby, Research Lead, and Tomos ap Sion, Research Assistant. Lisa and Tomos told us about the EREiS project (Embedding Research and Enquiry into Schools), which they presented at last year’s BERA (British Education Research Association) conference, now in its fourth and final year. EREiS is a Welsh Government funded collaborative project with several Welsh Universities, schools, and regional consortia.  

Lisa and Tomos explain the different phases of the project, and in phase one, the team identified five main themes related to the use of research and enquiry in schools; time and space, terms and expectations, networks, leadership and capacity, professional learning and presentation of evidence and theory. In phase two, the team focused on discussions with school leaders to explore these five themes found, but within the context of the Quality Use of Research Evidence (QURE) framework. In the final phase, the team explored system actions that can support educators, schools and leadership. 

Thank you very much to all four speakers, and we look forward to seeing everyone next time at Open House for Research, April 9th, B103/Teams.