PGR Celebration Seminar
Postgraduate Researcher Celebration Seminar
At the beginning of May, some of our excellent PGRs presented their ongoing PhD work to attendees in our first Celebration Seminar. Prof. Mandy Robbins introduced the seminar after attendees had grabbed some coffee and cake, warming up the audience with one of her famous jokes!
First up to present was Hanaan Al-Zubaidi, PGR in Clinical Health Sciences, who presented on the use of flow cytometry. Post-op complications from prostate and bladder cancer surgery, such as infections or bleeding remain a major concern, with lots of potentially avoidable deaths every year. Hanaan is investigating biomarkers in an attempt to single out some warning signs to avoid these post-op complications.
Hanaan will recruit 20 participants from each group (those with bladder or prostate cancer) and will take samples of blood and urine at several time points. They will be taking routine bloods, recording inflammatory markers, leukocyte function, and other clinical outcome measures to determine whether we can predict who is at increased risk post-op. This work could lead to improved patient care and avoidable post-op complications leading to serious illness. Hanaan’s research is currently awaiting local IRAS BCUHB ethical approval.
Next up, Louise Bosanquet, PGR in Social Work, presented with Tim Wynn from the focus group Outside In. Outside In stemmed from the disability movement that proclaims ‘nothing about us, without us’, indicating that research must be empowering and create a critical consciousness.
Their talk was on conceptualising the everyday practices of involvement in social work education. Involving service users in social work education is currently mandatory, but there is not a prescribed way to do this. Outside In, a service-user focus group consisting of experts by experience has been ongoing since 2006, and its invaluable members have been involved with the university in many ways from interviews, sitting on panels, to membership of Cyfiawnder: Social Inclusion Research Institute.
Louise and Tim shared a poem called ‘The Path taken by Outside In’, which was created during a summer workshop. They also shared an image of a tree representing the case study that is Outside In, which displayed a wood wide web root system that was absorbing various concepts for the tree to grow. Louise then spoke of their focus group research methods and how they would use that data to design interview questions for the latter stages of the work, as well as employ ethnography, and analysis of documents and artefacts.
Third to present was Kirsty Le-Cheminant, second year PGR in psychology, on ‘Investigating the value of intergenerational activities for nursery children and older adults’. Kirsty talked about their work with Little Scholars Nursery and Memory Makers Café - toddler groups held at care homes and community groups of older adults. We are faced with an increasingly ageing population, and those older adults do not always have the best quality of life due to health issues, loneliness, or loss; consequently, new approaches are needed to meet the demands of a growing population of older adults.
Age segregation in the UK is common, with stereotypes often existing between the young and old. As per Intergroup Contact Theory, contact with ‘out group’ can reduce prejudice between different groups. Kirsty aims to investigate the benefits and drawbacks for preschool children and older adults in care homes and communities of participants in intergenerational sessions. Kirsty is specifically looking at loneliness, sense of community, and wellbeing by surveying the older adults, and also interviews, observations, and qualitative questionnaires with parents.
Fourth to present was Sophia Mitchell, PGR in Criminology and Criminal Justice, who is looking into neurodiversity in the youth justice system. Their research focus attempts to account for trauma and neurodiversity in youth justice approaches. Sophia presented some statistics, showing that one third of young people in the criminal justice system are thought to be neurodivergent and that currently procedures and processes are not built to account for adults and young people with different ways of thinking.
Sophia’s research will take a qualitative constructivist-interpretivist approach, using reflexivity and thematic analysis to examine the data gathered from interviews with children and young people, and youth justice professionals. Sophia will employ a trauma-informed approach to the relationship-based practice in order to explore accessibility needs of the young people. The anticipated impact is improved awareness of accessibility consideration and enhanced understanding of working with trauma-experienced individuals who may ‘access’ the trauma informed environment.
Next up was Katherine Rowlands, another second year PGR in psychology. Katherine began their presentation with some audience engagement, asking us whether we ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ certain smells including petrol, grass, coffee, and vomit! This exercise demonstrated Katherine’s PhD topic on olfactory cognition. They gave a brief background on the world of smells, stating that there were four facets involved in smelling: external chemicals, inner physiology, inner mental representation, and outer world human behaviour. Olfaction is the neglected sense, but there has been an increase of academic papers on the topic since the COVID pandemic and the symptom of loss of taste and smell.
Katherine spoke about how difficult smell is to consciously name or become aware of it, even though it is all around us, despite, or maybe because of, the large overlap between the olfactory and cognitive systems. Katherine intends to explore this disconnect further by developing online reading tasks, using Gorilla software, that will examine sensory language.
Our sixth speaker was Emma Randles, PGR in Clinical Health Sciences, whose PhD topic brought us full circle back to biomarkers. Emma presented on the subject of biomarkers for detection of non-muscle invasive bladder cancer, showing the audience of different techniques for the resection of a bladder tumour (transurethral). Emma spoke of how the procedures for detecting, treating, and follow-up for bladder cancer can be extensive, and there are issues with the current methods, such as failure to detect flat legions in the bladder.
Emma aims to identify novel blood and urine-based biomarkers for the detection of recurring bladder cancer. Working with the Maelor Hospital in Wrexham, they first need to choose which biomarkers to focus on, and then they can collect surplus tissue, and follow-up blood and urine samples to investigate in the lab.
Finally, and taking us in a completely different direction was Eranda Abeysinghe, PGR in Business. Eranda is looking into the impact of organisations’ sustainable cost management strategies.
Eranda showed the audience of the importance of the topic on human-elephant conflict, with many human and elephant deaths due to a large population of elephants (around 6,000) in the drylands in Sri Lanka. As 70% of Sri Lanka’s population is Buddhist, which has a no-kill belief system, elephants are protected under Sri Lankan law.
Biodiversity plays a crucial role in sustaining the ecological balance of systems, and companies put money into various schemes to maintain this balance. Eranda is exploring how a sustainable cost management strategy can enhance animal biodiversity and human interests for the people, planet, and profit. They will use mixed methods, secondary data, interviews, and surveys for their research.
A huge thank you to all our wonderful presenters – it was great to hear about your research, and we look forward to finding out how you get on with your projects in the coming months.