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Sussex Research funds seven new projects

Sussex Research has made seven awards in the second round of the Research Development Fund.

The Research Development Fund aims to develop activities that will lead to the submission of substantive external research proposals.

The second round of the competition received 18 bids from faculty in 10 schools. There was a 39% success rate with the successful bids coming from the following schools: Education and Social Work, Engineering and Informatics, Global Studies and Life Sciences.

Professor Alan Lester, Director of Interdisciplinary Research, said: “The panel was very impressed with the quality of the proposals submitted to the second round. The lessons learned from the first round seem to have been taken on board by the vast majority of applicants and it proved exceptionally difficult to decide which of a number of fundable projects we could afford to support. The scheme will be run again in the autumn, with more funds than were available in this particular round.”

The successful proposals all provided a convincing case for the necessity of the pilot work to be undertaken before a competitive proposal could be made to a specific external funding body.

Research Development Fund awards were made to:

Dr Alexander Antonarakis
Predictions of current carbon stocks in a temperate forest

The study will evaluate the use of satellite lidar from ICESat, rather than airborne techniques, to provide accurate measurements of regional ecosystem structure and current carbon stocks in central New England.

Dr Jeremy Niven
Investigating the neural circuits underlying memory formation in foraging ants

This interdisciplinary project will investigate fundamental aspects of memory by pharmacologically interfering with ants’ neural pathways as they perform path integration (PI). The project will lead to novel insights into neural circuits underlying memory and allow the researchers to analyse memory systems associated with PI.

Dr George Parisis
Design and implementation of a simulation framework for experimenting with data transport mechanisms in simulated data centre network topologies

This project will build on existing, community-driven work on packet-level network simulations, in order to develop a platform for experimenting with network protocols in simulated data centre topologies.

Dr Frances Pearl
A target-prioritization database for cancer drug discovery

The near universal development of genomic instability that accompanies tumourigenesis has brought the pathways that mediate the DNA Damage Response (DDR) to the fore as targets for development of new approaches to the treatment of a wide range of cancers. This grant will enable the researchers to construct a database that integrates public domain and proprietorial Sussex cancer data. Using these data they will be able to identify novel DDR oncology targets and prioritise targets currently being studied within Sussex for lead compound development.

Dr Pedram Rowhani
Socio-ecological impacts of agricultural policies in the European Union

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the biggest budget expenditure of the European Union and influences regional land use and food production. The aim of this proposal is to perform an initial literature review and data analysis to identify regions in New Member States where agricultural practices changed due to the access to the CAP.

Professor Paul Statham
The politicization of ‘Immigration’ and ‘Europe’ in mass-mediated public debates: A a comparison of the UK and Sweden

The pilot project analyses contentious political debates over ‘immigration’ and ‘Europe’ carried by mass media from 2005-14, in the UK and Sweden.

Dr Julia Sutherland
Developing secondary students’ reading comprehension in Sussex and Brighton and Hove

This interdisciplinary project investigates the measurable impact of an innovative teacher-development programme on secondary students’ growth in reading comprehension, drawing on knowledge from Psychology and Education and local teacher networks.

A third call for proposals will be launched in autumn  2014. For more information on the scheme and details of how to apply, visit the Sussex Research website.