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Grant news, December 2007

Dr Kate Heppell has been awarded a NERC standard grant for a project entitled ‘Implications of groundwater-surface water connectivity for nitrogen transformations in the hyporheic zone’. The project involves research collaboration with the Environment Centre at Lancaster University and with the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at QM. The total award is for ca. £650,000 with ca. £270,000 coming to QM, in part to fund a PDRA.

Professor Andy Baird has been awarded a NERC grant (also along with Environmental Science at Lancaster University). The project is entitled Efflux of methane (CH4) to the atmosphere from northern peatlands via ebullition: the role of plants and peat structure and the total value is c. £359 k with c. £185 k coming to Geography at QM to fund a PDRA and some equipment.

Dr Sven Lukas has been awarded a Marie Curie Re-Integration Grant from the European Commission (€ 37500) for a project ADVANCE-SIS (Absolute dating of the variations of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet and correlation of events since the Eemian in north-east Germany). The project involves close collaborations with colleagues from Greifswald (Germany), Bern (Switzerland) and QM (Professor Jaap van der Meer and DrSimon Carr).

A project involving Dr Steve Cummins is to establish a new public health research centre, led by Professor Laurence Moore and based at the Universities of Cardiff, Swansea & Bristol.

The centre, DECIPHer (Design & Evaluation of Complex Public Health Interventions), is funded by the UK Clinical Research Collaboration (comprised of MRC, ESRC, Govmenment Offices, Department of Health, Wellcome Trust & Cancer Research UK).
Steve’s involvement is as a one of only two external collaborators. He will be working mainly in the Environmental Determinants of Health Programme, enabling access to expertise, joint PhD studentships, project development, training and pump-prime funding for the development and submission of large joint research grants. DECIPHer is to receive around £5 million over five years.

In 2007 alone the Department generated around £2 million in external grant income. A superb achievement and real testament to the research strengths of the Department.

September 2007

  • Dr Simon Carr, Dr Dave Horne and Stephanie Mills have been awarded c£12K by the Royal Society for an International Joint Project with Prof Stefan Grab at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa for a project aiming to “reconstruct Late Quaternary climate ‘snapshots’ from the high Drakensberg Escarpment at the LGM to test numerical models of long-term climate variation in Southern Africa”.
  • Dr Bronwyn Parry has been awarded a research grant from the Wellcome Trust for a Brain Bank photography project, titled Mind Over Matter: Exploring the Role of Brain Donation in Biomedical Research from November 2007 to 2010.
    This innovative project involves collaboration with a photographer and will result in an exhibition as well as publications.

July 2007

  • Dr Lisa Belyea has been awarded a NERC Urgency grant on The effects of fire on peatland carbon stocks and dynamics (£129,755.42 over one year), to start as soon as possible. The project will examine the effects of a recent fire in southwest Scotland on combustion and thermal alteration of peat, as well as longer-term effects on peatland physical/chemical properties, and plant and microbial communities. The project involves Andy Baird (CoI), Laura Shotbolt and Rebekka Artz (a microbial ecologist at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen), and will fund a full-time PGRA for one year.
  • Dr Steven Cummins has been awarded a three year NIHR Fellowship for a programme of work on the social and physical environment, diet and physical activity. This is to consolidate previous research and embark on new projects. The award will cover his salary and research costs with c£255,000 coming to the department subject to final contracting between the NHS and Queen Mary.

May 2007

  • Professor Alison Blunt has, together with Wendy Davis (Women's Design Service) and has been awarded funding from Urban Buzz (£127,420) for a project on Gender and the Built Environment. The research will identify and collate information about existing research on gender issues and the built environment, which will then be widely disseminated to academics, practitioners and policy makers via an online database, a booklet, seminars and training. The research is particularly timely in the context of new Gender Equality legislation. Its focus and collaborative nature are closely tied to the aims and work of The City Centre and the London Women and Planning Forum. Funding (FEC) will come to QM to employ a researcher for 6 months (who will work closely with a researcher employed at WDS) and to fund Professor Blunt at 10% for 12 months.

February 2007

  • Dr David Pinder has been awarded a grant under the AHRC research leave scheme for £25,774 for his work on Urban interventions: art, performance and the politics of urban space.

January 2007

  • Professor Andy Baird who as part of a larger team has been succesful with NERC on a project entitled The role of pipes in carbon export from peatlands. Leeds University is the lead organisation, with c. £48 000 coming through Queen Mary's books.
    The other organisation involved is NERC's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
  • Dr Lisa Belyea has been awarded £ 283,203.42 by NERC for a project entitled Geochemical control of organic matter turnover in peatlands: Long-term security or short-term vulnerability of a major carbon store.
  • Dr Alastair Owens who has been awarded £61,036 under the AHRC speculative research grant scheme for a nine month project entitled Living in Victorian London: A Material History of Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century Metroplis.

    Alastair will be working with the Museum of London on this research using their vast archaeological archive of nineteenth-century finds, pioneering an 'ethnography of place' approach (developed by historians and archaeologists in Australia), which combines the study of material artefacts with detailed documentary research, to illuminate everyday domestic life. The project will explore three socially contrasting localities in Victorian London for which there are significant archaeological assemblages: a poor alley in Limehouse, a wealthy court in Westminster, and the premises of a middle-class brewing family in suburban Sydenham!

    The Museum of London will provide consultancy expertise, and the geography department will be employing a PDRA for six months who will be based in the City Centre.

December 2006

Many congratulations to Professor Alison Blunt, for her successful application to The Leverhulme Trust for £143,608 to study Diaspora cities: imagining Calcutta in London, Toronto and Jerusalem. This project will employ Shompa Lahiri and Noah Rubin as part-time researchers, and will also fund two final years of Jayani Bonnerjee's PhD studentship.

The research proposes the idea of 'diaspora cities' (i) to analyse the importance of the city rather than the nation and/or 'homeland' for many people living in diaspora and (ii) to understand the importance of migration and diaspora within cities of origin as well as resettlement. The research will study the Anglo-Indian, Brahmo, Chinese and Jewish communities in Calcutta, their migration to London, Toronto and Jerusalem since 1947, and the effects of migration for those who have remained in Calcutta.

The research will be based in the City Centre, and will develop international collaborative work with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, the City Lives programme at Sarai, New Delhi, and the Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) in Toronto. As part of the research, we will be organizing international conferences on 'Diaspora Cities' at the City Centre and at CSSSC in Calcutta in 2008/9

October 2006

Many congratulations to Simon Lewis, who has been awarded £15,000 by Leverhulme/Natural History Museum for replacement teaching costs as part of AHOB 2, which is on the early human occupation of the British Isles.

July 2006

  • Dr Murray Gray has won a contract to undertake a report for English Nature on Conserving geodiversity in the wider landscape - making it happen worth c. £8k.
  • Dr Laura Shotbolt has been awarded £2914 from the Central Research Fund for field and laboratory work.
  • Three PhD students have also received grants from the CRF:
    Juan Cock has received £800 for fieldwork expenses for his project on Place, Transnational Practices and Identity among Colombian Migrants in London
    Cristen Davalos (who is 0.6 with Centre for Migration Studies, Department of Politics) has received £800 for fieldwork expenses for her project on Transnational Family Strategies among Ecuadorian domestic workers in Madrid, Spain
    Jayani Bonnerjee has been awarded £930 towards fieldwork expenses for her project Placing Neighbourhood and the City in Diasporic Space- Anglo-Indian and Chinese communities in Calcutta, London and Toronto.

June 2006

  • Dr Steve Cummins has gained funding for two projects:
    First, he has been awarded £14,900 from the ESRC for an international research seminar series Obesity: exploring the role of the social and physical environment. The series is in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of Child Health, UCL and Australian National University/ WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health.
    Second Dr Mai Stafford (UCL) and Steve have been contracted to undertake a project comparing health inequalities on UK and Belgium. This EU-funded project will focus on comparing contextual effects on health using the longitudial studies of both countries. They have been awarded 65,000 euros to employ a researcher.
  • Dr Ray Hall and Professor Philip Ogden have been awarded 4,250 euros as part of a larger project entitled Socio-spatial consequences of demographic change for East Central European Cities funded by the VolkswagenStiftung initiative "Unity amidst Variety? Intellectual foundations and requirements for an enlarged Europe". The project runs from 1 May 2006 to 30 April 2009 and Ray and Philip's role will be providing the western European, and more specifically, British and French comparisons.
  • Dr Simon Reid-Henry has been awarded £13,000 to run an interdisciplinary ESRC seminar series entitled Vital Politics/Valuing Life, co-organised by Gerry Kearns at Cambridge.

May 2006

  • Postgraduate Holly McLaren has been awarded £25,000 by the Arts Council for the public realisation phase of 'Bordering Art'. The project will lead to the creation of three new public artworks which will be exhibited/take place in October of this year.
  • Dr Kate Spencer has been awarded a 3 month Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship for £8,120 to visit the National Water Research Institute, McMaster University and Ryerson University in Toronto.
  • Dr Cathy McIlwaine has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for £24,995 to carry out a project on Coping practices among Latin American migrants in London.
  • Dr Steve Cummins has been awarded, together with colleagues (Stephen Matthews,Sybille Kranz) $21,977 by the Social Sciences Research Institute at Penn State University. This funding will allow pilot field work to be undertaken which will lay the groundwork for the preparation of a 5-year multi-site, multi-method study of food security in the USA. The pilot will run for 1 year from Summer 2006 and the data collected will also augment our ongoing NIEHS funded study in Philadelphia. This is a collaborative grant with several departments at Penn State including Nutrition, Anthropology and Sociology.
  • Professor Adrian Smith has been awarded a new collaborative research grant from the US National Science Foundation for $239,810 (£145,000). The project is titled The Geographical Consequences of the End of Quota Constrained Trade in the Global Apparel Industry and involves collaboration with John Pickles (Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Gary Gereffi (Sociology, Duke University) and Meenu Tewari (City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).
  • Dr Isabel Dyck has received £2,118 from The British Academy for a pilot study, Household diversity, food and the construction of 'healthy space' in East London.
  • Dr Catherine Nash has been awarded £2,460 from the British Academy for a project entitled Recreational genetics: an autoethnography.
  • Dr Murray Gray has received three awards: £670 conference grant from the Royal Society for the Geological Society of America conference in Salt Lake City, £700 from the British Geological Survey for outreach work on the Blakeney Esker, Norfolk, and €800 as Socrates funding to teach on the new Masters in Geoheritage Conservation in the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Minho, Portugal.
  • Dr Kate Spencer has received £750 from the Foundation for Canadian Studies' University Partnership Program to develop a research partnership between QMUL and McMaster University and the National Water Research Institute.
  • A top ranking department!
    Queen Mary has been ranked 11th (out of 85) nationally for Geography and Environmental Sciences in the latest Guardian subject league tables. Click here for further details
    Click here to view the tables, which were compiled using a range of assessments of teaching quality.