Research Interests

• Clinical trials
• Clinical trial design
• Early phase trials
• Non-inferiority
• Asthma epidemiology

Research Interests

• Design, assessment , analysis and interpretation of studies with Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) outcome measures. See 'Quality of life outcomes in clinical trials and health care evaluation: a practical guide to analysis and interpretation'.
• Analysing longitudinal HRQoL outcome data.
• Computer intensive methods – the bootstrap.
• Design, analysis and reporting of trials of complex interventions.
• Cluster RCTs and clustering by health professional in individually randomised trials.
• Study design and sample size determination.

Mathematical modelling of plasma processes, e.g., with application to the Sun's atmosphere.

My interests focus on student engagement within the education process and in different educational contexts and environments so that students are able to achieve their potential.  I also have an interest in social accountability and what it means to be socially accountable in health professions education. 

My main research interests lie in the practical application of statistics to geology and materials science. A long term concern has been the modelling of particle size, with investigations into its relationship with sediment transport processes and strength of composite materials. Other recent projects include the use of classification methods in pollen analysis, the design of resistant glazes and the production of computer-assisted-learning materials.

My general area of research is number theory, with an emphasis on congruences between Hecke eigenvalues of automorphic forms, and connections with instances of the Bloch-Kato conjecture on values at integer points of L-functions arising from arithmetic geometry.

Uncertainty quantification, Monte Carlo (especially Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods), applied statistical modelling, climate science.

My research interests are in Bayesian statistics, in particular uncertainty quantification for complex computer models, eliciting probability distributions from experts, and applications in Health Economics. On my personal website you can read these guidance notes for more information about PhD projects and suggested background reading.

Professor of Health Management

Jeremy's research falls broadly into three areas, with plenty of crossover between them – management of health care organisations, team working, and statistics.

Recent projects in health care include:

• a study of the effects of NHS staff engagement and experience on patient outcomes
• a longitudinal evaluation of Schwartz Center Rounds in the NHS
• the development and implementation of a tool to measure effectiveness of general practices.

Current work includes a study on the Retention of Mental Health Staff (RoMHS), an evaluation of specialist clinics for people suffering from multiple, medically unexplained symptoms (MSS3), and the Behaviour in Teams (BiT) study examining the benefit on giving teams feedback on their behaviour in meetings.

Dr Katzman's research is in the area of commutative algebra. Specifically, he is interested in the following. 

Characteristic p methods:

Certain theorems in algebra can be proved by showing that they hold in positive characteristic, and in characteristic p one has extra structure given by the Frobenius map x↦xp. There are several tools, notably tight closure, which exploit this extra structure to prove some remarkable theorems. 

Local cohomology modules:

This modules derive their importance partly from the fact that they detect interesting properties of modules over commutative rings (e.g., depth.) Unfortunately, these objects tend to be very big are rather mysterious. It is very difficult to describe them in any detail even in seemingly easy cases. Dr. Katzman has recently been producing both examples showing that these objects are more complicated than previously conjectured but also instances where they can be understood fairly well. 

Combinatorial aspects:

One of the simplest family of modules imaginable are monomial ideals in polynomial rings and, perhaps surprisingly, these objects have a very rich structure, in some sense richer than the structure of graphs. Dr Katzman has recently been studying certain monomial ideals associated with graphs a discovering some surprising connections between the algebraic and combinatorial properties of these objects.

Research Interests

Jeremy's research falls broadly into three areas, with plenty of crossover between them – management of health care organisations, team working, and statistics. Recent projects in health care include a study of the effects of NHS staff engagement and experience on patient outcomes; various studies of team working in health care, particularly in mental health services; an examination of the effects of organisational restructuring in the NHS; and a project looking at the diversity of hospital staff and their representativeness of the local community. In 2014 he begins an NIHR-funded study evaluating Schwartz Center Rounds^® in the NHS.

As well as teams in health care, he has a more general interest in team diversity, and in particular how it should be measured. As a statistician he has also undertaken a wide range of methodological research, particularly regarding interpretation of interaction effects, measurement of diversity, analysis of incomplete team data, and the effects of aggregation on relationships. He has published over 30 papers in refereed academic journals in the fields of psychology, management, health care and research methods, as well as numerous project reports and articles in practitioner publications. He is an editorial board member of five journals, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

Research Interests

• Evaluating initiatives
• Restorative justice
• Probation supervision
• Desistance from crime
• Training of criminal justice practitioners

Member of the Centre for Criminological Research.

Areas of Research Supervision

• Quantitate research methods and statistics
• Restorative justice
• Probation supervision
• Desistance from crime
• Training of criminal justice practitioners

My research interests are varied, interdisciplinary and lie within the field of materials for biomedical and dental applications. My research focuses on the design, fabrication and characterisation of novel glasses, ceramics and composites for dental and medical applications. Much of this research is in collaboration with Engineering Materials (UoS), Imperial College London, Chubu University, Japan and Sao Paulo University, Brazil. My research has also progressed to the production of custom prostheses using novel production methods and advanced manufacturing techniques such as additive manufacture, Hot-Isostatic-Pressing, Spark-Laser-Sintering, freeze-casting, laser machining and electro-spinning. In addition, due to my involvement in the MMedSci in Dental Implantology, I also supervise projects in the area of dental implantology.

My research is progressing more towards knowledge and technology transfer, hence my industrial collaborations are widening and increasing, presently these include Ceramisys Ltd (a SME manufacturing and distributing bone augmentation materials); Fluidinova (a SME manufacturer of nanoceramics); Primequal (a SME specialising in development of medical devices); neotherix (a regenerative medicine SME specialising in novel bioresorbable scaffolds); CERAM (materials testing, analysis and consultancy); JRI (a manufacturer of orthopaedic implants and surgical instrumentation); Nobel Biocare (a world leader in innovative restorative and aesthetic dental solutions); Dentsply (a global leading manufacturer and distributer of high quality dental product) and GlaxoSmithKline (one of the world's leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies).

Senior Lecturer (Statistician)

Research interests

Specific projects that Chris is currently working on include:

• The effects of perfectionism on well-being
• Cheating in sport; is it a team, individual or circumstantial act?
• From pitch to plinth; a study of statues of sportsmen and sportswomen (see http://www.sportingstatues.com)
• The psychology of nostalgia and the use of nostalgia branding
• The effect of the built environment and residential outdoor space upon well-being in older people

My research draws on experience in archaeology, palaeoenvironmental science and statistics, encouraging experts from a range of fields to share ideas and resources. Previous and current work includes:

• analysis of field survey data from Britain and Greece.
   
• the calibration and interpretation of groups of related radiocarbon determinations.
   
• the provenancing of archaeological ceramics with the aid of chemical compositional data.
   
• development of models for relative archaeological chronology building (seriation).
   
• analysis of the structure of prehistoric corbelled domes.
   
• the use of Bayesian radiocarbon calibration to aid in tephrochronology.
   
• models for interpreting spatio-temporal data such as those relating to the recolonisation of a landscape in response to past climate change or the arrival of domesticated cereals at the start of the Neolithic in Europe.
   
• the development of models and methods for estimating radiocarbon calibration curves.
   
• development of tailored statistical models to aid in palaeoenvironmental reconstruction on the basis of data preserved in ice cores and lake/ocean sediments.

Abigail joined the Sheffield Methods Institute as a Lecturer in Qualitative Methods in 2020. Previously she had worked at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Abigail completed a PhD at the University of York in 2015. Her thesis investigated female cultures of body modification across the life course, focusing on how women learn practices and the social norms which surround them. Abigails research has focued on organisational change (particularly within health and social care) and the impliations for workforce and inequalities as well as policy implementation. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, her research interests focus on organisation studies, inequalities and medical sociology/health services research and their intersection.

Abigail would welcome students with an interest in medical sociology, workforce and organisations adbn gender studies .

Dr Xingyi Song, an Academic Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK. He is a member of the Natural Language Processing group and GATE team (https://gate.ac.uk/)

Previously he worked as a machine translation specialist at Iconic Translation Machine (2015-2016) and Research Associate for several EU funded projects such as Kconnect, Knowmak and Risis2 (from 2016-2021)) at the University of Sheffield. 

He completed his MSc and PhD in Natural Language Processing group at the University of Sheffield.

His research interests are in:

• Natural Language Processing
• Computational Social Science
• Sentiment analysis
• Bio-medical text processing

Research interests

My research focuses on two areas: the social and ethical implications of genetic screening and the impact of novel technological application in medicine. These interests are reflected in two of my most recent projects. The first was a project funded by the The Wellcome Trust which focused on exploring the gendered nature of genetic screening in pregnancy. The second, a recently completed British Academy funded project on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) use in pregnancy. The findings from this project were recently presented at an interdisciplinary dissemination event funded by the Sociology of Health and Illness Foundation (December 2013). I am currently collaborating with the medical school and local NHS to develop this imaging work further, focusing in particular on the role of imaging in post-mortem. I am also continuing to develop research bids in the area of genetics, family history and health.

Students with an interest in the new genetics, and reproductive technology would be particularly welcome. I would also welcome supervising students with interests in the areas of social theory, race and ethnicity, gender studies.

Naomi Hawkins's research focuses on the interaction of law and biomedical science, particularly around intellectual property rights. She uses traditional legal research and empirical methods to investigate the impact of human gene patents on the development of translational outcomes of genetics and genomics research.

She is also interested in the ways in which data sharing practices intersect with intellectual property rights in science

Professor Hatton has interests in biomaterials, medical devices and tissue engineering for clinical applications in human skeletal tissues. The five major themes for his research are (1) the development of bioactive glasses and ceramics for mineralised tissue repair, (2) glass-ionomer bone cements, (3) In vitro evaluation of biocompatibility, and (4) Cartilage and bone tissue engineering on biomaterial scaffolds. He is also active more broadly in the promotion of academic-industrial collaboration and technology transfer in the orthopaedic, craniofacial and dental material sectors. See "Links" below for more details on this and the wider research of the Biomaterials Research Group.

• Identification and modelling for complex nonlinear systems
  
  • NARMAX methodology and applications.
  • Artificial neural networks (ANN), radial basis function networks (RBFN), wavelet neural networks and multiresolution wavelet models, computational statistics, machine learning, intelligent computation and data mining.
  • Regression analysis, parameter estimation and optimization, sparse representation.
  • Nonlinear and nonstationary (time-varying) signal processing, system identification and data modelling.
  • Spatio-temporal system identification and modelling.
• Bioscience signal processing and data modelling
  
  • Neurophysiology and neuro-imaging data modelling and analysis.
  • EEG, fMRI and ECG data processing, modelling and analysis.
  • Data based classification, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, with applications in clinical and medical diagnosis and prognosis.
• Forecasting and analysis of complex stochastic dynamical processes with applications in
  
  • Space weather systems.
  • Environmental systems.
  • Computational economics and finance.
• New concepts and methodologies developments for the identification and analysis of nonlinear complex systems.
• Applications and developments of signal processing, system identification and data modelling to control engineering, bioengineering, neuroscience, systems/synthetic biology, environments, space weather and other emerging areas.

Research interests with bullet points:

• Biophotonics
• Medical Imaging
• Optical Coherence Tomography
• Non-linear microscopy

I am interested in working memory and the development of memory and attention across the human lifespan, including both child development and cognitive ageing. Recently, I have been exploring the relationship between working and long-term memory and the development of object and feature memory. My research also examines lifespan differences in meta-cognition and how people approach cognitive tasks. I am very interested in open and reproducible science, Bayesian statistics, and research methodology

Research interests

I work on the physics, measurements, models, statistics, system analysis and sensor properties that all form part of measuring aspects of the land-atmosphere carbon cycle, with a particular emphasis on exploiting satellite measurements to improve carbon cycle models. A lot of my work is to do with forests, including measuring their biomass (I'm the lead scientist on the European Space Agency BIOMASS mission) and detecting and quantifying tropical deforestation.

Natural Polymers of bacterial origin and their use in medical and environmentally friendly applications.

Her group is currently focussed on the production of novel Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), a group of FDA-approved natural polymers and their characterisation. She has pioneered the production of PHAs from Gram positive bacteria which lack immunogenic properties and hence are excellent materials for medical applications. Her group is involved in the application of PHAs in the area of hard tissue engineering, soft tissue engineering, wound healing, drug delivery and medical device development. She has also initiated work with bacterial cellulose and γ-polyglutamic acid, as natural polymers for biomedical applications. PHAs are also environmentally friendly polymers that are biodegradable both in the soil and in the sea. She has recently initiated work related to this aspect of PHAs.

Research interests

The main concern of Dr Manson´s research has been, throughout, the development of robust structural health monitoring strategies for the purposes of damage identification. Over the years, this has taken on various approaches beginning with the examination of the response of nonlinear mechanical systems before moving into the fields of signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and multivariate statistics for damage identification. More recently, with the questions of damage prognosis and robustness of structural health monitoring systems, the research has led toward the investigation of the propagation of uncertainty through systems and structures.

Research interests

Roger's research interests are split into three areas: solving industrial wear problems; application and development of a novel ultrasonic technique for machine element contact analysis and design of engineering components and machines. The research themes are wide ranging, but the main focus is on:

Railway Engineering

• Wheel/rail contact tribology – including wear (wheel profile evolution), RCF, friction management (use of top of rail friction modifiers; grease lubrication and traction gels), isolation and links to effective train detection
• Rail infrastructure improvement – including laser cladding of rail to reduce wear/RCF; design and testing of insulated rail joints; overhead line wear testing
• Condition monitoring – including real-time measurement of the wheel/rail contact; force measurement and detection of loosening in bolted joints.

Human Interactions

• Fundamental characterization and modelling of skin friction including use of OCT to determine sub-surface skin strain
• Hand/object interactions – including kitchen equipment, sports equipment etc. and effects that wearing medical examination gloves has on dexterity, grip and tactile discrimination
• Human tissue interaction with medical devices including catheters
• Pedestrian slips and falls, particularly barefoot slips and characterisation of flooring performance
• Multi-scale modelling of skin to incorporate effects of moisture and temperature to optimise design of medical products that interface with skin.

Beth joined the Sheffield Methods Institute as a Lecturer in Quantitative Methods in September 2019. Before this, she was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Investigation, Nuffield College, Oxford. She completed her PhD in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester in 2015, exploring the role of income on mental health in 3-12 year-old British children and their parents. Her research focusses on mental health in adults and children, poverty, food poverty, and homelessness.

She is a strong believer in engaging with non-academic audiences, and to this end has spoken about food insecurity on TV and radio. Her research on UK food insecurity has received widespread press coverage, been cited in government debates and was also made into an impact film.

Beth's personal blog can be found here.

Research Interests

Kanchana’s research focuses on time-series Econometrics with applications in economics and finance, semi-parametric and non-parametric statistics, and partial identification and related matters in average treatment effects.

Her research interests are directed towards developing new techniques of estimation and inference in linear stationary and non-stationary fractionally integrated models. She investigates the impact of mis-specification in these time series models.

Further, her research focuses on developing a new theoretical and methodological framework for estimating the fractional differencing parameter. She is also working on estimation and inference on partial identification-related matters in conjunction with average treatment effects.

Kanchana is interested in supervising PhD students willing to work in time series Econometrics inline with her research interests.

Research interests

My research interest in Diabetes started whilst I was a medical student, and has continued ever since. My current research interests include complex interventions for patients with diabetes. I’m involved in interventions to examine the best way in which to deliver education to different patient groups, for example those with hypoglycaemia unawareness, or young people, and how best to integrate technology, e.g., the use of insulin pumps, physical activity monitors etc.

Broad area of interest:

Research methods I am able to supervise:

My research interests are the pathology and treatment of cardiovascular and pulmonary vascular diseases. My current work focuses on the pathology of pulmonary arterial hypertension and the development of novel therapeutic strategies. Recent pre-clinical studies have led to early phase clinical studies of pulmonary artery denervation and implantable pulmonary artery pressure monitors.

Our work is supported by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council UK and by industrial collaborators. We are greatful for the support of our funders and study participants.

Computer Vision for Healthcare

Dr. Chen Chen Chen is a Lecturer in Computer Vision at the University of Sheffield. Dr. Chen's research primarily revolves around the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and healthcare. Her work aims to develop and validate robust, data-efficient, and reliable machine learning algorithms that can enhance the scalability of AI-driven medical data analysis in practical applications. 

Dr Chen welcomes research students interested in the following areas:

• Robust machine learning

• Data-efficient learning: self-supervised learning, few-shot learning, semi-supervised learning

• Multi-task and multi-modal learning, e,g., large language model guided representation learning

• Adaptive machine learning, including unsupervised domain adaptation at training/test time

• Algorithms with fairness, privacy, robustness, and interpretability in mind, including uncertainty-aware training, test time model calibration;

as  well as in their clinical applications including:

• Medical image analysis (image segmentation, registration, motion analysis, and shape remodelling)

• Quality control (e.g. topology preserving, uncertainty measurement, explainable AI for medicine)

• Follow-up diagnosis, prognosis, survival/risk prediction, treatment planning

Research interests

I have two main areas of research interest. The first is the ethical, legal and social issues associated with emerging medical technologies and the second focuses on the commercialisation of biotechnology and expectation dynamics in medical innovation. My research has previously examined the development of gene therapy, genomics, pharmacogenetics, stem cells and regenerative medicine. I have advised the European Parliament, the Conseil d'Analyse Economique (part of the French Prime Minister's Office), the UK Department of Trade and Industry and the Wellcome Trust. I am a member of the Editorial advisory Boards of Sociology of Health and Illness and New Genetics and Society.

As regards my research interests in synthetic biology, I am currently a member of a BBSRC working group on synthetic biology, a co-investigator in a recently established multidisciplinary chell network and have co-authored a major review of the social and ethical issues raised by synthetic biology which was published in June 2008.

As regards my research interests in neuroscience, I am leader of a strand of research on neurosociety as part of the £1.6m Leverhulme Trust Programme Grant 'Making Science Public'.

Dr. Cao’s main research interests include flexible endoscopic surgical robots, soft robots, and compliant robotic systems. Specifically, he develops novel design, actuation, sensing, modeling, control, and navigation principles of these systems that advance minimally invasive procedures, e.g., gastrointestinal flexible endoscopy, bronchoscopy, and catheterization. Collaborating with clinicians and industrial collaborators, he strives to develop flexible/soft robotics technologies that enable medical diagnosis and treatment with minimal invasiveness. These technologies are rigorously developed and tested, in both in-vivo animal trials and human trials, with the ultimate goal of making a real difference for the healthcare of patients.

I originally came to Sheffield in 2003 for medical school. I stayed in South Yorkshire for my junior doctor jobs and then started specialist training in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. I went to Oxford University in 2015 to work on typhoid human challenge models and then got my PhD, based in Malawi studying typhoid epidemiology and vaccination in Africa and Asia. I have worked across Africa and Asia including the West Africa Ebola Virus Outbreak in 2014.

I am currently an academic clinical lecturer in the department of infection and immunity interested in measuring the vaccine preventable burden of infectious diseases in at-risk populations and using vaccines to prevent antimicrobial resistance.

 Research interests

I welcome research students who are interested in applied linguistics in its broadest sense. Qualitative and multiple/mixed methods approaches (incl. participatory and inclusive designs), interdisciplinary research as well as collaborations with institutions and organizations outside the University are all welcome. Interesting topics include but are not restricted to the following

• Individual multilingualism (from a socio-cultural perspective)
• Intercultural communication
• Interpersonal communication
• English as a Lingua Franca
• Translation and localization
• Multimodal communication (including audiovisual translation)
• Intercultural/contrastive pragmatics
• Register analysis (comparative/diachronic)
• Communication in organizations and institutions (including web-based communication)
• Business communication
• Interaction with technology (including user studies)
• Technology and science communication
• Risk, health and safety communication
• Medical communication
• Second language use
• Second language identities

Research interests

Research in the laboratory focuses on the mechanisms of nerve cell death in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS; also known as motor neuron disease (MND) or Lou Gehrig disease), hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). We are especially interested in the involvement of axonal transport, mitochondria and ER.

Current research themes include:

• The mechanisms causing defective axonal transport of mitochondria in ALS, PD and HSP.
• The cellular roles of C9ORF72 protein and their role in ALS and FTD
• The biology of close contacts between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and mitochondria and their involvement in health and disease

Work in the lab is funded by grants from the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Thierry Latran Foundation, the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA), the Spastic Paraplegia Foundation, and the Moody Endowment Fund.

Available to supervise history topics

James' research examines the relationship of legal structures (laws, practices, institutions) to the daily practices of economic life, with a special focus on early modern Italy. He has previously worked on petty crime and small claims litigation in Venice, and on retailing in the medical sector in Florence. His current project 'Debt in Venice' is a microhistory of economic practice in the seventeenth century. Adopting anthropological and sociological approaches to the study of the economy, this project uses case studies from legal archives to explore how people experienced the credit market at the everyday level.

He welcomes applications from postgraduate students with an interest in projects that bring together social, economic and legal perspectives, and particularly projects focusing on the history of early modern Italy.

My research interests centre of the use of digital representations of landscape, at the planning scale. This frequently involves the use of Geographic Information Science (GIS) and statistics to address the many challenges facing our landscapes. I have a particular interest in exploring inequalities in greenspace access, mapping land cover and in geographic definitions of the Rural-Urban divide.

The use of mobile technology forms an important strand of my research. I am interested in mapping using GPS but also in automated extraction from social media and other online data (such as Flickr and Twitter) in order to inform about the use and values of urban greenspace.

I am currently involved in the Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (IWUN) project, led by Dr Anna Jorgensen within the Department and funded by NERC through the Valuing Nature network. I am working on Work Package 1 which seeks to investigate the statistical relationships between health inequality, deprivation and greenspace in Sheffield using a range of secondary data (see funded research below).

I am a co-author on the Rural-Urban Classification which is the official statistic used to distinguish rural and urban areas in England and Wales. The work identified and characterised physical settlements in order to generate a typology of settlement form (such as ‘village,’ ‘town’ or ‘urban fringe’).

I am interested in vague and fuzzy geographic objects. Despite the widespread acknowledgment that people will frequently have varying opinions relating to spatial boundaries and categorization, most digital representations treat such continuous spatial objects as discrete objects. My doctoral studies were concerned with formulating vague definitions of place through the extraction of differing opinions held on the internet. As such, it generated vague and probabilistic data for both neighbourhood boundaries and settlement classifications. I am interested in applying these concepts within landscape planning (for example using vague boundaries within Landscape Character Assessment).

Research Interests:

My research group focuses on biomedical robotics, specifically bionics and capsule robots to advance healthcare technology for long-term therapies and non-invasive surgical interventions.
We work on three main research themes: (1) soft-matter devices, in which we develop surgical and medical devices that are soft and functional such that they comply with the mechanics of soft tissue reducing inflammatory responses. Examples: soft sensors, soft pneumatic actuators, soft implants; (2) tissue-device interaction, in which we investigate advanced and efficient therapies based on in situ sensing. Examples: tissue patching, deployable miniature surgical devices, remotely controlled capsules; (3) resilient devices, in which we investigate methods and mechanisms to develop fault-tolerant devices that can continue their operation even in the event of a fault. Examples: mechanisms and control algorithms that avoid faults or detect and isolate the faults.
Relevant background to carry out this research: mechatronics, bioengineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, material engineering or chemical engineering.

Keywords: Automatic Control and Systems Engineering,

Research interests

Casting and related processes such as Rheocasting & Thixoforming.

Semi-solid processing of alloys and composites (Thixoforming). 

Thixoforming produces complex near-net-shaped components of high integrity, with mechanical properties better than conventionally cast components. As a relatively ‘new process’, before proving its value as a commercial success, thixoforming has had to exploit alloys that were already available. However, the true potential of this process will only be utilized through an expanding portfolio of alloys that fulfill the needs of industries such as aerospace, and bio-medical which demand innovative new alloys with near net shape, high strength and integrity products that can perform at such demanding environments.  Currently, research is undertaken on the semi-solid processing of high melting point alloys such as steels, iron-alloys, copper-alloys, super-alloys and other exotic materials in order to further exploit the potential benefits of this under-utilised metal forming technique. Although thixoforming of high melting point alloys offers exciting possibilities and tremendous potential, and has already been part of research work of over thirty years, it is still at present in the research stage of development.

Currently involved in two collaborative pieces of research in semi-solid processing of high melting point alloys; with Poland (Copper alloys) & Spain (Steels).

Non-destructive testing.

Investigating the development of a calibration standard for Dye Penetrants.

Research interests

My principal area of research is focused on the Gothic of the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. My first monograph, Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century(Macmillan 2000) explored how a Gothic tradition during this period critically reconstructed an Idealist tradition from Burke to Freud. This demonstrated the intellectually radical critical potential of the Gothic. My second research monograph, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the fin-de-siècle (MUP 2004) centred on the representation of disease and degeneration from the 1880s to the end of the century. The book consists of a series of related case histories, including chapters on Joseph Merrick (aka ‘The Elephant Man’), the ‘Jack the Ripper’ Whitechapel Murders, and medical textbooks on syphilis. The book examines how medicine at the time became increasingly implicated within a language of degeneracy that it was ostensibly meant to diagnostically police. My third research monograph The ghost story 1840-1920: a cultural history (MUP 2010), which was nominated for the inaugural Allan Lloyd Smith prize for the best book of Gothic scholarship published between 2010-2011, examined the various economic, cultural and political contexts of the ghost story.

I welcome PhD applications on any area of Gothic studies, and the literature of the long nineteenth century.

Research interests

I am Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the University of Sheffield and Consultant in Obstetrics and Maternal and Fetal Medicine at the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. I am Training Programme Supervisor for the Maternal and Fetal Medicine subspecialty in Sheffield. I run clinical services addressing high risk pregnancies, prenatal diagnosis and therapy and prematurity prevention.

I am Principal Investigator on several Project Grants funded by the UK’s Department of Health, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Medical Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), developing technologies for preterm birth risk assessment and interventions to mitigate preterm birth and other pregnancy complications.

I am Director of the NIHR Global Health Research Group on Preterm Birth Prevention and Management (PRIME) - an interdisciplinary research alliance working across UK, Africa (currently South Africa - Cape Town, Pretoria, Johannesburg; Nigeria – Kano, Benin and Ilishan), and South East Asia (currently Bangladesh and Karnataka India).

My translational research projects have attracted over £8million of grant income in the last 8 years and mainly focus on the physiology of human birth, reproductive immunology and reducing health inequalities.

I have supervised 18 PhD/MD students, and 10 Postdocs in the last 10 years amongst other. Areas in which I am able to supervise PhD/MD studentships and include:

·      Molecular biology of human parturition
·      Reproductive immunology of high-risk pregnancies and recurrent pregnancy loss
·      Global maternal and Newborn health
·      Health inequalities in maternal newborn health
·      Premature birth, still birth, pre-eclampsia, placental disorders.
·      Clinical and laboratory Maternal and Fetal Medicine

Research Interests

My main research interest is understanding how cancer spreads to the skeleton, in order to identify new therapeutic approaches that will prevent this from happening. Around 80% of patients with advanced breast and prostate cancer will experience that their cancer spreads to the skeleton, resulting in pain, weakening of the bone and sometimes fractures. At this stage the cancer is incurable, with patients living an average of 2 years. In order to improve patient outcome we need to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underpin cancer progression in bone, which is the focus of my research.

The research in my team is focussed on tumour cell dissemination in bone, and how this is influenced by the microenvironment in breast and prostate cancer. We use cutting edge technology to study the early stages of bone metastasis and how single cancer cells may remain dormant or start to proliferate when encountering different environments. We work to elucidate the molecular mechanisms involved in tumour cell-bone cell interactions, and how these can be targeted by anti-cancer therapies, including CDK4/6 inhibitors. We also investigate the role of the microenvironment in driving progression of bone metastases, the effects of female hormones, and how therapeutic agents affect the bone and tumour vasculature.

I have several collaborative projects both with other researchers in the medical school, nationally and internationally. I work closely with my clinical colleagues on translational research projects, transferring the results from our laboratory projects into clinical feasibility studies.

Students will be part of a enthusiastic team of post docs, technicians and clinical fellows that all work on related projects, have the opportunity to use a range of techniques and to present their work at workshops and conferences.

I work at the intersection of medical sociology and science and technology studies. My doctoral research looked at lay and professional constructions of familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH), a treatable hereditary condition associated with heart disease. My analysis focussed on the themes of geneticisation, genetic responsibility and biosociality, three prominent concepts in discussions of the social implications of genetic knowledge. Subsequent research projects looked at more mundane health technologies for cholesterol management, including cholesterol-lowering foods containing plant sterols and prescription and over-the-counter statins. Current research is expanding this work on consumer health technologies, looking at self-monitoring technologies such as blood pressure monitors and weighing scales/BMI monitors. All of these studies consider professional expectations as well as people’s accounts of why and how they adopt and use, or don't use, particular products or technologies. They consider the way responsibilities for health are distributed, the practices involved and the implications for forms of expertise in relation to health care. The work critically engages with notions of 'self-care' and 'health behaviours', proposing alternative lenses such as care infrastructures and practice theory approaches. I have an ongoing interest in developments in the biomedical sciences. Recent work has looked at the routine practices of racialised prescribing.

 Research interests:

• everyday health practices
• mundane health technologies
• self-monitoring, self-tracking, self-care
• social implications of biomedical developments eg genomics, epigenetics
• social categories in the clinic
• qualitative research methods

Research interests

Joab Winkler’s main research interests are image processing, and  algebraic and numerical properties of curves and surfaces in computer-aided design systems.

• IMAGE PROCESSING: The removal of blur and other degradations from an image arises in many applications and it may be considered a preprocessing operation before the image is interrogated for, for example, medical diagnosis. The most challenging problem arises when prior information on the source of the degradations and the exact image is not known, in which case the problem is called blind image deconvolution. My research is concerned with the application of polynomial computations, implemented using structure-preserving matrix methods, for the solution of this problem. The next stage of this work on image improvement is its extension from static images to video images for the observation of dynamic events, for example, the flow of blood.

• GEOMETRIC MODELLING: Curves and surfaces in computer aided design systems are represented by polynomials. Computational problems arise because the coefficients of these polynomials are corrupted by noise due to manufacturing tolerances and numerical approximations, and robust computations on polynomials are therefore required. Recent work on these robust computations includes the computation of a structured low rank approximation of the Sylvester resultant matrix, and the devlopment of a polynomial root solver for the determination of multiple roots of the theoretically exact form of a polynomial, when the coefficients of the given polynomial are corrupted by added noise.

• FEATURE SELECTION: Many problems in science require the identification of the most important features that characterise a system, such that the expected response of the system to new data can be accurately predicted. Problems arise because the given data that is available to identify these important features is usually insufficient to define the system uniquely, which implies that the equation to be solved has an infinite number of solutions, This raises the question as to the solution that is selected from this infinite set of solutions, and the criterion used for this selection. My research is concerned with the development of mathematical theory and methods for the selection of the best solution, defined using a specified criterion. The features that characterise a system may be a combination of numerical data, binary data and categorical data, and a mathematical model that describes a system must include these three classes of data. This problem has many applications, including bioinformatics, signal analysis, atmospheric physics, and in general, problems in which the response (output) is a function of many variables (inputs), only some of which are important and must therefore be identified.