Research Supervisor Details

This page provides additional information about our research supervisors. You can either browser supervisors by department or search for them by keyword. Most supervisors also have a personal webpage where you can find out more about them.

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Mr Abdullah Pandor
a.pandor@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

My research interests are:

  • Systematic review and meta-analysis of evidence for clinical effectiveness
  • Application and development of methods for the systematic review and synthesis of diagnostic evaluations in the field of health services research
  • Network meta-analysis (indirect and mixed treatment comparisons)
Dr Katie Sworn
K.Sworn@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

My research interests are systematic review methodology, including Complex Intervention development. I am also interested in dementia research.

Dr Katy Cooper
k.l.cooper@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My research interests include:

• Systematic reviews of clinical effectiveness for healthcare interventions
• Development of methods for systematic reviewing and evidence synthesis, including rapid review methods
• Systematic reviews of complex interventions 
• Patient safety and quality of care
• Complementary and alternative medicine research

Dr Munira Essat
m.essat@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

  • Systematic review of evidence for clinical effectiveness in healthcare
  • Health policy and decision making
  • Systematic review methodology
Dr Emma Hock
Emma.Hock@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

I am interested in supervising research into health behaviour change. I am particularly interested in supervising research on physical activity. I am able to supervise students in qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research, and many different types of evidence synthesis.

Dr Tanefa Apekey
t.apekey@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad area of research interest:

  • Primary and secondary prevention of nutrition-related diseases.
  • Interventions to support healthy eating and lifestyle in underserved groups.
  • Reviews
  • Food analysis and nutrient composition
  • Public health, including low/middle income countries
  • Sustainable diets

 

Methods I am able to supervise:

  • Quantitative
  • Qualitative (interviews, focus group discussions and vox pops)
  • Mixed Methods
  • Systematic review
  • Narrative review

 

Research interest:

  • Nutrient composition of ethnic foods
  • Development of food-based resources for health promotion and interventions
  • Community-based interventions to support healthy eating and lifestyle.
  • Interventions to enhance health literacy, expand health opportunities and reduce nutritional issues related to under/over nutrition.
  • Promotion of sustainable diets.
Dr Lindsay Blank
l.blank@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

General areas of interest:

  • Systematic review and evidence synthesis of public health topics including qualitative and mixed method evidence synthesis.
  • Qualitative evaluation of complex public health interventions.

Specific areas of interest:

  • I am particularly interested in topics relating to social and commercial determinants of health, wellbeing, and housing concerns.

Research methods I am able to supervise: 

  • Systematic review and evidence synthesis
  • Qualitative
  • Evaluation
  • Mixed methods
Professor Andrew Booth
a.booth@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My research interests focus on all methods of systematic review,  evidence synthesis, evidence based practice, and knowledge translation. I am particularly interested in systematic review topics from developing countries, particularly from Sub-Saharan Africa, and in public health topics such as alcohol and HIV/AIDS.

I have published with students in topics such as medication adherence, social marketing,  disaster management and evidence based management. My current research students are working in knowledge management in acute hospitals and use of NICE guidance in Social care.  I have been involved in development of a wide range of tools for dissemination, both web based and as online briefings. In 2013 I was one of the first to achieve the University of Sheffield's PhD by Publications with my thesis entitled Acknowledging a Dual Heritage for Qualitative Evidence Synthesis: Harnessing the Qualitative Research and Systematic Review Research Traditions. My most recent interests centre on multiple types of review, including rapid reviews, mapping reviews and scoping reviews.

Professor Daniel Hind
d.hind@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

  • Evaluation
  • Methodology
  • Research methods
  • Evidence synthesis
  • Clinical trials
  • Qualitative research
  • Anthropology
  • Ethnography
  • Personalised care
  • Quality improvement
  • Philosophy of Science
  • Theory
  • Theories, models and frameworks
  • Applied health research
  • Health sciences
  • Health Services Research
  • Complexity
  • Mechanisms and mechanistic thinking
  • Philosophical Realism
  • Philosophical Pragmatism
Dr Calum Webb
c.j.webb@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

Calum Webb joined the Sheffield Methods Institute as a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in September 2021, having previously worked as a Research Associate in the Department of Sociological Studies. His research explores socioeconomic inequalities in the child welfare system and their relationship to fiscal and social policy using quantitative research methods. He completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of Sheffield in 2019 as an ESRC-funded White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership student.

His research on child welfare inequalities and the funding of local services for children and young people has been published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Children and Youth Services Review, the Journal of Mixed Methods Research, Child & Family Social Work, and elsewhere. Outside of academic circles, his work has been cited by the National Children’s Bureau, Ofsted, Children England, the British Association of Social Workers, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the Department for Education, and other organisations.


From 2021-2024 Calum will be leading an innovative new research project as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the British Academy titled “Investment in Prevention and its Systemic Effects (IPSE): Modelling the causal effects of spending in children's services with a whole systems approach.” 

Dr Marrissa Martyn-St James
M.Martyn-StJames@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

My research interests include:
• Systematic reviews of clinical effectiveness for healthcare interventions
• Development of methods for systematic reviewing and evidence synthesis including meta-analysis, meta-regression, individual patient data analysis and mixed-treatment comparisons/network meta-analysis
• Critical appraisal and risk of bias assessment methods for systematic reviews
• Exercise interventions for health outcomes

Dr Melanie Hassett
melanie.hassett@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Lecturer in International Business

Research

My research interest lies in internationalization strategies, particularly cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As), post-acquisition socio-cultural integration and organisational change, emotions and cultural differences, as well as sustainability. My research focuses on the human side, such as emotions and change management, in international business strategy (M&A) and more recently in SME internationalisation.

My research expertise also lies in research methods, particularly qualitative research methods, longitudinal, case study and mixed method approaches. This is reflected in a book, namely “Handbook in Longitudinal Research Methods in Organisation and Business Studies”, published by Edward Elgar in 2013, as well as an article on time, which was published in Management International Review in 2016 “TEMPUS FUGIT – A hermeneutic approach to internationalization process”. I am the co-editor in recently published Special Issue on “When Time Matters: Rethinking the Role of Time in IB Theory and Practice” in the Journal of World Business.

PhD Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

  • International mergers and acquisitions
  • Post-acquisition integration and socio-cultural integration
  • Internationalisation (SMEs and MNEs)
  • Emotions, social capital, informal networks in the context of internationalisation and/or mergers and acquisitions

Publications

Hurmerinta, L., Paavilainen-Mantymaki, E. and Hassett, M. E. (2016). TEMPUS FUGIT: A hermeneutic approach to the internationalization process. Management International Review, 56(6) 805-825.

Hassett, M., Vincze, Z., Urs, U. and Angwin, D. (2016), “Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions from India: Motives and Integration Strategies of Indian Acquirers”, in Marinova, S., Larimo, J. & Nummela, N., Value Creation in International Business, Palgrave Macmillan-SpringerDegbey, pp. 109-139.

Degbey, W. and Hassett, M.E. (2016), “Creating value in cross-border M&As through strategic networks”, in Heinz Tüselmann, Stephen Buzdugan, Qi Cao, David Freund and Sougand Golesorkhi, Impact of International Business: Challenges and Solutions for Policy and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, pp. 158–177.

Nummela, N. and Hassett, M. (2016), “Opening the black box of acquisition capabilities”, in Risberg, A., King, D. and Meglio, O., The Routledge Companion of Mergers and Acquisitions, Routledge Companion Series, Routledge: Oxon, pp. 74–91.


Dr Lien Monkhouse
L.L.Monkhouse@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Lecturer in Marketing

Research interests

Following the achievement of an MBA degree (with Distinction) from the University of Leeds, Lien carried out her PhD research in consumer behaviour of East Asian luxury goods market. She has conducted peer review for a few marketing journals and conferences (for e.g. Journal of International Marketing, International Marketing Review, Journal of Business Research, Marketing Intelligence and Planning, AIB South East Asia conference, Academy of Marketing conference). Lien has a few papers in 3* journals and has presented at different international conferences in her research area.

Lien has supervised a number of PhDs to completion at the Management school. When she has capacity to take on more students, she welcomes those applicants who would like to research especially in the following areas: quantitative methods, East Asian culture, acculturation, sustainable consumption, luxury goods buyer behaviour, and consumer research in general.

Miss Diana Papaioannou
d.papaioannou@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My research interests are in the following areas:

  • Harms/adverse events in behavioural change trials
  • Randomised controlled clinical trials
  • Systematic reviews
Dr Rachel King
rachel.king@sheffield.ac.uk

Nursing and Midwifery

I have a particular interest in researching nursing workforce issues and knowledge mobilisation. Current research includes longitudinal mixed methods cohort studies of advanced level nurse practitioners and trainee nursing associates. I am also involved in a systematic review of continuing professional development in nursing.

Methodologically my expertise lies in qualitative research (using observations, focus groups and interviews), and reviews.

I currently co-supervise two PhD students, exploring advanced nursing roles in surgery and stroke care settings, and welcome any prospective student interested in researching nursing workforce issues or aspects of knowledge mobilisation.

Dr Lesley Uttley
l.uttley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

  • Systematic review and meta-analyses
  • Research integrity and developing healthy research cultures
  • Human influences that lead to questionable research practices such as bias, conflicts of interest and researcher allegiance
Professor Sundari Anitha
S.Anitha@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Anitha joined the Department of Sociological Studies in 2024, having previously worked at the University of Lincoln, the University of Leeds and the University of Central Lancashire. 

Anitha’s research focuses on two areas across the disciplines of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology: (i)  the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG) at the intersection of gender, race, border and migration in diverse contexts including the UK, US and India; domestic violence and abuse, including particular manifestations such as dowry-related abuse, forced marriage, transnational forms of violence such as abandonment of wives and domestic servitude; sexual violence including everyday forms of sexual harassment in online and offline spaces; gender-based violence in university communities; and (ii) the intersection of gender, race and ethnicity in employment relations; agency, solidarity and industrial action by migrant workers;  and trade union representation of migrant workers.  Anitha’s research draws upon qualitative research methods, including life history methods.

Anitha has been the Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on a range of research projects and received funding from the The Leverhulme Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Nuffield Foundation and the British Academy. 

Anitha served as Associate Editor of Women’s Studies International Forum (2022-23) and is a member of the Editorial Board of British Journal of Criminology and Women’s Studies International Forum.

Anitha was a member of the REF2021 Sociology sub-panel. 

She is a member of the ESRC peer review college.


Anitha’s research spans the following areas:

  • Violence against women and girls at the intersection of gender, race, border and migration
  • Domestic violence
  • Sexual violence
  • Gender-based violence in university communities
  • Intersection of gender, race and ethnicity in employment relations
  • Trade union representation of migrant workers
  • Industrial action
  • Forced labour and domestic servitude
  • South Asian diaspora
  • Qualitative and narrative methods
  • Feminist and participatory research methodologies
Dr James Fotheringham
j.fotheringham@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Methods and Instruments

  • Within and beyond trial health-economic modelling
  • Patient reported outcome and experience measures - Symptom burden, quality of life (utilities), mapping to the EQ5D
  • Observational data, secondary use of data and data linkage for epidemiology and comparative effectiveness
  • Statistical methods to reduced confounding - Instrumental variables, marginal structural models, G-methods and treatment switching
  • Discrete choice experiments
  • Systematic review and meta-analysis

Topics

  • Health Technology Assessment
  • The two-day break in three times as week haemodialysis
  • The health economics surrounding renal replacement therapy - In centre haemodialysis (range of formats and settings including intensive frequency/duration and minimal care), peritoneal dialysis, home haemodialysis and transplantation
  • Patient centred care, decision making and research prioritisation
Mr Chris Blackmore
C.M.Blackmore@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad area of research interest:

  • Mental health
  • Online learning
  • Technology (inernet, social media) 

Methods I am able to supervise:

  • Qualitative
  • Mixed Methods
  • Systematic review 

Specific areas of interest:

My main research interest is in the role of emotions in online learning, and more generally the impact of the internet on well-being. I have been involved in developing and evaluating e-learning Psychotherapy training resources across Europe. Since my doctoral research, I have become interested in the potential of learning analytics and the use of data on well-being to enhance and personalize students' learning, and the application of the same principles in analysing therapeutic interactions. I am developing an interest in narrative therapy and use of virtual reality.


Dr Christopher Carroll
c.carroll@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

  • Systematic review and evidence synthesis of medical, health and social science topics, including qualitative and mixed method evidence synthesis
  • The Health Technology Assessment (HTA) process
  • Information retrieval and programme evaluation (implementation fidelity) research
Dr Alvaro Martinez-Perez
a.martinez-perez@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

My current research interests are:

  • Social stratification and inequality
  • Labour markets
  • Education
  • Family and gender
  • Migration
  • Electoral behaviour
  • Advanced multivariate methods (such as panel regression, event history analysis, multilevel analysis, multiple imputation)

I would be very keen to supervise PhD students with an interest in these substantive topics and with an interest in quantitative research methods.

Dr Mark Taylor
m.r.taylor@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

I'm interested in culture. This includes what we might call "formal" culture, like theatre, music, and visual art. It also includes other ways that people spend their time such as playing video games, cooking, and watching telly.

In my research, I've worked on both the production and consumption of culture: asking questions about who works in jobs making culture, and what their experiences are like, as well as who attends, engages with, and likes different forms of culture and how that all fits together. Most of this research has asked how these questions relate to social inequality.

I mainly use quantitative methods in my research: mostly large surveys with National Statistic status, but I've also used other forms of data such as ticket sales and Companies House data, and I also run my own surveys.

My PhD is in Sociology, which is probably the discipline with which I'm best-aligned, but I work with people from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds in the social sciences and arts and humanities.

Dr Hannah Fairbrother
h.fairbrother@sheffield.ac.uk

Nursing and Midwifery
My principal research focus is on socioeconomic inequalities in health, particularly as they relate to children, young people and families. This is a longstanding interest and stems from my upbringing in Sheffield, a city of contrasts in health and wealth, visiting family in Anfield, Liverpool and through voluntary work in Cambridge with young mothers and with children in a disadvantaged area of Paris.

I am particularly interested in:
- Work to understand and address the underlying causes of inequalities in health
- Public perspectives, particularly children and young people’s perspectives, on and understandings of inequalities in health and their relationship with broader societal inequalities
- The role of health and wider policy (a health in all policies approach) and the potential for whole systems approaches to facilitate coordinated action in reducing inequalities in health
- The importance of children and young people’s health literacy practices in making sense of, interacting with and responding to health information.

I mobilise a variety of different methods to explore these key interests, including critical policy analysis, systematic and narrative literature review, participatory interviews, creative workshops, observation and systems mapping.
Dr Joanne Thompson
j.thompson1@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Academic Unit of Medical Education

My current research is focused around the Social Accountability of Medical Schools, the impact on medical students and community organisations working in partnership with the university. This involves supporting students to become more aware of health inequity and social determinants of health and the broader implications for society.


My background is in academic psychology and counselling and I have a longstanding interest in the psychosocial impact of illness, in particular in relation to cancer survivorship and the management of children with long term conditions

Professor Tracey Young
t.a.young@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

  • Methods for measuring uncertainty in economic evaluations
  • Methods for developing preference-based measures from existing QOL measures
  • Economic evaluations alongside clinical trials
  • Censored costs
  • Mapping
Mrs Michaela Senek
m.senek@sheffield.ac.uk

Nursing and Midwifery
I am a mixed-methods researcher interested in supervising projects related to health services improvement  (both focusing on workforce and patient outcome issues). 
Dr Helen Quirk
h.quirk@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health
I am interested in supervising Research Students in topics/areas such as:
  • community-based physical activity promotion and/or associated health inequalities
  • physical activity for people living with long-term health conditions
  • physical activity among children and young people
  • research exploring the public health potential of parkrun
Research methods I can supervise:
  • qualitative methods
  • mixed methods
  • evaluation 
Professor Clare Gardiner
c.gardiner@sheffield.ac.uk

Nursing and Midwifery

My research interests are in palliative and end of life care, in particular the role of the family caregiver, palliative care in hospitals, care of older people at the end of life, and health economic approaches to palliative care. My methodological expertise lies mainly in qualitative, mixed methods research and evidence synthesis

Dr Claire Cunnington
claire.cunnington@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies
  • Childhood sexual abuse - both current and historical
  • Research ethics
  • Qualitative methods including insider research
  • Trauma informed research and practice
  • Children’s social work
  • Impact

Claire’s research has mainly focussed on interpersonal violence towards adults and children as well as the social work response. Claire is particularly interested in the lived experience of CSA recovery and the professionals supporting that recovery. Her work looks at how recovering can be conceptualised and facilitated. 
She is also fascinated by participatory research methods, co-production and trauma aware research. Recently she worked with NHS stakeholders and people with lived experience to produce a film (Flow) about disclosing abuse to NHS staff.

Dr Elisabeth Garratt
elisabeth.garratt@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

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.

Professor Caitlin Buck
C.E.Buck@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

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.
Dr Tessa Peasgood
t.peasgood@sheffield.ac.uk

Division of Population Health

Tessa is a Senior Lecturer in Health Economics within the Division of Population Health. She has a background in economics and is a mixed-methods researcher, with significant expertise in quantitative and qualitative research.

Research Interests

  • Measuring and valuing health, wellbeing and quality of life
  • The development, evaluation, and modification of patient reported
  • outcome measures and preference-accompanied measures
  • Measuring and valuing child health and carer health and wellbeing
  • Valuation of very poor health states which may be considered worse
  • than being dead
  • Normative and ethical issues in the valuation of health states
  • The use of health values or utilities within economic evaluation
  • Use of wellbeing measures in health and social care


Tessa is available to supervise students in these and related areas.

Dr Hannah Lambie-Mumford
h.lambie-mumford@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Politics and International Relations

Her research focuses on food insecurity, emergency food systems and the role of public policy. Her work has been at the forefront of the emerging evidence base on the growth of food charity in the UK and comparative research across Europe. 

Professor Georg Struth
g.struth@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Georg works mainly on logical and algebraic methods in computer science, formalised mathematics with interactive theorem provers and program verification and correctness. His interests range from foundational work on the axiomatisation and semantics of sequential and concurrent computing systems to applications in the design and implementation of program verification software.

Ms Kitty Nichols
k.nichols@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies
Sheffield Methods Institute

My main research interests are in the broad areas of gender, masculinity,  sexuality, identity, sport, humour, language, emotion and age. I am also interested in research methodology and developing innovative qualitative methods.

I welcome applications to study PhD research degrees, either full or part time in the following areas:

 

    • Masculinity 

    • Gender and sexuality

    • Gender and sport

    • Humour, or banter

    • Gender and emotion

  • Qualitative and ethnographic research methods

 

Professor Jill Carlton
J.Carlton@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad Research Interests:

My research interests are health-related quality of life and patient outcome measures. In 2006 I was awarded a fellowship (Researcher Development Award) through the National Co-ordinating Centre for Research Capacity Development, NCCRCD). My PhD involved designing a paediatric disease-specific health related quality of life measure for amblyopia. The Child Amblyopia Treatment Questionnaire (CAT-QoL) is a short questionnaire that was designed for children aged 4-7 years to measure the impact of amblyopia treatment from the child’s perspective.

Research Methods I can Supervise:

  • Instrument Development
  • Mixed Methods
  • Specific Areas of Interest:
  • Paediatric
  • Quality of Life
Professor John Derrick
j.derrick@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Research interests

Specification, refinement and testing using formal methods:

  • Refinement in state-based systems
  • Verification of concurrent algorithms
  • Testing distributed and concurrent systems
  • Integrated formal methods
  • Testing of formal specifications
  • Process algebraic refinement
  • Frameworks for distributed systems: architectural semantics, specification templates, object orientation, interfaces

I have specific interest in the use and theory of refinement in specifications languages. We have recently been applying this to the verification and liearizability of concurrent algorithms. Work on testing includes that on property-based testing for distributed applications (e.g. those written in Erlang), and reverse engineering. I have coordinated two EU FP7 grants in this area (ProTest and Prowess).


Dr Kirill Bogdanov
k.bogdanov@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Research interests

In traditional software development, specification and testing do not play an important role. In particular, changes to software code do not normally get reflected in a specificaton. At the same time, specification-based testing methods are very important for maintaing software quality, for identification of missing or incorrectly-implemented behaviour. K.Bogdanov's research aims to develop a method and a tool to take an incomplete state-based specification, hints for developers as to how it relates to code and both (1) extract an up-to-date specification and (2) generate tests from it.
A number of existing specificaton-based testing methods rely on a program under test being built with testing in mind, and lose a lot in power if this is not true. In his work, observation of program behaviour under test is used to make up for the missing information about a system, making it more amenable to testing using these methods. 
More recent work focuses on passive inference of software models from logs, where it is not possible to attempt experiments on a system being reverse-engineered.

Ms Kitty Nichols
k.nichols@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

Kitty has been teaching Sheffield Methods Institute (SMI) modules since the Institute first launched, but joined the SMI full-time in 2021, having previously been based in the Department of Sociological Studies where she completed her PhD. Before this Kitty completed her Masters degree in Sociology and Social Research Methods at The University of Newcastle and her undergraduate degree at The University of Leicester.

In 2018 Kitty completed her PhD entitled ‘Banter, masculinities and Rugby Union: exploring the relationship between masculinity and humour in men’s lived realities of gender.’ Drawing on data from a three-year ethnographic study of a Northern Rugby club, the thesis was concerned with how men experience and negotiate the gendered structures which underpin sporting sites. She has since been developing and extending these ideas into papers.

Dr Abigail Tazzyman
a.tazzyman@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

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 Lindsey Rice
L.Rice@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

Research Interests

  • Police and Policing (in particular criminal investigation, vulnerability and police training/education)
  • Police Reform (in particularly, the civilianisation and privatisation of ‘core’ provision and services)
  • Vulnerabilities Crime
  • Police Custody
  • Police Legitimacy
  • Private Security
  • Criminological Theory
  • Mixed Methods Research

Member of the Centre for Criminological Research Cluster
College of Policing – Policing Education Qualifications Framework network

Dr Lorna Warren
l.warren@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Research interests

Much of my early research centred on social care for older people, though it also extended to other aspects of community and health care services and their impact on the lives of service users and carers. More recently, I have focussed on issues of representation in later life, looking at the construction and framing of ageing and care-giving. I draw from a mix of anthropological, social policy, sociological, social gerontological, and feminist perspectives and approaches and the intersection of gender and age has been a key focus of my work. My interests include social and cultural dimensions of ageing, intergenerational relations and informal or family care relationships, which I have explored predominantly through qualitative methods, including interviews, focus groups, observation (participant and non-participant), ethnography, life stories and more recently visual approaches. I recognise the importance of `user involvement´ and interdisciplinarity in research and am committed, in particular, to the development of participatory research, raising questions about how we come to know what we know about the lives of people who use services and the connection of this knowledge with policy and practice.

I have recently completed 2 major research projects:

The social process of everyday decision-making by people with dementia and their spouses, an ESRC-funded study carried out with Dr Geraldine Boyle (PI) which aimed to explore and raise awareness of the decision-making abilities of people with dementia. 

Representing Self – Representing Ageing,  part of the cross disciplinary New Dynamics of Ageing Programme: http://www.newdynamics.group.shef.ac.uk/ and which I carried out, as PI, with Professors Merryn Gott and Susan Hogan. Known more familiarly by the title of Look at Me! Images of Women and Ageing, the project worked with women in Sheffield to explore representations of women and ageing in the media and to produce new images to challenge existing stereotypes: http://www.representing-ageing.com/. I won an ESRC Outstanding Impact in Society Award for the project in 2014 and am continuing to extend the project's impact through activities including intergenerational work in schools.

My other research activities have included:

The ESRC Older Women’s Lives and Voices project, exploring issues affecting the quality of life of older women across different ethnic groups within Sheffield and their involvement in services available to them:

The European Commission funded MERI project (Mapping Existing Research and Identifying Knowledge Gaps Concerning the Situation of Older Women in Europe), a collaborative project involving 13 EC countries and designed to contribute to the development of European studies and policy to improve older women’s lives.

Postgraduate Supervision

I have supervised 9 students to successful completion at PhD (x 8) and MPhil (x 1) levels. I am currently primary supervisor of 1 full-time and 5 part-time PhD students, including a joint location student (Trinidad and Tobago). I welcome applications to study full-time or part-time with me for MPhil or PhD research degrees that are related to my activities and experience. I would be particularly interested in hearing from students who wish to undertake participatory research with older people and carers.

 

Professor Elizabeth Goyder
e.goyder@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests:

Research topics in the field of developing and implementing evidence-based public health including: health inequalities, access to health care, physical activity interventions, type 2 diabetes and diabetes prevention.

Methods:

Research methods include mixed methods evaluations of public health and complex interventions and evidence synthesis/ systematic reviews of public health and complex interventions.

Professor Helen Kennedy
h.kennedy@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

I have supervised seven PhD students to successful completion. My research interests are:

  • social media;
  • data mining(on social media and elsewhere);
  • big data and data in society;
  • the role, meaning, uses, effects of data visualisation;
  • digital media theory and practice;
  • (digital) media work;
  • digital methods;
  • other inventive methods.

I’m interested in supervising PhD students working in areas such as:

  • Social media / social media data mining / big data / visualisation
  • Cultural & social issues relating to digital and social media
  • New media theory and practice
  • Media work, production practices and cultural labour.
  • Digital methods
  • Action research / participatory methods
  • Gender and the media / feminist STS.


Professor James Chilcott
j.b.chilcott@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

* Modelling in public health

* Modelling in cancer and cancer screening

* Methodological modelling interests including:

  • the modelling process and errors in HTA models
  • cognitive mapping for systematic reviews in complex settings
  • structural uncertainty in models
  • Bayesian analysis of joint disease natural history and test characteristics in screening
  • value of information methods
  • probabilistic sensitivity analysis methods
  • meta modelling
  • information gathering processes for models
Dr Philip Powell
p.a.powell@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

hilip (Phil) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research (SCHARR). He has a background in Psychology, Economics, and Health Outcomes research and is a mixed-methods researcher, with combined expertise in quantitative, qualitative, and experimental research methods.

Phil’s research interests include:

  • Measuring and valuing health-related quality of life (HRQoL) across different health conditions.
  • Measuring and valuing HRQoL in children and in rare diseases.
  • Developing, evaluating, and modifying patient reported outcome measures (PROMs).
  • Methodological (including normative and ethical) issues in the valuation of health states.

He is available to supervise students in these and related areas.

Dr Ysabel Gerrard
y.gerrard@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies
My research mainly focuses on how the policies of technology and social media companies further marginalise particular social identities. Broadly speaking, my research interests fall into the following categories:
 
  • Social media content moderation
  • Digital identities (particularly gender and race)
  • Feminist media theory
  • The ethics of social media research
 
I would be particularly interested in supervising students researching one of the following topics:
 
Social media content moderation: I am interested in various aspects of the content moderation process, including: the process of writing policies, the implementation of new rules, press/public responses, and users’ reception and circumvention. I am especially interested in policies that heavily affect marginalised populations, like adult content bans and mental health-related rules.
 
Secret-telling apps: I have begun a new project about secret-telling social media apps and am interested in supervising students who also have interests in this area. 
Dr Tim Highfield
t.j.highfield@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

My research focuses on how digital media and related technologies intervene within everyday life, encompassing visual, temporal, cultural, and political perspectives. Much of my work examines how the everyday cultural practices of digital media users intersect with political themes and issues, such as how digital content, and especially visual forms, are used to make sense of politics. I am also interested in the aims and roles of digital platforms themselves in making and shaping these interventions, and how these relate to the cultures and practices of their users.

 

I am interested in supervising PhD students investigating topics including:

  • Visual social media

  • Everyday digital cultures

  • Digital media politics

  • Time and digital media

  • Digital methods

Dr Ros Williams
r.g.williams@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Sociological Studies

My research falls at the intersections of Science and Technology Studies, Sociologies of Race and Ethnicity, and Digital Sociology.

My current and previous research includes:

  • exploration of institutional practices of stem cell banking which included looking at race classifications, legacies of health care inequity, and genetic understandings of racial differences in blood and tissue in a UK context
  • digital health and self-monitoring technologies - user, commercial and policy perspectives through ethnography, interview, and novel material methodologies
  • stem cell donor recruitment activities in minority communities including ethnography of minority community donor drives, and digital method-based analysis of online minority ethnicity recruitment campaigns that focus on mixed raced donors

Interested in supervising research students who are focused on the following topics (in UK and/or other national/regional/international contexts)

  • health activism - particularly targeted at, or taking place within, racialised communities
  • processes of racialisation (and, more generally, invocations of racial difference) within biomedical contexts
  • mixed raced experience, particularly in the context of health, and of new genetic sciences
  • the intersection of race/ethnicity and digital media in general
Dr Liz Croot
l.croot@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests:

  • Access to and provision of equitable services for individuals from marginalised groups
  • Learning disabilities
  • Health behaviour particularly weight management
  • Qualitative methods
  • Narrative research
  • Cross lanaguage qualitative research
  • Realist synthesis
  • Complex intervention development and evaluation
  • Social Care Research
Dr Diane Burns
d.burns@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School
Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies

Research interests
  • Health & Social Care at home and in institutions
  • Care recipent's and care worker's perspectives and knowledge 
  • Financialisation of social care, business models and managment
  • Social innovation in home care provision - a Wellcome Trust funded project 2017-18.
  • Diane's Department of Health and Comic Relief funded project examined organizational cultures in care homes for older people and positive experiences of care. This study was conducted with colleagues at the University of East Anglia, University of Stirling, University of Worcester and Cardiff University.
  • Recently Diane was involved in a two and half year, Department of Health and Comic Relief funded participatory project with care home residents and family carers to examine the organisational dynamics of abuse and respectful care of older people in care homes.

Diane’s research examines organizational arrangements, cultures and change in health and social care systems with two sub themes – organizational failure and institutional abuse in care homes; and social innovation in home care provision.

Diane is interested in supervising qualitative research in health and social care systems and organization; job quality, care workforce and labour arrangments; care quality, abuse and mistreatment in organized care; voice, power and whistle-blowing in the workplace and other organizations; collaborative forms of organizing and partnership. 

Diane is particularly interested in action research, participatory appraoches and co-production, and the development of organizational ethnography using visual methods, poetics and film.

Dr Anton Selivanov
a.selivanov@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

My research interests lie in the area of mathematical control theory. I study infinite-dimensional systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) and delay differential equations. My goal is to develop mathematical tools for designing controllers that guarantee the desired system behaviour in the presence of input/output delays, external disturbances, measurement noise, parameter uncertainties, and other phenomena occurring in practice.

Research interests 

  • Control and stability of partial differential equations (PDEs)
  • PDE-based analysis of multi-agent systems (robot swarms)
  • Analysis and control of traffic flows
  • Time delays and networked control systems
  • Adaptive control
Dr Casey Strine
c.a.strine@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies
Department of History

Available to supervise history and biblical studies topics

Casey's main research focuses on how the experience of involuntary migration influences the development of ethnic, national, and religious identity. He combines insights from the social scientific study of migration with historical sources (textual and material) in order to reconstruct the political, social, and cultural development of ancient Israel and Judah as well as for the interpretation of the literature of Israel, Judah, Assyria, and Babylonia.

Casey is keen to supervise postgraduate students working in History or through the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. Students with interests in the political, social and cultural history of ancient Israel and Judah—particularly those exploring the impact of migration on these societies and their texts—the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and the relationship between the visual arts and the Bible are welcome to be in touch with me.

Dr Malcolm Patterson
m.patterson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Senior Research Fellow

PhD Supervision

I am currently supervising PhD students in the following areas:

  • destructive leadership
  • emotions, moods and innovative work behaviour
  • knowledge sharing
  • organisational interventions to enhance employee engagement
  • start-up journeys of entrepreneurs
  • participative action research interventions to improve quality of patient care

I would welcome applications and inquiries in these areas and related areas corresponding to my areas of expertise listed above.

Publications

Knight, C;, Patterson, M.G, Dawson, J and Brown, J (2017). Building and sustaining work engagements- a participatory action intervention to increase work engagement in nursing staff. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 26(5) 634-649.

Knight, C;, Patterson, M. and Dawson, J. (2017). Building work engagement: A systematic review and meta-analysis investigating the effectiveness of work engagement interventions. Journal of Organizational Behavior Education, 38(6) 792-812.

Madrid, H.P. and Patterson, M.. Creativity at work as a joint function between openness to experience, need for cognition and organisational fairness. Learning and Individual Differences, forthcoming 2016.

Stephan, U., Patterson, M., Kelly, C. and Mair, J. (2016). Organizations driving positive social change: A reveiw and an intergrative framework of change processes. Journal of Management, 42(5) 2016.

Madrid, H., Patterson, M. and Leiva, P. (2015). Negative core affect and employee silence: How differences in activation, cognitive rumination and problem-solving demands matter. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(6) 1887-1989.

Madrid, H.P., Patterson, M.G., Birdi, K.S. and Leiva, P.I. (2014). The role of weekly high-activated positive mood, context, and personality in innovative work behavior: A multilevel and interactional model. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35(2) 234-256.

Full list of publications

 

Professor Michael Thelwall
m.a.thelwall@sheffield.ac.uk

Information School

Research Interests

I have two main research interests: bibliometrics and social media analysis.

Bibliometrics involves primarily quantitative analysis of academic publications, including factors like citation rates, the role of collaboration, gender differences, and the relationship between citations and research quality. It also includes altmetrics, in the form of alternative quantitative indicators of research impact.

In terms of social media analysis, I am interested in the development and applications of mixed quantitative-qualitative methods to analyse social web data for social science research goals. I am particularly interested in YouTube at the moment because of the availability of large scale data.

Research supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD projects in the following areas:

  • Bibliometrics and research evaluation, whether methods development, broad applications, or the assessment of the influences of factors like gender and collaboration.

  • Altmetrics for research evaluation: either developing new altmetrics or assessing existing altmetrics in new contexts.

  • The accuracy and limitations of various types of scholarly peer review in research assessment.

  • Artificial intelligence in research assessment.

  • Equality and diversity in research assessment.

  • Qualitative-quantitative methods to analyse social media data for social research goals, such as testing theory or investigating online or offline phenomena.

  • Parasocial interaction between YouTubers and followers.

  • Artificial intelligence methods for social media analysis.

Dr Paraskevi Katsiampa
p.katsiampa@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Lecturer in Financial Management

Paraskevi’s primary research interests include Financial Econometrics, Time Series Analysis, Forecasting, Spillover effects, Cryptocurrencies, Commodities, House prices, and Financial Crises, among others.

Her secondary research interests include Pedagogy in Higher Education. She is also interested in interdisciplinary research projects involving quantitative methods.

She regularly acts as a reviewer for several refereed academic journals, such as Annals of Operations Research, Economics Letters, Economic Modelling, Finance Research Letters, International Journal of Finance and Economics, International Review of Financial Analysis, North American Journal of Economics and Finance, and Research in International Business and Finance, among others.

Paraskevi would welcome proposals from potential doctoral students wishing to work in any of the fields of her research interests.

Professor Andrew Lee
andrew.lee@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

My main research interests are in the field of health protection-related topics such as disaster response and emergency planning, and the control of communicable diseases/infectious diseases. I am also interested in topics in international health, primary care as well as health service management.  Examples of my previous research  activities include

  • mixed methods study of the state of integrated disease surveillance globally
  • evidence reviews on mass testing for COVID, public health benefits of urban greenspace, emergency planning in health in the UK
  • qualitative studies on beneficiary perspectives of humanitarian aid in Sri Lanka after the Asian Tsunami disaster, and of the drivers of smoking in young people in Pakistan
  • developing evidence-based disaster management practice in the UK and Nepal,
  • mixed methods study investigating barriers to testing and treatment of Hepatitis B in the migrant Chinese ethnic population in the UK,
  • Methods: policy, qualitative, epidemiology and evidence reviews.

My current ongoing research projects (as of February 2017) are:  

  • developing a series of health research projects on slum health in Nepal,
  • evidence review of public health needs following earthquakes.
Dr Kevin Hughes
K.J.Hughes@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Kevin's research covers a range of topics related to fuel combustion, fuel degradation and deposit formation, pollutant chemistry, proton exchange membrane fuel cells, and process modelling in carbon capture and storage systems.

In the area of combustion, degradation, and pollutant chemistry, the approach is a combination of experimental and theoretical investigation; for example the elucidation of a simple laminar flame structure by a combination of conventional species sampling techniques allied to laser diagnostic probing of the flame structure using the technique of planar laser induced fluorescence. This provides data that allows for the validation of detailed chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms. These mechanisms are constructed by a variety of means ranging from experimental measurements of individual reaction rates, crude estimation by analogy, group additivity based methods, detailed theoretical calculation using quantum chemistry methods, and the application of master equation models to calculated potential energy surfaces. Insight is further gained by the application of sensitivity analysis methods to both allow the simplification of detailed mechanisms, and to highlight those regions of particular importance for the phenomena of interest.

In the area of proton exchange membrane fuel cells, the focus is on the CFD modelling and the experimental testing of small scale devices, and the systematic investigation of their performance as a function of operating conditions and the properties of the individual fuel cell components such as electrical conductivity and gas permeability. This is complemented by an experimental and theoretical investigation of novel catalysts, using quantum chemistry methods to predict behaviour, along with catalyst synthesis, physical and electrochemical characterization, and finally testing in real fuel cell systems.

Carbon capture and storage related research is focused on novel operating procedures related to gas turbines linked to solvent capture plants, with the aim of optimizing the overall system performance, and understanding the chemistry of solvent degradation and emissions.

Dr Binakuromo Ogbebor
b.ogbebor@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Journalism, Media and Communication

Journalism, Media and Communication

Bina’s research interests include media representation, the relationship between the media and democracy, critical incidents in journalism, race equality in journalism, media policy, and media self-coverage. Bina’s research and publications have contributed to knowledge relating to key debates about press regulation, the public interest, public trust, media ownership, political economy of the media, paradigm repair, boundary work, and the public sphere concept. Her research into how the British press covered the press standards debate that followed The News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry employed content and critical discourse analyses and was interdisciplinary in content drawing from law, politics and psychology in addition to journalism. 

Bina’s research entitled, A meta-analysis of key concerns and developments on media standards informed the 2020-2022 Impress Code Review. The research findings were used by the press regulator, Impress to modernise the Standards Code and make it fit for purpose in the digital age. Her research on the WhatsApp, Black People and COVID-19 Infodemic explored the WhatsApp Communications of Nigerians in the UK and Nigeria, using the methods of interviews and content analysis. This work made contributions to knowledge about effective health communications in times of Public Health Emergencies. Bina’s current research investigates race-based student activism in journalism, media, and communication schools in the UK using the methods of content analysis, interviews, and surveys. 

PhD Supervision 

  • Bina is interested in supervising students in the following areas:
  • The relationship between the media and democracy
  • Race equality involving Black Asian and Minority Ethnic groups
  • Media representation on diverse platforms
  • Media self-coverage 
  • Political economy of the media

Dr Joe Purshouse
j.purshouse@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law
My research focuses on the disruptive impact of innovations in technology and society on the law. I have published in leading journals such as the Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, Modern Law Review, Public Law, and Criminal Law Review. This research has contributed to policy debates on the application of law to new technologies in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Research Interests
  • New technologies
  • Criminal justice
  • Criminal process
  • Facial recognition technology
  • AI
  • Online child abuse activism
  • Citizen-led policing
  • Privacy
Dr Yuanbo Nie
y.nie@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
  • Numerical Methods for Dynamic Optimization
Dynamic optimization is integral to many aspects of science and engineering, commonly found in trajectory optimization, optimal control, state estimation, system identification and design synthesis problems. A key characteristic of dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) is that the decision variables can be functions or trajectories, leading to infinite-dimensional optimization problems that are often more challenging to solve.
 
My current focus is on the development of a type of direct transcription method named the integrated residual methods. This is an excellent starting point to develop new DOP solution methods and next-generation software toolboxes. The advancements would allow DOPs to be formulated intuitively based on the problems' mission specifications and successfully solved thereafter, making the method easily accessible for scientists and engineers.
  • Optimization-based Control
Optimization-based control explores the use of optimization algorithms for feedback control of dynamical systems. For example, model predictive control (MPC) is a widely used optimization-based control method, allowing systematic and optimal handling of constraints, nonlinearities and uncertainties.
 
The area I am particularly interested in is the design of optimization-based control with the optimization problem formulated directly based on the original problem specifications. Although such problems are typically more difficult to solve numerically, the difficulties are often offset by the availability of guarantees in solution properties, so that any local optimum solution (to a certain extent, even any feasible solution) can be considered suitable for real-world implementation.
  • Control and Simulation of Aerospace Systems
I have a strong interest in the control and simulation of aerospace systems, particularly when unconventional and counterintuitive solutions are needed. My current focuses are on
  • Development of tool-chains that can be integrated into the aircraft's daily operations (e.g. as next-generation flight management systems), where optimal flight trajectories can be automatically obtained based on the information regarding aircraft aerodynamics, propulsion, departure and arrival airport, atmospheric conditions and any relevant air traffic control restrictions,
  • Optimal energy management for electric, hydrogen and hybrid aircraft concepts,
  • Multi-disciplinary optimal design of aerospace vehicles and flight control systems, for example, regarding the optimal sizing and placement of flight control surfaces, and the integration of distributed propulsion systems in flight control designs,
  • Guidance and automatic control for the safe recovery of airliners in extreme conditions known as upset, such as stall and spin,
  • Next-generation flight simulator concepts, e.g. ones that are suitable for upset recovery training
Dr Ciara Kelly
c.kelly@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Lecturer in Work Psychology

Research Interests

I have two established streams of research. Both streams aim to further our knowledge of socially responsible and sustainable practices. One focuses on individual level practices and the other focuses on organisations and industry.

At the individual level, I focus my research on building our understanding of how individuals’ roles and experiences outside of work influence their work lives, and vice versa. To do this I examine the impacts of leisure activities, idiosyncratic deals (‘i-deals’) and interpersonal emotion regulation on employees work and non-work lives. My research contributes to the literature on work-life enrichment by providing a more nuanced understanding of the roles individuals fulfil, beyond the traditional focus on family. It sheds light on broader mechanisms that facilitate individual success and productivity in the workplace. I do this through intensive longitudinal quantitative methods- often referred to as diary studies.

At the organisational and industry level, my research deals with how businesses and public bodies can positively impact wider society.

I have worked on multidisciplinary projects such as:

  • Comparative Police Studies in the EU (COMPOSITE), a European project examining policing processes across countries.
  • Mainstreaming Assisted Living Technology (MALT), a TSB funded project aiming to facilitate the large scale introduction of telehealth technology.
  • Active Workforce Initiative (AWI), a BOHRF funded project examining the impact of positive psychology interventions on the well-being of police and health workers.
  • Business Driven Social Change, an NBS funded review of literature on the techniques and outcomes of business driven social change.

PhD Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD students who would like to examine issues to do with the interface between work and other life domains - this can include work-life balance, enrichment and conflict pertaining to family and leisure domains as well as the impact of supportive supervisor behaviours on work-life balance.

Dr Julie Jones
Julie.Jones@Sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Geography

Research interests

  • Reconstruction and analysis of Southern Hemisphere Atmospheric Circulation from proxy data, long instrumental records, and climate model simulations
  • The design and analysis of global climate model (GCM) simulations for the mid- and late-Holocene and development of methodologies for systematic comparison of these simulations with proxy data
  • Regional climate modelling with a focus on the European Alps
  • Links between atmospheric circulation and transport of air pollution


Dr Jonathan Collinson
j.collinson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

Jonathan joined the University of Sheffield as a Lecturer in January 2023. He is the Book Review Editor for the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Jonathan's research interests are primarily in immigration law, and his research and writing are informed by the methodologies of human rights law and administrative law.

Research interests

  • Immigration Law
  • Foreign National Offenders
  • Human Rights Law
  • The Best Interests of the Child
  • The Best Interests of the Child principle in data protection law
Professor Shuxing Yin
shuxing.yin@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Head of Accounting & Financial Management Subject Group

Research interests

Shuxing's research interests include corporate finance, corporate governance, market efficiency and anomalies. She has acted as referee for Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, British Accounting Review, European Journal of Finance.

She welcomes PhD applicants in the field of corporate finance, particularly focusing on Chinese (mainland and Hong Kong) markets, initial public offerings and market efficiency.

Professor Robert Hierons
r.hierons@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Testing

Professor Rob Hierons’ research largely concerns software testing. The main aim of this research is to devise automated techniques (and tools) that generate efficient, systematic test suites on the basis of program code, models or specifications. Progress in this area can help industry to produce higher quality software and potentially to do so more quickly. He has recently become interested in the testing of autonomous systems, with a particular focus on robotics.


PhD Supervison

Professor Hierons is particularly interested in hearing from research students interested in the following areas:

  • Testing from formal specifications
  • Search-based testing
  • Automated test generation
Professor Julie McGarry
j.h.mcgarry@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Nursing and Midwifery

I am a registered nurse in adult and mental health fields of practice and an established researcher with specialist interest in the field of domestic abuse – recent work has focused on mental health and complex presentations of sexual harm and domestic abuse in older age - intimate partner and gender based violence and sexual harm.

As a registered nurse I am also interested in research studies which focus on nursing practice/development and/or organisational change.  

My research largely utilises a qualitative approach to enquiry including ethnography, arts based and narrative co-production.  I am a qualified trainer for the Joanna Briggs Institute of Systematic Reviews.

Dr Robyn Orfitelli
r.orfitelli@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of English Language and Linguistics

My research is focused on the intersection between first language acquisition and generative syntactic theory. I use a variety of corpus and behavioral measures to experimentally analyze children’s acquisition of complex syntactic phenomena.

Recently, I have been interested in understanding the acquisition of a range of A-movement phenomena related to voice, including subject-to-subject raising, passives, and middles. I am working to link patterns in acquisition to systematic cross-linguistic differences in the representation of these structures.

Other current or recent topics of interest include the Null-Subject stage in first and second language acquisition, word-level prosody in Samoan, and the syntax-prosody interface in language development.

Dr Subhasish Modak Chowdhury
subhasish.chowdhury@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Economics

Research Interests

Subhasish M. Chowdhury joined Sheffield as Professor of Economics in 2022. His areas of research interest cover both theoretical and applied investigations of problems in Conflict, Industrial Economics, Behavioral Economics, and Political Economy. Subhasish serves as a Co-Editor of the journals ‘Frontiers in Behavioral Economics’, and ‘Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy’ and is an editorial board member of ‘Studies in Microeconomics’. He has also served as a guest-editor for ‘Economic Inquiry’ and the ‘Journal of Economics Psychology’. His research has been published in journals such as the Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Public Economics, Economic Theory etc.

Dr Mark Stevenson
mark.stevenson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Natural Language Processing 

Dr Mark Stevenson’s research focuses on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. He has worked on a range of topics in these areas including word sense disambiguation, Information Extraction, plagiarism/reuse detection, author identification, cross-lingual information retrieval and exploratory search. His research includes applications of these technologies to a range of areas including analysis of medical documents (study identification and evidence synthesis for systematic reviews; data mining information from corpora) and exploratory search (automatic organisation of large collections of documents, interpretability of topic models).

 

PhD Supervision

Dr Stevenson is particularly interested in hearing from research students interested in the following areas:

  • Interpretation of scientific literature, particularly in the health domain
  • Development of tools and techniques to support evidence synthesis (e.g. identification and analysis of research evidence)
  • Supporting access to large collections of information
Ms Agnes Rydberg
A.V.Rydberg@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

Agnes holds a PhD in Public International Law from Queen Mary University of London, where she also completed an LLM. She also has a BSc in International Law from Orebro University in Sweden. Her future research plans include exploring the international law implications of climate change, and in particular the challenge of rising sea levels for small island developing states. She has several publications, including with Kluwer and Oxford University Press, as well as in the International Community Law Review and the Yearbook of International Disaster Law. She is an assistant editor of a book series on Principles of International Environmental Law. Her teaching experience in teaching contract law at Queen Mary and serving as a visiting tutor in public international law at Royal Holloway. Agnes has previously worked with UN Women and the International Bar Association.

Research interests 

  • Public International Law 
  • Law of Treaties 
  • International Environmental Law 
  • Maritime Dispute Settlement 
Dr Nicholas Woodrow
n.woodrow@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests:

  • Young people's health and substance use practices
  • Health inequalities for children and young people
  • Accessing marginalised groups 

Methods:

  • All qualitative methods 
Professor Liz Sharp
l.sharp@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

My interests lay in public engagement in environment and infrastructure planning and development, with a particular focus on water and green infrastructure. I am fascinated by processes of policy change and how the interplay of different individuals’/organisations’ perspectives is played out in the evolution of their practices. I have worked on waste management and water supply but my current research is focused on public engagement in the design and development of green infrastructure for flood reslience.  My research focuses on policy change in the UK and Europe but I have supervised a variety of PhDs with foci across the world.  

Suggested PhD projects/topics

1. Investigations of how and when civic society groups have intervened to improve the environment of their area through working with or protesting against the relevant authorities in relation to water infrastructure 

2. Studies of how green infrastructure is being implemented in specific locations with an emphasis on whether and how the authorities are engaging the public in the design and development of the features 

3.  Systematic investigations of authorities responses to changing understandings about green infrastructure through a study of policy documentation and/or practices.  For example, in a UK context it might be appropriate to look at surface water rmanagement plans to investigate the links between these and statutory local plans. 



Professor Paul Martin
paul.martin@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

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'.

Professor Mark Hopkinson
m.hopkinson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering

Research interests

  • Development of new methods and technology for the growth, processing and characterisation of III-V photonic devices and nanostructures.


Professor Alicia O'Cathain
a.ocathain@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

Mixed methods, evaluation of new health services, patient views of health care, urgent care.

Dr Munya Dimairo
m.dimairo@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Specific area of research interests:

  • Statistical methods
  • Clinical trials methodology to improve trial efficiency across disease areas
  • Adaptive designs
  • Bayesian methods with application in clinical trials
  • Early phase clinical trials
  • Diagnostic accuracy studies
  • Hierarchical or multilevel modelling
  • Global health research
  • Prediction modelling
Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova
L.S.Mihaylova@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

Research interests:

Broad research in the areas of signal processing, Bayesian methods, Monte Carlo methods, nonlinear estimation, target tracking, sensor data fusion, control, autonomous and complex systems (e.g. image and video processing, transportation systems, large scale systems) – both at theoretical and applied level.

Dr Clara Mukuria
c.mukuria@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests: 

  • Development and testing of preference-based health measures in different populations
  • Mapping between condition-specific and generic preference-based measures of health
  • Use of well-being measures in health and social care

Methods:

  • Quantitative
  • Mixed methods
Professor Richard Wilkinson
r.d.wilkinson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

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

Professor Mike Williamson
M.Williamson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences

Research Interests

Protein structure determination by 2D and 3D NMR, and interactions with ligands. Methods for characterising protein mobility on multiple timescales.

Mrs Elizabeth Taylor Buck
e.taylor-buck@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My research interests are in child and adolescent mental health and interventions that focus on the relationship between child and caregiver. In 2009 I was awarded an NIHR Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship. I used a mixed methods design to create an online manual of dyadic art therapy.

Research Methods I can Supervise

  • Mixed Methods
  • Manual Development

Specific Areas of Interest

  • Child and adolescent mental health
  • Parent-child interventions
  • Parenting interventions
  • Early years 
  • Art therapy
Dr Lauren White
l.e.white@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

Lauren joined the Sheffield Methods Institute in January 2023 as a Lecturer in Social Research Methods, having previously worked as a researcher in iHuman and the School of Education at the University of Sheffield.

Lauren is a sociologist interested in health, disability, everyday life, materialities and mobilities. Her research is often interdisciplinary in nature and spans sociology, geography, urban studies, and critical disability studies. She is particularly interested in creative and participatory qualitative research methods and doing meaningful public engagement.

Professor Nicholas Williams
n.h.williams@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

Our research can be broadly described as physical organic chemistry. This is the design, synthesis and systematic study of (mainly) organic molecules. The molecules we are interested in designing are ones which either show fundamental insights into mechanisms, reactivity, recognition and/or catalysis, or exploit the understanding we have to create more complex supramolecular systems. Practically, we think at the molecular level (designing organic molecules with key structural features), make them (organic synthesis), and finally discover how well they function by carefully examining their properties.

Currently, we have several main strands of investigation:Enzymes are remarkably efficient catalysts, operating under mild aqueous conditions; as man made efforts to achieve similar activity are many orders of magnitude less efficient, there is still a great deal that we do not understand. We are investigating well defined model compounds to understand how to combine several functional groups so that they work really effectively together. This helps give a deeper understanding of biological catalysis, and guides us in designing our own biomimetic catalysts. Organic ligands which can bind and control the reactivity of metal ions provide the best catalysts to date, and form the core of our models and catalysts.

We are applying the discovery that individual components of a catalyst can be brought together to achieve cooperative catalysis (i.e. the whole is more effective than the sum of the parts!) towards creating supramolecular systems which can be controlled by recognition processes. This is the type of event which takes place in signalling at cell surfaces, and we are making transmembrane signalling systems which mimic this. As well as these larger systems, which involve many weak interactions, we are exploring molecular cages, which are held together by stronger interaction to make more well defined structures that are capable of binding and catalysing the reactions of substrates selectively.

Keywords:

Physical organic chemistry, biological chemistry. Mechanism, reactivity, and catalysis, especially relevant to organic chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, and biology. Functional supramolecular systems.

Dr Alexis Foster
alexis.foster@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

I specialise in research on the third sector such as charities and community groups. I also research wellbeing interventions including social prescribing. I am interested in services which link different sectors together such as housing associations working in hospital inpatient units. I also have experience in implementation and knowledge mobilisation for example, implementing Patient Reported Outcome Measures. 

Methods

I am a mixed methods researcher with experience of booth quantitative and qualitative methods. I also undertake participatory and action research. I am passionate about stakeholder involvement especially patients/ service-users. 

Professor Val Gillet
v.gillet@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research interests

My research interests focus on:

  • the development and application of chemoinformatics techniques that are used primarily in the design of novel bioactive compounds.
  • data mining and machine learning methods including emerging pattern mining, multiobjective evolutionary algorithms and graph theory.

Particular application areas include the identification of structure-activity relationships, toxicity prediction, 3D similarity methods and the de novo design of novel compounds. I also have expertise in developing novel representation methods for chemical structures with recent areas including reduced graphs, wavelet analysis and reaction vectors.

Dr Laura Gray
laura.gray@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My main research interests lie in applied micro-econometrics and health. I am interested in supervising students using econometric methods to analyse individual behaviour. My previous research has included a range of quantitative methods including factor analysis, structural equation modelling, growth models and mixture models as well as methods for dealing with missing data.

I am particularly interested in obesity across different stages of life and how and why BMI changes over time. My current fellowship focuses on the causes and consequences of risky BMI trajectories in older adults.

Dr Matthew Bacon
M.Bacon@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law
Research interests and areas of supervision
  • Policing (in particular the occupational culture of the police, criminal investigation and covert policing practices)
  • Illegal drug markets and drug control policy
  • The informal economy
  • Qualitative research methods
Dr Jennifer Burr
j.a.burr@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad area of interest:

  • Sociology of health and illness

Research methods I am able to supervise:

  • Qualitative

Specific areas of interest:

  • Reproductive technology
  • Research ethics
  • Gender and sexuality
Professor Steve Goodacre
S.Goodacre@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My research interests are clinical trials in emergency medicine, economic analysis, the organisation of emergency care and methods for evaluating the quality of emergency care.

Dr Michael Mangan
m.mangan@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

My group uses bio-robotic methods to investigate how animals solve complex problems such as navigation before abstracting lessons learned to solve engineering goals. 

To reveal how animals function we utilise methods from computational neuroscience, behavioural ecology, graphics, information theory, computer vision, machine learning, and robotics disciplines. 

We then use more standard robotic and engineering methods to apply lessons to specific problem areas including robot controllers, novel sensing, and new methods of AI and machine learning inspired by natural intelligence.  We celebrate this truly multidisciplinary approach which we find both stimulating and challenging. 

Therefore we welcome exceptional candidates from across fields but those with strong backgrounds in mathematical, physical sciences and engineering disciplines (including computer science and computational neuroscience) are particularly well suited to research in my group.  

Dr Jane McKeown
j.mckeown@sheffield.ac.uk

Nursing and Midwifery

My research interests are the care and involvement of people who have dementia and I am interested in research methods that enable people’s ‘voices to be heard’.

Ms Permala Sehmar
p.sehmar@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Permala's research interests are

  • Domestic violence and abuse in marginalised and minoritised communities
  • Family practices and everyday family life 
  • Intersectional inequalities in children and families social work  
  • Restorative practice 
  • Qualitative research methods with families 
Professor Rachel Smith
rachel.smith@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

Wet granulation design and scale-up, DEM/CFD modelling of particulate processes, drug delivery methods, biological and water systems modelling.

I am also a founding member of the Pharmaceutical Engineering Interest Group.

Dr Emily Wood
e.f.wood@sheffield.ac.uk

Division of Population Health
My research interests are primarily around mental health staffing and the nursing role in health services. Methodologies include qualitative and mixed methods and single case experimental design.
Dr Steven Ariss
S.Ariss@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Methods:

  • Realist (and other ‘theory led’) Evaluations of Programmes and Complex Interventions 
  • Conversion Analysis & Ethnomethodology
  • Mixed and Qualitative Research Methods

Topics of Interest:

  • Health Service Organisation and Delivery
  • Interdisciplinary Team-Working
  • Organisational change management
  • Implementation and knowledge transfer
  • Use of technology in healthcare (for service development and evaluation)
  • Health Care Interactions and Relationships
  • Self-Management of Chronic and Long-Term Conditions
  • Older People's Community Health Services
Dr Andrew Bell
andrew.j.d.bell@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

Before moving to Sheffield, Andy was a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he also completed his undergraduate degree (in Geography) and PhD (in Advanced Quantitative Methods). Methodologically, Andy’s interests are in the development and application of multilevel models, with work focusing on age-period-cohort analysis, fixed and random effects models, and multilevel models for uncovering intersectionality. He uses these methods in a broad range of substantive areas, such as mental health across the life course, the effect of unpaid care on employment outcomes, changing attitudes to migration, etc.

Dr Richard Cooper
richard.cooper@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health
The Medical School
Department of Sociological Studies

Research Interests

  • Pharmacy
  • Non-medical prescribing
  • Addiction
  • Empirical and normative ethics in healthcare 
  • Medicine supply (prescribed and over the counter) and misuse/abuse (over the counter, illicit)
  • Medical sociology
  • Public Health

Methods

  • Qualitative (interviews, observation, ethnography, content analysis, narrative)
  • Mixed methods (questionnaires, secondary data analysis)
Dr Duncan Gillespie
duncan.gillespie@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My fundamental interest is in informing decision making in health and healthcare.
  • Health economic modelling of public health policies, particularly relating to tobacco and alcohol.
  • Social inequalities in the effects of policies and interventions.
  • Demographic change and forecasting, particularly trends in cause-specific mortality.
  • Lifecourse dynamics of health and the social determinants of health
  • Commercial determinants of health.
  • Individual-based modelling methodologies.
  • Methods for improving the reproducibility and transparency of modelling research.
  • The integration of qualitative research with mathematical modelling methods.
Dr Berna Keskin
b.keskin@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

My research interests focus on understanding the structure of the urban housing market and specifically exploring the relative merits of different approaches to capturing neighbourhood segmentation within house price models by using quantitative methods. My research adopts a variety of econometric methods to the analysis of property markets by investigating the effectiveness of different modelling techniques at capturing housing market segmentation. I am also interested in the structure and operation of real estate markets particularly from investor's and developer's perspective. 


Dr Aneta Piekut
a.piekut@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

Dr Aneta Piekut (she/her) is Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Methods Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK. Aneta also co-directs the Migration Research Group at the University of Sheffield. She is a mixed methods sociologist and her research spans disciplinary boundaries. Her research focuses on ethnic diversity, socio-spatial segregation and social cohesion, attitudes towards immigration and ethnic minorities, including their measurement and the problem of survey nonresponse.

Professor Sarah Salway
s.salway@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad area of research interest: 

  • Health inequalities
  • Gender
  • Race/ethnicity
  • Poverty
  • Reproductive health
  • Work and health
  • South Asia

Research methods I am able to supervise:

  • Qualitative
  • Quantitative or mixed methods
  • Participatory and inclusive research approaches

Specific areas of interest:

  • UK South Asian populations
  • Intersecting inequalities
  • Complex interventions
  • Knowledge translation
Professor Sarah Salway
s.salway@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Broad area of research interest: 

  • Health inequalities
  • Gender
  • Race/ethnicity
  • Poverty
  • Reproductive health
  • Work and health
  • South Asia

Research methods I am able to supervise:

  • Qualitative
  • Quantitative or mixed methods
  • Participatory and inclusive research approaches

Specific areas of interest:

  • UK South Asian populations
  • Intersecting inequalities
  • Complex interventions
  • Knowledge translation
Professor Li Su

Personal Webpage

Division of Neuroscience
My lab is a multi-disciplinary research group aims to combine innovative and original computational methods including artificial intelligence models with the state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques (EEG, MRI and PET) in understanding, detecting and developing treatments for neurological and psychiatric conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. 
 
Offering PhD opportunities in but not restricted to the following areas
 
  • Early neuroimaging and behavioural changes in neurodegenerative dementia
  • Multimodal imaging biomarkers in neurodegenerative and neurovascular diseases
  • Advanced neuroimaging analysis and computational methods including AI models
Professor Steve Fotios
s.fotios@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Architecture

My research of lighting has two main themes – human factors and research methods.

Lighting and human factors: The main question is how do variations in lighting conditions (the amount, colour, and spatial distribution) affect perception of the environment and task performance, and non-image-forming effects such as alertness? Currently, I focus mainly on lighting for pedestrians and cyclists.

Research methods: In the Lighting Research Group we aim to make sure our results are robust. In subjective evaluations, for example, we study how the question and the experimental design influence the responses gained in an experiment. Was Poulton correct that all subjective quantitative judgements are erroneous or misleading?

I have supervised 20 PhD students to completion and set up LumeNet, the annual research methods symposium for PhD students of lighting. I am the Editor-in-Chief of Lighting Research and Technology.

Professor Nicholas Latimer
n.latimer@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

My research interests focus on economic evaluation methodology, with a particular emphasis on the incorporation of survival analysis within economic models. My doctoral and post-doctoral research has focused primarily on methods for adjusting survival estimates in the presence of treatment switching - that is, when patients in the control group of a clinical trial switch onto the experimental treatment, thus confounding estimates of the treatment effect (where the relevant question for an economic analysis is what would have happened if control group patients did not receive this experimental treatment). Adjustment methods are primarily from the causal inference literature, and I have a related interest in the use of causal inference methods to estimate comparative effectiveness from registry datasets, particularly in the area of cancer.


Dr Michaela Rogers
m.rogers@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Primarily I am a qualitative researcher with an interest in narrative but I have experience of managing mixed methods projects too. I am interested in all things that concern equality and social justice in relation to my practice discipline of social work and social care, but my main research interests and research lie in the following areas:

  • interpersonal and gender-based violence (including intimate partner violence, elder abuse, domestic homicide, child abuse, and other forms of family violence);
  • gender, trans and gender diversity;
  • hidden voices and marginalised communities;
  • narrative methods.

I am also interested in, and would welcome applications, concerning:

  • Identity and belonging;
  • A sociology of family, family practices and identity;
  • Hate crime;
  • Stalking and harassment;
  • Digital methods, abuse, stalking and harassment;
Professor Michail Balikhin
m.balikhin@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

Research interests:

  • Space Plasma
  • Turbulence in high beta (hot) plasma
  • Collisionless Shocks
  • Avalanching Systems
  • Space Weather
  • Solar-Terrestrial Relations
  • Spacecraft Instrumentation
  • Nonlinear Systems
  • Identification of linear and non-linear processes in data
  • Methods of data analysis for multi-spacecraft missions.
Dr Samantha Caton
s.caton@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad area of research interest:

  • Obesity
  • Appetite regulation
  • Nutrition

 Research methods I am able to supervise:

  • Quantitative

Specific areas of interest:

  • Infant feeding behaviour
  • Promotion of healthful diets in pre-school children
  • Effect of alcohol on appetite and body weight regulation
Professor Enrico Dall'Ara
e.dallara@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism

Research Interests

My research interests are related to better understanding bone mechanics and remodelling with imaging, experimental and computational methods.

In particular the main goal of my research is to develop and validate computational models for the prediction of bone strength and risk of fracture in healthy and disease, applied to both preclinical and clinical studies.

Professor Jaime Delgadillo
j.delgadillo@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Psychology

My clinical interests are in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for depression, anxiety and addiction problems. My research primarily focuses on the development of methods to predict and prevent poor treatment outcomes (i.e. dropout, persistent distress after therapy, relapse) and to optimally match patients to specific interventions.

Professor Peter Dodd
p.j.dodd@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

  • Infectious disease modelling.
  • Epidemiology
  • Burden estimation
  • TB, particularly in settings with high-HIV prevalence, and population-level TB interventions.
  • TB in children.
  • Individual-based modelling methodologies.
  • Methods for model calibration and uncertainty analysis
  • Cost-effectiveness modelling
  • Global health
Professor Andrea Genovese
a.genovese@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Research interests

  • Facility Location Problems: models, methods, applications
  • Applications of Spatial Interaction theory
  • Multi-Criteria Decision Making problems
  • Decision Support Models for Logistics Problems
  • Green logistics and low carbon innovation for Supply Chains
Professor Kirill Horoshenkov
k.horoshenkov@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

Professor Horoshenkov’s main research interests are in novel sensors for water industry, novel acoustic materials and material characterisation methods. His other area of work relates to noise control, audio-visual interactions and design of nature-inspired noise control solutions.

Professor Derek Ingham
d.ingham@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Professor Derek Ingham is an applied mathematician who has worked on a wide variety of engineering and industrial mathematical problems in collaboration with numerous engineering scientists and with several industries and acted as an Expert Witness. He has published research papers with members of staff in all the engineering and environment departments, and several science and medical departments. At present he supervises 15 PhD students and has successfully supervised over 100 PhD students. Further he is on the editorial board of 12 international journals, has written 16 research books, over 900 research papers in referred journals and over 40 confidential industrial reports. He has received funding from over 70 different organizations.

In particular, he has research interests in energy:  wind energy, fuel cells; heat and fluid flows: flows in porous media, ill-proposed problems, cementing of oil castings, proppant transport in  fractures, Stirling Engines, heating of oils and in ship holds. Carbon capture and storage. Environment: ventilation, fume cupboards, sampling, aerosols, filtration, gravity currents, atomisers, blowing snow. Computational Fluid Dynamics: Finite volume methods, finite element methods, Lattice Boltzman methods, boundary element methods. Turbulence. Boundary layer theory.

Professor Suzanne Mason
s.mason@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

My research interests relate to the evaluation of complex interventions and systems in emergency care settings. I have extensive experience in multi-centre mixed methods studies which can directly inform the delivery of high quality emergency care to patients.

Dr Tom Pering
t.pering@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Geography

The measurement of sulphur dioxide, using ultra violet cameras, and modelling via computational fluid dynamics and laboratory analogues of a variety of degassing modes from basaltic magmas, including: passive, strombolian, and lava fountaining.

Low-cost alternatives to previously expensive methods

Ms Katie Powell
K.Powell@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad areas of research interest:

  • Health Inequalities

Research Methods I am able to supervise:

  • Qualitative

Specific areas of interest:

  • Community development/engagement
  • Voluntary sector
  • Geographical areas of deprivation
  • Health improvement initiatives
  • Social exclusion
Dr Rola Saad
r.saad@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
Research Interests
  • Miniaturised multiband electromagnetic metamaterial characterisation and design.
  • Regression methods for electromagnetic periodic structures 
  • Active mmWave programmable metamaterials. 
  • Printed antennas and metasurfaces. 
  • Reconfigurable miniaturised antennas. 
  • mmWave Phased array antennas and beamforming systems.
Dr Angela Sorsby
A.Sorsby@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

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
Professor Markus Szymik
M.Szymik@Sheffield.ac.uk

School of Mathematics and Statistics

My research revolves around symmetries in topology, geometry, and algebra. I use homotopy theory and homological algebra, representation theory and K-theory to understand groups and their generalisations, but these methods have applications far beyond the study of symmetry. My current research also applies these ideas to number theory and algebraic geometry.

Dr James Weinberg
james.weinberg@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Politics and International Relations

James is particularly interested in mixed methods’ studies of political behavior (at both elite and mass levels). He has experience of fielding experimental surveys, conducting focus groups and elite interviews, designing and evaluating surveys for a range of research purposes, as well as quantitative textual analysis and data visualisation.

Dr Fiona Wilson
fiona.wilson@sheffield.ac.uk

Nursing and Midwifery
My research interests are in palliative and end of life care, particularly how people make decisions about care and service provision, and older people's care and access to services.  My methodological strengths are in participatory approaches and qualitative research methods. 
Dr Tim Ireland
t.ireland@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Architecture

My research interests include:

# Computational/generative design: morphology/form finding and spatial configuration.

# Algorithmic and biological design: understanding morphology and structure in natural constructions (for example termite mounds), and how understanding of such structures (the construction process, morphology, and physiological performance), can be applied in architectural design

# Swarms and Collective Behaviour

# Collective intelligence and distributed cognition

# Communication and signification in natural systems (i.e., sign systems/biosemiotics)

# Experimental architecture, with note to history and theory of (which is typically analogue or pre-modern algorithmic methods) and how such past work might be (re)applied and transformed through algorithmic generative design methods.

# The design theory and work of Frederick Kiesler.

Professor Adam Leaver
A.Leaver@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Chair in Accounting and Society

Adam's current research interests include:

  • using social network analysis methods to map the social relationships that underlie certain complex securities markets
  • developing a relational theory of the firm to understand the impact of financialization in the corporate sphere
  • exploring the inter-temporal transfers and tensions that arise as a consequence of financialization
  • theorising the relations between accounting and the built environment.

Adam is available to supervise PhD students in the following areas:

  1. Critical accounting using 'follow-the-money' methods
  2. Financialization
  3. Heterodox economic/accounting approaches to financial crisis
  4. Economic sociology of finance
Dr Robert Barthorpe
r.j.barthorpe@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

Dr Barthorpe's research covers a range of problems in the field of structural dynamics and beyond, with an underlying theme being the integration of numerical modelling and experimental data. Structural health monitoring is one of his major research themes. The broad aim of an SHM system is to be able to identify, at an early stage, occurrences of damage that may ultimately lead to the failure of the component or system being monitored.

Established approaches to this task typically fall into one of two categories: they are either based entirely on experimental data, or make use of a numerical model that is periodically updated as new data becomes available. Both of these approaches have distinct drawbacks: for the former, lack of appropriate experimental data is the major issue; for the latter, model-form uncertainty is among the challenges faced.

Part of Rob's work is in investigating ways to circumvent the lack of data problem through novel experimental and data-modelling techniques. A larger part is in developing new methods for integrating experimental and numerical methods, such that uncertainty in both the experimental measurements and the numerical model may be accounted for.

These methods are being developed for application to aerospace structures, wind turbines and civil infrastructure. However, the domain of applicability is much broader as the issues of handling uncertainty, solving inverse problems and overcoming test-model discrepancy are pervasive in many branches of science and engineering. Applications being investigated include the energy performance of buildings and the modelling of human bones.

Dr Joseph Claghorn
j.claghorn@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Landscape Architecture

The focus of my personal research has been on the use of computational methods to model emergent processes in the landscape and to explore how these methods can be used in contemporary landscape architectural practice.

This has been the topic of my doctoral thesis Algorithmic Landscapes: Computational Methods for the mediation of Form, Information, and Performance in Landscape Architecture.

More broadly, I am interested in studying the emergent and evolutionary qualities of landscapes and in developing strategies for intervention in particularly difficult or complex contexts.

In the past years, I have collaborated on research exploring the potential of landscape architectural interventions to address issues of disaster and risk while improving community living standards in low-income, largely informal settlements, including sponsored research in Colombia and in Brazil.

In addition, I have curated the blog Generative Landscapes since August of 2014, which provides straightforward examples of algorithms developed using Rhino and Grasshopper. As of January 2019 the blog has just shy of 800,000 views from 170,000 unique visitors.

Dr Dani Madrid Morales
d.madrid-morales@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Journalism, Media and Communication

Global Communication and Computational Methods in Journalism

Dani's research focuses on global political communication and international media flows, with a focus on the Global South. He has published on the impact of global Chinese media on local journalistic cultures in English and French speaking Africa. He has also studied the multiple ways audiences in East and Southern Africa engage with news and entertainment on Chinese media.


In recent years, he has also been interested in the geopolitics of disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from an audience perspective. He is currently examining how media users engage with disinformation online, and how foreign disinformation influences public opinion.

In his research, Dani employs a wide range of methods and welcomes students with a keen interest in mixed methods, including computational approaches to the study of media texts.

PhD Supervision

Dani is particularly interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

  • China-Africa media relations
  • Disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Global public opinion
  • Audiences and global media flows
  • Computational approaches to the study news
Professor Siddharth Patwardhan
s.patwardhan@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

Picture


Green Nanomaterials Research Group

Research in the group undertakes the synthesis of bespoke nanomaterials using biologically inspired green routes.

In our new book, the aim is to address the highly sought aspect of how to translate the understanding of biominerals into new green manufacturing methods. We cover aspects from the discovery of new green synthesis methods all the way to considering their commercial manufacturing routes.

The group aims to demonstrate potential of green methods for nanomaterials synthesis by realisation of their real-life applications. Current projects are focussed on developing application of green nanomaterials in four distinct sectors:   

A significant research focus is on developing the science underpinning scale-up of green nanomaterials, thus enabling their large-scale manufacturing.

Focus is on increasing technology readiness level (TRL) for new developments and delivering technologies that are ready for commercialisation.

New Technologies Invented:

Dr Indeewara Perera
i.perera@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Economics

Indeewara’s research interests include model fitting, estimation, inference and forecasting in non-linear time series models, with special emphasis on statistical analysis of financial data. The concepts and tools used for weak convergence of stochastic processes in metric spaces, bootstrap methods, and goodness-of-fit tests play important roles in most of his research.

He has produced several papers in leading journals in the areas of econometric theory, mathematical statistics, and time series analysis. Four of his papers have been published in journals ranked A* by the 2013 Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List.

Indeewara is interested in supervising PhD students working in Econometrics (Theoretical or Applied) and Statistics. Specifically, he is interested in the following areas:

  • Developing new methods for model fitting, estimation, inference and forecasting in non-linear Econometric/Time-Series models, including ARCH/GARCH type models, Multiplicative Error models, and Panel Data models.

  • Bootstrap and resampling methods in Econometrics and Statistics; in particular, he is interested on nonstandard and massive data set ups.

Professor Keith Worden
K.Worden@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

Keith's research is concerned with applications of advanced signal processing and machine learning methods to structural dynamics. The primary application is in the aerospace industry, although there has also been interaction with ground transport and offshore industries.

One of the research themes concerns non-linear systems. The research conducted here is concerned with assessing the importance of non-linear modelling within a given context and formulating appropriate methods of analysis. The analysis of non-linear systems can range from the fairly pragmatic to the extremes of mathematical complexity. The emphasis within the research group here is on the pragmatic and every attempt is made to maintain contact with engineering necessity.

Another major activity within the research group concerns structural health monitoring for aerospace systems and structures. The research is concerned with developing automated systems for inspection and diagnosis, with a view to reducing the cost-of-ownership of these high integrity structures. The methods used are largely adapted from pattern recognition and machine learning; often the algorithms make use of biological concepts e.g. neural networks, genetic algorithms and ant-colony metaphors. The experimental approaches developed range from global inspection using vibration analysis to local monitoring using ultrasound.

Dr Jon Dickson
j.m.dickson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Academic Unit of Medical Education
Division of Population Health

I am an academic GP.  My special interests are neurology, epilepsy and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures.  Major themes in my research are improving emergency care for people after a seizure and the use of free-association narrative interviews to give new insights into psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. All of my research is about health-service quality improvement, my personal methodological expertise is in quantitative methods but I work in multi-disciplinary research teams using mixed methods to develop and test complex interventions. 

I am very happy to receive informal enquiries.  Feel free to get in touch by email.  

My web profile is avaiable via this link:

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/medicine/research/aupmc/staff/academicprofiles/jmdickson

 

Dr Ross Drummond
ross.drummond@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
Research description: Dr Drummond's research has three main focus areas: the management and control of energy storage devices, nonlinear systems analysis and the robustness analysis of neural networks. A primary concern is the use of control theoretic techniques to optimise the performance of energy storage devices such as lithium ion batteries. This includes the design of fast charging protocols, model development and advancing battery manufacturing methods. The need to understand battery dynamics has motivated his research into nonlinear systems, in particular searching for novel Lyapunov functions. Finally, using these advances in nonlinear systems, he has been applying these methods to quantify the robustness of neural networks and relate them to control theoretic techniques such as model predictive control. Together, these three research streams emphasize how effectively utilising modelling, control and optimisation can improve the performance of several leading technologies such as batteries and neural networks.
Dr Morgan Harvey
m.harvey@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research Interests

My research focuses on the following main areas:

  • (Interactive) Information Retrieval, particularly mobile IR - how situational context and distractions impact search behaviour/performance and how this can be mitigated
  • Recommender systems and personalisation, particularly to help improve people’s nutritional intake, meal planning and overall health
  • Conversational agents and how these can be used to solve problems in search, recommender systems and health

PhD Supervision

I would welcome proposals related to any of the above topics and have experience working with a wide range of research methods. I am particularly interested in work that seeks to tackle problems with a mixed methods approach and that directly involves target users in research via co-design and user studies.

Dr Siobhan McAndrew
s.mcandrew@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

Siobhan’s current research interests span behavioural social science; the study of religion, culture and values in social and political life; and digital policy. Prior to joining Sheffield Methods Institute, Siobhan was QStep Director and Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Social Science at the University of Bristol.

Siobhan currently leads a research project into vaccine confidence and attitudes to public health policy, and is also involved in funded projects on cultural sector employment and cultural data innovation. Her methodological interests lie in generation of new historical datasets, linkage of born-digital and survey data, and network analysis. Siobhan is also Programme Director of the BA and BSc degrees in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, leading core modules on concepts and research methods

Dr Andrew Nowakowski
a.f.nowakowski@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

Andrew's research interests are in the area of aerodynamics, multi-component and multi-phase flows. In all these categories, the work aims to construct the algorithms for determining approximate solutions of relevant flow problems. Then, numerical methods are analysed and computer codes implementing the algorithms are developed, first for the purpose of showing the efficacy of the discretization methods and ultimately, to solve problems of practical interest.

The developed numerical technique based on vortex method was used to compute hydrodynamic forces for the flow past a rotating body. Andrew's group created a novel approach for calculation of the flow problem in hydrocyclones and developed its own specialist finite element software package, which was used to calculate the three-dimensional incompressible flow in complex geometries. Most recently, a computational simulation of two-phase compressible flow has been proposed for safety analysis of chemical reactors. The approach taken in this research enables the resolution of multi-phase mixtures and interface problems between compressible fluids.

Professor Layla Skinns
l.skinns@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

A key focus of my research has been police detention, in England and Wales, but also in other parts of the Anglophone world. In this setting, I am interested in police powers and their relationship with the law, police cultures and police discretion, and furthermore, how this impacts on equality and on state-citizen relations. I am also interested in how the public – particularly detainees – perceive the police, which links my research to discussions about police legitimacy and to 'good' policing.

Research Interests

  • The police custody process
  • Police and policing
  • The role of the law in policing
  • Police legitimacy
  • Multi-agency criminal justice partnerships
  • Crime prevention and community safety
  • Restorative justice in schools
  • The relationship between drugs and crime
  • Mixed-methods research

Areas of Research Supervision

  • The police custody process
  • Police and policing
  • The role of the law in policing
  • Police legitimacy
  • Multi-agency criminal justice partnerships
  • Crime prevention and community safety
  • Mixed-methods research
Dr Keith Tarnowski
k.tarnowski@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

My research focuses on fracture mechanics aspects of structural integrity, encompassing crack growth mechanisms such as fatigue and creep, as well as brittle and ductile fracture. My research combines experimental techniques with numerical modelling and I have experience of a wide variety of finite element analysis software packages including, ABAQUS, DYNA, NASTAN and PATRAN.

I have developed improved methods of accurately measuring crack initiation and growth in ductile materials and in hostile environments. These methods, based on the electrical potential drop technique, facilitate improved material models that enable the continued safe operation of structures, avoiding premature maintenance and decomissioning programmes. This provides potentially huge social, environmental and economic benefits to variety of industries, e.g. power generation.  The ASTM standards on fracture toughness testing (E1820) and creep crack growth testing (E1457) have been revied to incorporate this research.

Dr Mark Tomlinson
mark.tomlinson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Research interests

  • Poverty and deprivation (measurement and impacts)
  • Labour markets, skills and training
  • Innovation systems and the learning economy
  • The relationships between social, innovation and industrial policy
  • Socio-economic indicators
  • Advanced multivariate methods (such as Structural Equation Models, panel regression, neural networks)

I am an interdisciplinary scholar having worked in economics, management, innovation studies and sociology over the past two decades. My main interests at the moment are in labour processes and labour market disdvantage (which includes skills, learning, organisational effects on human capital development, and the contribution labour makes to innovation systems etc). I also have a strong interest in poverty research in general.

I broadly follow an economic sociological approach and use quantitative methods. I also try to apply my research to the real world in terms of policy development.

Dr Alexandra Woodall
alexandra.woodall@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Programme Director for Creative and Cultural Industries Management

Primarily interested in how people engage with material culture in museums (the encounter between a person and a thing), not least through developing collaborative creative projects with artists, Alex is also interested in how the museum workforce is supported to flourish. To that end, she initiated and is currently working with the UK Museums Association to undertake the first ever piece of research on bullying in the museums sector. In addition, she is involved in object-based research in heritage tourism sites in India, particularly in the City Palace Museum in Jaipur and in Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh, where she has collaborated with Professor Sandra Dudley (University of Leicester), Professor Manvi Seth (National Museum Institute, New Delhi) and an international team of researchers.

Alex's research methods are qualitative, often including reflexive interview, participant observation and visual methods. 

Professor Parveen Ali
parveen.ali@sheffield.ac.uk

Nursing and Midwifery

I am a mixed method researcher and equally use qualitative as well as quantitative methods. I explore gender based violence, especially intimate partner violence from the perspective of victims and perpetrators.  I am interested in exploring nursing research related topics,  inequalities in health care experiences and health outcomes and how the preparation and training of health professionals such as doctors, nurses and allied health professionals can contribute to tackling such inequalities. Any other topics related to nursing, nursing research  

Dr Gemma Arblaster
g.arblaster@sheffield.ac.uk

Ophthalmology and Orthoptics

I am a clinical academic Orthoptist with an interest in strabismus, binocular single vision, eye movements, low vision and orthoptics. I have a special interest in projects that measure the outcomes of treatments for strabismus, functional outcomes and eye movement disorders, such as nystagmus. My previous research has been quantitative, but more recently has also included mixed methods research. Please contact me if you would like to discuss research in these areas.

Dr Gianna Ayala
g.ayala@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Archaeology

Research interests:

My research interests are wide reaching and focus on the integration of different analytical methods. I work predominately in the Mediterranean but have worked all over the world, including Britain, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Turkey and Argentina.

  • Geoarchaeology (landscape and on-site investigations)
  • Italian and Mediterranean prehistory
  • Landscape archaeology and field survey techniques
  • Contemporary archaeology
Dr Gianna Ayala
g.ayala@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences

Research interests:

My research interests are wide reaching and focus on the integration of different analytical methods. I work predominately in the Mediterranean but have worked all over the world, including Britain, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Turkey and Argentina.

  • Geoarchaeology (landscape and on-site investigations)
  • Italian and Mediterranean prehistory
  • Landscape archaeology and field survey techniques
  • Contemporary archaeology
Dr Harsh Beohar
h.beohar@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

My research interests lie in developing new techniques or improve the existing ones for the behavioural analysis of concurrent systems. To this end, I use methods from algebra, logic, or/and category theory. In the past, I've worked on the following topics: coalgebras and their modal logic, model based testing of software product lines, semantics of hybrid systems, (pre)sheaves models for concurrency, and verification of asynchronous systems.

Dr Rebecca Boston
r.boston@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Sustainable Oxide Processing Group 

My group and I are interested in developing new low-temperature synthesis routes to control particle size and shape in functional ceramic oxides. Current work includes Na- and Li-ion battery cathodes and anodes, thermoelectrics, dielectrics, oxide superconductors and materials for fusion energy generation. 

We also investigate novel low temperature sintering methods which allow us to create dense ceramics with controlled nanostructure, exploiting emergent structure-morphology relationships. 

Professor Thomas Bridgeland
T.Bridgeland@shef.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

I am an algebraic geometer with a particular interest in homological methods, enumerative invariants and topological string theory. My research is currently focused on a large programme which aims to use Donaldson-Thomas invariants to define geometric structures on spaces of stability conditions. Research projects in this area typically involve a mix of algebraic geometry and complex analysis.

Dr Mark Bryan
m.l.bryan@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Economics

Mark is interested in supervising PhD students in variety of topics in empirical labour studies including:

  • wage inequality (trends and causes)
  • consequences of the ageing workforce
  • trends in the amount and timing of work and their implications
  • the impacts of labour market institutions such as the minimum wage
  • the impact of labour market experiences on wellbeing
  • econometric and statistical methods for describing and analysing labour market outcomes
Dr Roy Chaudhuri
r.chaudhuri@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences

Research Interests:

Bacterial genomics.  Current research topics include:

  • Comparative genomics and phylogenetics of bacterial pathogens, particularly E. coli and Salmonella
  • Use of transposon insertion sequencing methods (TraDIS/TnSeq/HITS/InSeq) to identify essential bacterial genes and genes important for survival in particular environments such as during infection of a model system
  • Development of user-friendly software tools and online resources for exploring data from -omics technologies. Examples include coliBASE, Xbase and the recently-funded MicrobesNG.
Dr Thomas Clark
t.clark@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Research interests

My main research interests are in the broad areas of research methodology, novel applications of social theory, and sport. More specifically, I am interested in the utility of social research and the impact of being researched; the ethics of social research; secondary research methods; methodological innovation; and, the sociology of lower league football. Currently, I am attempting to utilise novel sources of data in order to explore the sociology of evil. I am also interested in the sociology of deception, in all of its various disguises.

Professor Helen Colley
h.colley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Clinical Dentistry

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma is the 6th most common cancers worldwide. The survival rate for head and neck cancer is poor. This is largely due to late diagnosis and a lack of effective therapeutic agents.


My particular research interest is in the development of multi-cellular three dimensional in vitro models of the oral mucosa in health and disease. My current research utilises these models to develop; new methods of detecting oral pre-cancer, novel drugs to treat oral cancer and new modes of drug delivery systems.

Dr SJ Cooper-Knock
S.J.Cooper-Knock@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies
School of Law

SJ Cooper-Knock's research focuses on the politics of urban life in South Africa. The current focus of their work includes: everyday policing and punishment; being and belonging in the city; the politics of crisis; and concepts of urban justice. SJ particularly welcomes applications that will be using qualitative methods and has an ongoing interest in arts-based approaches.

Mr Lee Crookes
l.crookes@shef.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Research interests

Positioning myself as a critical geographer/planner, I am interested in using qualitative methods to explore contemporary issues related to housing, class, gentrification, urban regeneration and associated conflicts over the meaning and use of space.

Within the context of a broad ambition to develop an understanding of planning ‘from below’, I am keen to extend and develop the focus of gentrification research from displacement to matters of emplacement whilst further examining the politics and geography of ‘home’, attachment to place and the personal and social costs of displacement.

Professor Simon Dixon
s.dixon@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad area of research interests:

  • Health economics
  • Economic evaluation

Methods I am able to supervise:

  • Economic evaluation
  • Preference elicitation

Specific area of research interests: 

  • Economic evaluation alongside controlled trials
  • Valuation of non-health outcomes
  • Process utility
  • Willingness to pay methodology
  • Decison rules for reimbursement
  • Transferability of economic evaluations
  • Global Health
Dr Samuel Farley
s.j.farley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Senior Lecturer

Sam is a Senior Lecturer in Work Psychology at Sheffield University Management School. He is particularly interested in the Dark Side of workplace behaviour, including bullying, cyberbullying and incivility. Within this field, his interests include the measurement of bullying, perpetrators of bullying and methods of preventing and addressing bullying in organisational life. Prior to working at Sheffield, Sam worked as an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds Business School.

Dr Aimee Felstead
a.felstead@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Landscape Architecture
  • Urban commons and community-led management of urban resources
  • The design and management of shared landscapes with a particular focus on community-led housing.
  • The role of design practitioners in mediating top-down and bottom-up approaches to design
  • Creative and participatory methods for engaging people in research and design, with a current focus on pattern languages.
  • Philosophies and theories relating to long-term affordance and adaption of urban spaces
Dr Jonathan Foster
j.j.foster@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research interests

My main research interests are within the area of information management, with specialist expertise in information governance and ethics. I have led and worked with colleagues from across a number of disciplines on externally funded projects in this area supported by the EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC, and Innovate UK. I predominantly use qualitative and mixed-methods.

PhD Supervision

Information governance and ethics; AI governance, accountability and ethics; trustworthy and responsible AI; information management.


Professor Thomas Hain
t.hain@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Research interests

Thomas' research interests cover many areas in natural language processing, speech, audio and multimedia technology, machine learning, and complex system optimisation and design.

His interests include: large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, non-linear methods in speech processing, low bit-rate speech coding, machine learning, multi-modal systems, image classification, microphone arrays, system and resource optimisation.

Professor Naomi Hawkins
n.l.hawkins@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

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

Research interests
  • Intellectual Property and Innovation Law
  • Patent Law
  • Biotechnology Law and Ethics
  • Health Law and Bioethics
 
Dr Liam Healy
liam.healy@sheffield.ac.uk

School of Architecture

My practice-research interests focus around situated speculative and critical design, participation, co-design, prototyping, DIY design, care, the Anthropocene, design's intersection with actor-network theory (ANT), science and technology studies (STS), and speculative thought.

I am also interested in (and convinced by the value of) designing and researching through making and practice — to think through materials and their processes by experimenting, modelling and prototyping, as well as utilising photo and video methods.


Professor Monica Hernandez
monica.hernandez@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

My main research interests lie in microeconometrics, the analysis of micro level data on the economic behaviour of individuals. I am also interested in more general model and methods development to analyse individual level data showing nonstandard characteristics. Recent examples include analysis of health state utility data, health and life satisfaction, the economics of illicit behaviour, the dynamics of children developmental outcomes and applications to individuals’ decisions to participate in welfare programmes.

Professor John Holmes
john.holmes@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My research focuses on alcohol and public health.  I have particular interests in trends and patterns in alcohol consumption, alcohol policy analysis, and the relationship between alcohol use and other health-related behaviours.  Recent projects focus on alcohol pricing, trends in drinking occasions, cultures and practices, youth drinking trends, the development and evaluation of drinking guidelines, and the equity implications of alcohol policy. 

I would be interested in supervising doctoral research related to any of the topics above using quantitative or mixed methods.  

Dr Georges Kesserwani
g.kesserwani@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

Research interests

Dr Kesserwani current research interests revolve around:

  • Hybrid mesh-based/mesh-less numerical methods for solving conservations laws
  • Integrated river flow modelling on mobile bed with sediment transport and vegetation
  • Multi-layer coastal flow modelling with application to tsunamis
  • Integrated hydrological and flood modelling at multiple scales
  • High-performance computing and Multi-Agent-based systems


Professor Vitaveska Lanfranchi
v.lanfranchi@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Her research has a fundamental interdisciplinary nature, and has developed both in industry and in academia. It concerns the intersection among ubiquitous computing, knowledge capture and visualization and human computer interaction in fields as diverse emergency response, mobility, smart cities, manufacturing, aerospace and more recently wellbeing. Her research focuses on user participatory design methods to develop novel methodologies and interfaces for ubiquitous and mobile computing.

Professor Zoe Marshman
z.marshman@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Clinical Dentistry

Research interests

My main interest is child-centred dental research to increase understanding of the impact of oral health and dental care on children and young people. My work involves inclusive research with children with the aim of informing policy and clinical practice.

I co-ordinate the Children and Young People Oral Health Research Group, a multidisciplinary team conducting research with children using a range of research methods

Dr Andrew Narracott
a.j.narracott@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease
The Medical School

Research interests

My research interest is the application of numerical techniques to the study of cardiovascular systems, with development of associated experimental validation methods. Application areas include coronary artery stenting, native and prosthetic valve function and venous haemodynamics. Such applications cover a range of technical areas including structural mechanics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Fluid-Structure Interaction and multi-scale approaches for biological systems.

Professor Glenys Parry
G.D.Parry@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

My interests include the application of research to policy and practice, service evaluation, process and outcomes of psychotherapy in health service settings and psychotherapeutic competence.

Recent research includes an evaluation of the new model of psychological service delivery "Improving Access to Psychological Therapies" and an investigation into research-based methods of improving the quality and effectiveness of psychological services for people with long term depression.

Mr Dan Pollard
d.j.pollard@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Broad area of interest:

My interests are broadly in building mathematical models to assess the long term benefits and costs of different health care strategies/interventions and subsequently conduct an economic evaluation of adopting the new strategies/interventions. I have primarily done modelling in populations with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and people presenting with medical emergencies. Most economic evaluations I have conducted have involved developing an individual level simulation model.
 

Research methods I am able to supervise:

Mathematical modelling
Economic Evaluation
Professor Pierre Ricco
p.ricco@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

Pierre's research focuses on fluid mechanics and he has used experimental, numerical and theoretical techniques. He has been interested in turbulent drag reduction by moving surfaces (spanwise wall oscillations and traveling waves), and in boundary-layer transition to turbulence induced by free-stream perturbations. 

  • Turbulent drag reduction
  • Bypass transition to turbulence
  • Klebanoff modes in laminar boundary layers
  • Effect of free-stream disturbances on laminar boundary layers
  • Receptivity of Tollmien-Schlichting waves
  • Perturbation methods in applied mathematics


Dr Sarah Spencer
sarah.spencer@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Human Communication Sciences (old code)
Research interests
  • Interventions and evidence-based practice for developmental speech, language and communication difficulties
  • Including service-users in developing, designing and evaluating interventions
  • Speech and language difficulties of older children and adolescents
  • Working in contexts of 'social disadvantage'
  • Facilitation of effective collaborations with education and families
  • Sociolinguistics and speech and language therapy
  • Service-level evaluation
  • Identity and language, particularly related to a) social class; b) adolescence; and/or c) speech, language and communication difficulties.
  • Qualitative and mixed research methods
Dr Neil Stewart
neil.stewart@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease

My research interests include the development and optimisation of MRI methods and technology for hyperpolarised media and lung imaging.

Ongoing projects include:
- Free-breathing cardio-pulmonary MRI in infants
- Pulse sequence development for multi-nuclear MRI
- Hyperpolarisation technology development for 129Xe gas by spin-exchange optical pumping, and 13C compounds by parahydrogen-induced polarisation
- Physiological models of gas exchange and diffusion in the lungs

Dr Eleanor Stillman
E.C.Stillman@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

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.

Dr Christina Tatham
c.h.tatham@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Education

Christina’s research is focused on young children’s experiences of, and access to, education
in linguistically and culturally diverse settings. More recently, Christina has worked
specifically with asylum seeking and refugee families with young children to understand
how voluntary and community organisations support them to access education.

Christina has a particular interest in participatory, visual methods with children and
methodologies that highlight children’s rights adopt the perspective that children are
competent social actors.

Professor Andrew Tyas
a.tyas@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

Research interests

Dr Tyas is head of the blast and impact research group in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, managing the testing laboratory at Harpur Hill, Buxton where research into blast physics and the response of structures to rapid dynamic loading is conducted. He is also a Director of Blastech Ltd, a University spin-out company offering consultancy and commercial testing services to industry in the field of blast and impact loading of structures. Additionally, he collaborates with Dr Matthew Gilbert in the development of computational optimisation-based methods for the design of structures. 

Professor Stephen Walters
s.j.walters@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

Dr Kevin Walters
k.walters@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

My research interests are in the application and development of (mostly Bayesian) statistical methods to identify disease-causing DNA variants in population-based studies. I am interested in finding coherent ways of incorporating functional genomic information into priors to aid the detection of these causal variants. I have also recently become interested in developing statistical approaches to determine essential bacterial genes using transposon insertion data (next generation sequencing). One such approach uses modified Hidden-Markov models.

Dr Antony Williams
Anthony.Williams@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Education

Tony's research interests are focused in areas of critical psychology and psychoanalytic concepts and theory. To date his research has focused on contributing to the concept of a critical educational psychology. Related areas of interest include group dynamics, conceptions of mental health and emotional wellbeing, case study research and the use of reflexive and interpretative research methods.

Dr Mengdie Zhuang
m.zhuang@sheffield.ac.uk>
Personal Webpage

Information School

My research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and has applications both in academic, public service and in industry. The topics and methods I am interested in include, but are not limited to: Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Data Visualisation, Urban Analytics, Digital Health, Machine Learning, Spatial Data Science, Representation Learning.

A detailed and updated list can be found here.

Professor Liam Foster
l.foster@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Research interests

Much of my research focus is on inequalities in later life and policy implications, particularly in relation to pensions. This has often included a gendered focus. The role of planning for retirement has also been explored. I have liaised with the Labour Party, Trade Unions, the European Parliament and pension providers about these findings. I am also interested in theories of ageing and the application of the political economy of ageing. I have also published on the notion of active ageing considering comparative policy approaches to the implementation of active ageing measures. The impact of poverty and social exclusion on policy has been central to much of my research, for instance, in relation to my work with colleagues on funeral provision and the notion of responsibility and on social quality. I employ a variety of methods in my research including interviews, surveys and secondary data analysis of secondary data sets. These skills have been used in consultancy work for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) employing quantitative methods to evaluate student satisfaction and career paths following the completion of Architecture degrees and for AXA Wealth in relation to pension education.

Dr Christine Huebner
c.huebner@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield Methods Institute

Christine’s research explores trends in political behaviour, political engagement, and conceptions of citizenship and democracy, in particular among young people. Her current research focuses on inequalities in political representation of young people and how experiences of inequality shape young people's political behaviour. Christine has accompanied and collected evidence on the outcomes of the lowering of the voting age to 16 in Scotland and Wales and is providing evidence-based advice to policymakers wanting to connect with young people around Europe, partially in her role as partner of independent and non-partisan think tank d|part. Her methodological interests include longitudinal qualitative and quantitative research designs, statistical modelling, and surveying difficult-to-reach groups. Prior to joining the Sheffield Methods Institute, Christine was Early Career Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2020. She welcomes applications to study PhD research degrees, either full or part time in the following areas: political participation, citizenship, perceptions of political legitimacy, political inequality, lowering the voting age, children’s voting, longitudinal qualitative methods

Dr Guenter Moebus
g.moebus@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Research interests

Core research develops from the advancement of methods of Characterization, Patterning and Irradiation of Materials on the Nanoscale (Nanometrology & Nanomanipulation). These methods are applied in collaboration with research groups spanning a wide range of research fields in optical, energy, catalytical and biomedical materials sectors. Particular materials examinations include oxide nanoparticles, nanoscale hydroxyapatite, metallic nanostructures with special plasmonic properties, porous alumina and related nanocomposites, piezo-actuation materials, metallic multi-layers, and multi-component oxide glasses, including those for radionuclide immobilisation.

Recent priority research topics include:

  • Developments in Nano-Tomography for 3D reconstruction of nanoparticles, nanophases and for 3D chemical mapping of composites.
  • Atomistic structure of nanoparticles, their surface structures and structural dynamics related to catalytic activity, as well as particle-coalescence, using quantitative high- resolution electron microscopy (HREM) and in-situ TEM.
  • Study of structure and chemistry of glasses and ceramics, including radiation induced fluidity, local determination of coordination and oxidation states of cations, coordination of borate units, and precipitation in oxide glasses (e.g. alkali-borosilicates, zinc-borosilicate).
  • Electron and ion beam interactions with materials, including irradiation for patterning of surfaces for nanotechnology applications. New method of porous-alumina-masked ion implantation into substrates for optical and magnetic nanodot patterning
Professor Amaka Offiah
a.offiah@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism
The Medical School

Research interests

I am interested in the imaging of the paediatric musculoskeletal system including suspected child abuse, skeletal dysplasias including osteogenesis imperfecta and rheumatological conditions such as juvenile dermatomysosits and juvenile idiopathic arthritis. My research includes developing methods of determining which children have fragile bones prone to fracture and which do not. More specifically, I am concentrating on the optimisation of current techniques and development of novel methods of distinguishing brittle from normal bones, in understanding the mechanisms of accidental injury in infants and young children, in post-mortem imaging and in improving the detection and dating of the subtle fractures seen in abuse. More generally within the paediatric musculoskeletal system I am developing normative data for a signficant number of radiographic parameters measured in children for which robust normal standards do not exist, including vertebral fracture assessment, base of skull measurements and bone age. In collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Engineering, I am developing finite element models of children's bones to improve our understanding of accidental and inflicted injuries. My research has a focus on learning and teaching, amongst other projects I am developing software tools for teaching and training in suspected child abuse (ELECTRICA) and skeletal dysplasias (dREAMS).

Dr Ozge Ozduzen
o.ozduzen@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

First, Ozge studies media activism and participation, where she investigates political voice and mobilisation and intersectional approaches to urban and digital citizenship. Second, her research covers the interrelated areas of far-right digital publics, the visibility and spread of online conspiracy theories, and social media use during conflicts and crises. Ozge uses both qualitative (e.g., discourse-analysis-centred methods, in-depth interviews, and participant observation) and quantitative (e.g., sentiment and content analyses) methods in her research on digital media and society.

Ozge is an experienced supervisor for students at BSc and MSc levels. She has supervised undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations on digital cultures and social identities at Brunel University and Loughborough University, including Brexit memes, #MeToo culture, celebrity diplomacy and alternative online platforms in China. Ozge would be interested in supervising PhD students on online political cultures, DIY media activism, visual politics, online disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories, media and its relationship to radicalisation, and crisis communication.

Professor Colin Smith
c.c.smith@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

Research interests:

  • Limit analysis in geotechnics: development of new numerical and analytical tools, including development of a  new numerical technique Discontinuity Layout Optimization (DLO) for solution of plasticity problems and its application in a range of areas including offshore and unsaturated soils.
  • Masonry arch bridge analysis, modelling and assessment, including the development of a full scale plane strain testing tank for soil structure interaction in masonry arch bridges in collaboration with the University of Salford.
  • Design code development focusing on theory and application of design codes using numerical methods and Eurocode 7.
  • Unsaturated soil-structure interaction. Soil physics, soil-biology interaction and micromechanics.

The experimental work has a strong basis in physical modelling, supported in particular by innovative digital imaging techniques.  Whilst at Sheffield his research has been funded by EPSRC, NERC and industry.

He is co-founder of a University spin-out company LimitState Ltd. The company specialises in the development of novel ultimate limit state analysis and design software applications which make use of research methods developed in the University, including LimitState:GEO, a rapid tool for geotechnical limit analysis in use in industry and universities in over 30 countries across the world.

Dr Julie Walsh
j.c.walsh@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Sociological Studies

My research is influenced by my historical involvement with Youth and Community Work and focuses on family, and the social constructions of what is perceived to be a 'normal' family within specific contexts.

More broadly, I am interested in the ways in which the gender, generation, ethnicity, race and migration status of family members impacts on their sense of 'belonging' to both their 'family' and the broader community.  I am also interested in the strategies employed by families, and individuals within families, to foster this sense of 'belonging' within a certain place. In addition to this, I have a long-standing interest in qualitative and ethnographic research methods and working with individuals and communities to understand the impact of broader narratives on everyday life.

I am interested in supervising research students who intend to focus on any of the following issues (in UK and/or other national/regional/international contexts):

    • Family and the relationships between ‘family’ members.
    • Community and ‘belonging’.
    • Intersections of gender, generation, ethnicity, race and migration status.
    • Multiculture and multiculturalism.
    • Qualitative and ethnographic research methods.
Dr Jingxia Wang
jingxia.wang@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

have broad research interests in spatial planning, land resources management, and urban nature. My research interests lie primarily in the trans- and interdisciplinary areas, especially in the fields of landscape and urban ecology, land resources management, landscape planning and management, and social-ecological systems research. I have worked on the topics of nature-based solutions, ecosystem services, green infrastructure planning, climate change adaptation, biodiversity conservation, soundscape assessment and planning, and smart cities. My research methods include but are not limited to GIS-based and Remote Sensing-based methods and effective planning- and decision-support digital tools such as environmental modelling, environmental sensors, Internet of Things, point cloud and digital twins, and other smart technologies for urban nature. Are you looking for Honours, Scholarships, or a PhD project? I am keen to hear from individuals with studentship, doctoral or fellowship funding. I encourage applications that highly motivated and from diverse backgrounds, particularly for topics: • Green infrastructure planning • Nature-based solutions • Ecosystem Services & Nature’s contributions to People • Climate change adaptation • Biodiversity conservation and Resilient Cities • Soundscape planning and assessment • Smart cities

Dr Liz Williams
e.a.williams@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism

Research Interests

I am a UK registered nutritionist.  My primary research interests are the role of diet in the prevention of chronic disease, healthy ageing and dietary assessment methods in older adults.  I am interested in dietary strategies to improve musculoskeletal health, diet and digestive health and in technology use for supporting people to adopt healthy behaviours. I am also interested in diet and fertility.  My research methods are primarily quantitative, and I have considerable experience in conducting and supervising dietary intervention trials in adult/older adult populations. 

My recent PhD students have studied the following:
- a randomised control trial to investigate the effect of vitamin D on musculoskeletal function in post-menopausal South-Asian women
- dietary pattern analysis in people with colorectal adenoma
- vitamin D for the management of symptoms in people with irritable bowel syndrome
- complex dietary intervention (physical activity, vitamin D and protein) to prevent musculoskeletal ageing
- development of a novel method of dietary assessment in older adults
Professor Frances Babbage
f.babbage@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of English Literature

Research interests

I welcome PhD applicants who wish to undertake research in fields that include contemporary theatre practice; devising; theatrical adaptation and rewriting; performance documentation and archive studies; and applied theatres. Sheffield University encourages practice-based as well as traditionally framed PhDs; I have supervised and examined several practice-based doctorates and am very happy to discuss such applications from potential research students. I currently supervise or co-supervise PhD projects in: aerial performance as critical practice; representations of ageing in contemporary British theatre; new models of performance dramaturgy; paratext and contemporary theatre; the methods of Maxwell and the New York City Players.

Professor Kalina Bontcheva
k.bontcheva@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Natural Language Processing

Professor Kalina Bontcheva leads the Natural Language Processing (NLP) research group. Her main research interests are in NLP methods for online abuse and disinformation analysis, social media mining and summarisation, and biomedical text analysis. Kalina has published over 150 peer reviewed papers on these topics. She regularly reviews papers for high profile conferences and journals in the field of AI and its applications.

 

PhD Supervision

Professor Bontcheva is particularly interested in hearing from research students interested in the following areas:

  • Detection and analysis of online harm (disinformation, abuse etc)
  • Social media Analytics
  • NLP Infrastructures
Dr Christopher Cooney
c.cooney@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences

Our research seeks to understand the processes structuring large-scale patterns of biodiversity. As a lab we specialise in the use and development of phylogenetic comparative methods and large datasets to address fundamental questions about the forces shaping Earth’s biodiversity and the factors responsible for maintaining it.

We work on a broad range of macro-scale ecological and evolutionary questions, often using birds as a model system. In particular, we are interested in understanding the interaction between sexual selection and ecology in driving evolutionary dynamics within birds and across the Tree of Life.

Dr Richard Craven
richard.craven@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

My academic interests concern administrative law and market regulation. In my research, I focus on government buying and selling. I have published on various aspects of UK and international public procurement regulation, and I am currently researching the legal side of major government auctions. My research uses empirical methods, qualitative and quantitative, and, related to this, I have a growing interest in the research field of empirical industrial organisation.

Research interests

  • Administrative law
  • Regulation
  • Public Procurement Regulation
  • Government contracts
  • Competition regulation
  • Law and economics
  • Empirical legal research
  • Socio-legal studies
Dr Holly Croft
h.croft@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences

I am an ecological remote sensing scientist with interests in agricultural, forested and Arctic terrestrial ecosystems. My research is focused on the use of remotely sensed data in the measurement and modelling of biophysical and ecological variables that influence vegetation productivity, carbon exchange and nutrient use, along with the effects of disturbance on ecosystem structure and function. I use remote sensing data, acquired from a range of platforms from UAVs to satellites, ground-based field experiments and novel analytical methods to improve our understanding of vegetated systems for research and management applications.

Dr Kate Davison
kate.davison@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of History

Available to supervise history topics

Kate’s research focuses on eighteenth-century British society and culture. She has a particular interest in humour and laughter in this period, and how they played a part in social practices and political processes, but this work has also drawn in wider themes relating to print culture, sociability, gender, race, and public politics. She also has an interest in approaches and methods associated with social network analysis in historical contexts.

She is happy to supervise students with interests in most aspects of eighteenth-century British culture and society.

Professor Sara Fovargue
s.j.fovargue@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Law

I have been teaching and researching issues relating to health law and ethics, and family law (particularly relating to children) for over 20 years and I am passionate about these subjects. I have also taught Criminal Law, English Legal Systems/Legal Methods, and Gender and the Law.

Research interests

Health care law and ethics generally - specifically:

  • Consent and Capacity
  • Decision Making for the 'Vulnerable'
  • Risk and Regulation
  • Clinical Research Involving Human and Non-human Animals
  • Developing and Emerging Biotechnologies (such as xenotransplantation)
  • Reproduction and Reproductive Technologies
  • Organ Donation and Transplantation
  • Conscientious Objection

Family law:

  • Parents, Parenthood and Reproductive Technologies
  • Children and Health
  • Children and Childhood
Dr Robin Highley
robin.highley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Neuroscience

I am interested in the neuropathology and pathophysiology of neurodegeneration, in particular motor neurone disease (MND), Parkinson’s disease and dementia. I use standard neuropathological techniques to characterize post mortem tissue kindly donated by individuals with these diseases and to highlight contrasts with tissue from people who were free from disease. These methods are used to study genes, proteins and molecular pathways of interest and the pathological effects of gene mutations known to neurodegeneration.

I study mouse, zebrafish and cellular models of disase and the comparison of these with human tissue based pathology

Dr Daniel Holman
daniel.holman@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

My research centres on social science and perspectives on health and illness, especially with respect to health inequalities and ageing. My work sits at the interface of sociology, social policy and public health.  I have particular interests in intersectionality, biomarker analysis, chronic disease/multimorbidity, social determinants of health, the life course, and extending working lives. I have methodological expertise in the analysis of survey data, including the use of multilevel models and panel data methods.  I am interested in supervising PhD students working on the above topics.

Professor Caroline Jackson
c.m.jackson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of History

Available to supervise archaeology topics

Caroline’s research interests are very varied and diverse within the field of archaeological material culture.  Her current focus is on the study and scientific analysis of archaeological materials, specialising in glass and other vitreous materials such as  faience and glazes. Her research uses scientific analytical methods alongside experimental archaeology to elucidate patterns relating to provenance, trade and consumption in the ancient and historic world.

  • Material culture
  • The technology of glasses
  • The analysis of glasses to explore production and consumption patterns
  • Experimental archaeology
  • Craft production
  • Provenance studies
Mr Phil Joddrell
p.joddrell@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

My primary research interest is focused on improving the quality of life for people diagnosed with dementia using everyday technologies. I specialise in using innovative methods to involve people in research for whom self-report may not always be possible. My PhD was titled: Investigating the potential of touchscreen technology to create opportunities for independent activity with people living with dementia.

I am broadly interested in the health and wellbeing of older adults including (but not limited to) the use of technology to achieve this.

I have a psychology background and spent 6 years working with older adults with dementia and mental health problems in a hospital environment.

Dr Miguel Juarez
m.juarez@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

I am interested in Bayesian hierarchical modelling for panel and longitudinal data, in particular to address problems in econometrics and biology.  I have developed mixture models capable of accommodating skewness and non-Gaussian tail behaviour in econometrics. I have been involved in developing models for systems biology as well, specifically trying to understand gene regulatory networks. Recentrly, I have developed models to analyse images from super-resolution microscopy.  I am also interested in objective Bayesian methods and their relationship with measures of information.

Professor Dorothea Kleine
d.j.kleine@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Geography

• Sustainable and just development futures in the global South (and North)

• Information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D)

• Digital Geographies and digital participatory methods

• Ethics of ICT-related development interventions, inclusive innovation and data ethics

• The capabilities approach and sustainable development

• Sustainable/ethical consumption research, food geographies, trade justice and Fair Trade

Themes such as participation, gender, justice and choice run strongly through my work. I have conducted research in Latin America (Brazil; Chile), Europe (UK, Germany), South Asia (India) and Africa (Kenya; South Africa).

Professor Rebecca Lawthom
r.lawthom@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Education

Rebecca enjoys doctoral supervision and has a strong track record of working within supervision teams to achieve success.  She is a feminist community psychologist, a disciplinary space which is suffused with explicit values and founded on social justice principles.  Her work engages in qualitative, creative and often participatory processes.  She has supervised theses which use ethnography, narratives, creative methods with children, older adults, migrants, disabled and older people.  Rebecca's research shares a similar focus, working on projects which centre partnership working, social change and marginalisation.  She is interested in supervising qualitative work which engages critically with education as a lifelong process. 

Dr Adrian Leyland
a.leyland@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Research interests

Dr Leyland´s main research interests are plasma-based coatings & treatments for surface engineering and tribology, wear & corrosion of surfaces. Coatings and treatments studied include PVD ceramic, metallic and nanocomposite films and hybrid/duplex substrate pre-treatment by diffusion hardening, plasma electrolysis or interlayering (eg. by electroless plating), to improve coating durability. Practical applications for these processing methods range from tribological (friction and wear), through thermal barriers, to high temperature & aqueous corrosion-control – as well as biomedical, optical and other functional property requirements.

Dr Sabine Little
s.little@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Education

My work is situated in the field of heritage language learners and identity -  how families who speak multiple languages in the home navigate these languages, and what this means for individual family members' sense of identity and well-being. Language is an integral part of identity, but is a very personal experience, even within the same family, so my work focuses on helping families and policy-makers understand issues and pressures faced by heritage language families, and to develop holistic support opportunities.  I supervise projects focusing on heritage languages from a family, child, school, or societal perspective. Methodologically, my work focuses on co-production and participatory research methods.

Professor Munitta Muthana
m.muthana@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism
The Medical School

Research interests

My research focuses on the role of innate immune cells like macrophages and dendritic cells in diseases including cancer and rheumatoid arthritis.  Recently, I have used my knowledge of this area to develop innovative cell-based methods to target anticancer thereapy to tumours.  For example, I have devised a way to use macrophages to deliver large quantities of cancer-killing virus to both primary and secondary tumours simultaneously (click here).  My group is also interested in improving the delivery of therapies to diseased tissue using a nanomagnetic targeting approach.

Dr Mohammed Nassar
m.nassar@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences

Research Interests

My research is focused on investigating the excitability of primary sensory neurones. The cell bodies of these neurones make Dorsal and Trigeminal sensory ganglia, and are part of the peripheral nervous system (PNS).

These neurones convey sensory information from skin and internal organs (e.g. viscera, muscles and bones) to the central nervous system (CNS). Sensory neurones convey both innoxious and noxious stimuli. The latter is perceived in the CNA as pain.

My research interest lies in investigating the molecular changes in sensory neurones that underlie pathological pain. My lab uses a variety of methods based on molecular biology, cellular biology, imaging and functional imaging to identify targets for novel and effective analgesic drugs.

Dr Caroline Oates
c.j.oates@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Reader in Responsible Marketing

Research interests

My main research efforts are focused on challenges in marketing, including sustainable marketing and marketing to children. My particular interests are centred on consumer behaviour, for instance how individuals make choices around sustainable consumption. My current research with colleagues from Scotland and Ireland investigates influences on sustainable consumer behaviour. My other research interest is marketing to children and here I am interested in what children understand when encountering marketing episodes across different media and in different contexts. I mainly work with qualitative methods.

 

Dr Lee Pretlove
l.j.pretlove@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research Interests

My research interests using qualitative methods focus on:

- Self tracking practices in physical activity

- Understanding personal privacy and information legislation rights

- Post-custodial digital archival practice

PhD supervision

I am particularly interested in supervising PhD work related to those themes:

- The behaviourial changes self tracking data and information makes in physical activity

- The extent to which personal information rights are understood amongst the public when using online services and applications

- The changing nature of the archive and the profession in digital societies


Dr Brian Rice
b.rice@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

My primary research interest is strengthening the collection, collation, and use of HIV data to inform prevention and care programming in sub-Saharan Africa.

Working towards this broad objective, my key research areas are

  • developing epidemiological methods to strengthen the collection and use of data collected through surveillance and service delivery platforms
  • characterising the locations, populations and individuals at greatest risk of infectious disease
  • designing and implementing frameworks to collect strategic health data
  • constructing health indicators / minimum indicator-sets
  • implementing continuous data quality improvement
  • formative research into the health and wellbeing needs and priorities of communities
Dr Sam Rigby
sam.rigby@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

Dr Sam Rigby is a Senior Lecturer in Blast & Impact Engineering and has extensive experience in numerical analysis and experimental techniques. His research interests include:

  • Understanding blast-structure interaction, and how the properties of a blast are altered as it reflects off and diffracts around an object
  • Using machine learning and data analysis to develop approximate, engineering-level design tools
  • High-rate explicit finite element/finite volume modelling
  • Single-degree-of-freedom analysis methods for structural response under blast loading
  • Experimental measurements of blast loading in complex environments
  • Imagining techniques such as digital image correlation and edge detection
  • Computer programming
Dr Jem Rongong
j.a.rongong@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

Viscoelastic damping materials
• development, analysis and testing of polymers
• design and testing of syntactic foams and other multiphase systems

Surface damping treatments
• free and constrained layer systems using organic and ceramic materials
• methods of application

Friction-based systems
• design and analysis of particle dampers including the use of discrete element analysis
• granular polymeric materials as fillers
• metal mesh and other dry fibre systems

Active & Adaptive Structures
• active constrained layer damping
• adaptive particle dampers
• shape memory actuated systems

Design of damped components
• hollow turbomachinery blades
• numerical optimisation techniques including genetic algorithms and cellular automata
• composite structures

Professor Jennifer Rowsell
j.rowsell@sheffield.ac.uk

School of Education

Jennifer welcomes applications for doctoral research degrees in literacy and language education
with a focus on digital literacy, multimodality and makerspace research. Jennifer is a multimodal
ethnographer who researches in formal schooling contexts like primary and secondary schools and
in informal learning contexts like community and welcome centres. Her research interests include:
theorising digital reading; the platformisation of literacies; digital materiality in teaching and
learning; makerspace research across formal and informal contexts; digital perspectives on language
teaching and learning; research that applies posthumanism and sociomateriality; digital inequalities
and digital divide research; post-qualitative methods and approaches to literacy; and, activist
disruptive literacies research.

Miss Fiona Scott
f.scott@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Education

Fiona’s work is located in the field of digital literacies. Her research engages with sociomaterial theory to theorise very young children’s intra-actions with digital devices and texts. She is concerned with child and family practices in relation to the digital and, in particular, the role played by social class. Fiona is also interested in research methods and methodologies, including the tensions associated with researching children’s lives in more-than-human contexts. Fiona’s PhD thesis, produced in collaboration with CBeebies, examined preschool children’s engagements with television and related media at home.

Dr Anthony Simons
a.j.simons@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Research interests

Dr Simons’ research focuses on turning formal results from verification and testing into practical benefits for software engineering. His current research areas include model-based testing and model-driven engineering, with applications to Cloud computing. He has also published widely in object-oriented software engineering, including type theory and software development methods. He is inventor of the JWalk automatic software testing tool for Java; and the JAST library for processing XML in Java. He is co-author of the OPEN Toolbox of Techniques.

Professor Neil Sims
n.sims@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

Smart fluids

• Modelling and design of smart fluid dampers
• Control and stability of smart fluid dampers
• Commercialisation of smart fluid dampers for consumer and industrial applications
• Research projects include the ADLAND project

Machining vibration:

• Methods for predicting and preventing chatter in high speed machining
• Active and passive vibration control during machining
• Research projects include the EPSRC research grants on chatter avoidance, and process damping

Uncertainty propagation:

• The role of uncertainty in structural dynamics problems
• Propagation techniques
• Application to smart materials and machining problems
• Application to modelling and design of energy harvesting systems
• Research funded by the EPSRC platform grant on Uncertainty Propagation in Structures, Systems and Processes

Dr Lisa Stampnitzky
l.stampnitzky.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Politics and International Relations

My research focuses on political discourse in the war on terror.   My first book addresses the history of "terrorism" and terrorism expertise.  My current research focuses on debates over the permissibility of torture in the U.S. after 9/11.  I have used a variety of methods, including interviewing, discourse analysis, and archival research. 

I am particularly keen to hear from research students focusing on

  • the intersections of knowledge, violence, and power
  • the politics of expertise
  • historical and sociological approaches to politics and the state
  • terrorism and the war on terror
  • the politics of human rights
Professor Eleni Vasilaki
e.vasilaki@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Machine Learning

As a Computational Scientist and Engineer with extensive cross disciplinary experience, Professor Eleni Vasilaki contributes to understanding brain learning principles. Together with her team she takes inspiration from these principles to design novel, machine learning techniques, and in particular reinforcement learning methods.  They develop data analytics frameworks for neuroscientists, and also work closely with engineers from other disciplines to design hardware that computes in a brain-like manner. 


PhD Supervision

Professor Vasilaki is particularly interested in hearing from research students interested in the following areas:

  • Neural Networks (and Spirking Neural Networks in particular)
  • Reservior Computing
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Clustering
  • Computational Neuroscience
Professor James Wild
j.m.wild@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease
The Medical School

Research interests

My research focus is the physics and engineering and clinical applications of MR imaging of hyperpolarised gases (3He and 129Xe) and protons in the lungs and pulmonary vasculature.

Physics and engineering projects include:

  • rapid acquisition methods for imaging of inhaled hyperpolarised gases using compressed sensing, steady state free precession and parallel imaging.
  • Techniques for simultaneous imaging of 1H, 3He and 129Xe in the lungs.
  • RF coil hardware engineering for 3He and 129Xe lung MRI.
  • 3He and 129Xe MRI at different magnetic field strengths.
  • Spin exchange optical pumping physics for polarisation of 3He and 129Xe.
  • Measuring and modelling gas flow and diffusion in the lungs; physiological models of alveolar geometry and gas exchange.
Professor Sue Yeandle
s.yeandle@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

My research, publications and teaching have focused on the relationship between work and care in contemporary societies, and on how people manage caring roles and responsibilities throughout the life course.

I specialise in research with the potential for policy and practical impact, and have expertise in making complex research findings accessible to a wide range of audiences, wide experience of research design and methods, and extensive knowledge of policy on care, carers and employment.

I currently supervise PhD students studying the work of carers’ organisations (Jenny Read) and the provision of home care in Shanghai (Wenjing Jin), and welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students wishing to study topics in my specialist field.

Dr Karl Travis
k.travis@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Research interests

Alternative Disposal Concepts: Deep Borehole Disposal
Geological disposal of HLW and spent nuclear fuel (SNF) in very deep boreholes is a concept whose time has come. The alternative – disposal in a mined, engineered repository is beset with difficulties not least of which are the constraints placed upon the engineered barriers by the high thermal loading. 
The deep borehole concept offers a potentially safer, faster and more cost-effective solution. The deep borehole research group at Sheffield (Travis and Gibb) is at the forefront of international efforts to develop this concept. We are currently working with Sandia National Labs on a program leading to the drilling of pilot borehole in the USA. Our work includes: developing sealing and support matrices, rock welding and deployment mechanisms, and employs a combination of experiment and continuum modeling (Finite differences and Smooth Particle Applied Mechanics).

Behaviour of Materials under extreme conditions
Our main focus here is on wasteform performance. The detrimental effects of self-irradiation (mostly alpha decay) of immobilised radionuclides include: swelling, amorphisation and crack formation in ceramics and de-vitrification in glasses. We use computational methods (mainly molecular dynamics and topological modeling) and statistical mechanics to examine the consequences of alpha recoil damage and understand the recovery pathways in these materials. Recent research is aimed at understanding why some materials have a greater resistance to radiation-induced amorphisation. The use of Smooth Particle Applied Mechanics in understanding how materials fail under mechanical and thermal loading is another area of interest.

Simulation Methodology
Software Packages certainly have a role to play in the Materials Science and Engineering community, but new research often requires new methods of simulation that are not supported by off-the-shelf codes. Developing new simulation methods and codes is a key area of interest for this research group. 
Previous research in this area includes the development of configurational thermostats and barostats for molecular simulation and a method which allows an unambiguous determination of the role played by intramolecular flexibility on transport properties of liquids. Recent work in collaboration with Bill and Carol Hoover, has lead to a new algorithm for simulating Joule-Thomson expansion of gases.

Professor Lee Brammer
lee.brammer@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

Our current research can be divided, broadly speaking, into three areas: (i) inorganic supramolecular chemistry, (ii) porous coordination framework materials, and (iii) reactions in molecular crystals.

Work in inorganic supramolecular chemistry involves the use of transition metals to influence the construction and properties of supramolecular assemblies in the solid state (crystal engineering) and in solution. We have a number of ongoing projects in this area, but the principal focus is on (a) detailed study of intermolecular interactions using various experimental and computational methods, and (b) the application of the knowledge gained to the construction of network solids (infinite assemblies).

Framework materials based upon coordination chemistry, often known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), provide a highly versatile alternative to well-established porous materials such as zeolites. Their synthesis is based upon molecular chemistry and they are typically constructed as crystalline network solids using metal centres as nodes which are linked via organic bridging ligands. Applications range from sorption and storage of gases (including hydrogen) and volatile pollutants, to host-guest chemistry for chemical separations and even catalysis. Current efforts in our group are focused on flexible, responsive materials and upon functionalised materials tailored to specific applications. Studies involve synthesis, characterisation by diffraction methods (single crystal, powder) and by a range of other techniques including thermal analyses and spectroscopy.

Facilities

Our research is based in excellent modern synthetic laboratories built in 2003, with an accompanying office suite for students and postdocs. The department maintains excellent instrumentation facilities for spectroscopy (NMR, IR, MS) and we have an outstanding X-ray diffraction facility that is crucial in characterisation of the crystalline materials that we study. We also make extensive use of major national and international facilities for diffraction, in particular high flux synchrotron X-ray facilities in the UK (Daresbury SRS and in future Diamond) and at the ESRF in Grenoble, France.

General

My general philosophy is to make use of a variety of approaches and techniques in pursuing research goals. A better overall understanding is developed by such an approach. Thus, students and postdocs have the opportunity to be exposed to many aspects of chemistry, while perhaps developing greater expertise or interests in certain aspects of a project. Many projects involve some synthesis of organic, organometallic and/or coordination compounds, and will involve supramolecular synthesis and/or materials synthesis methods (e.g. solvothermal synthesis). NMR and IR spectroscopy are widely employed and extensive use is made of diffraction methods, particularly single crystal and powder X-ray diffraction, but also neutron diffraction. Materials characterization methods (e.g. DSC, TGA) are also used where needed and computational chemistry is used to support efforts in other areas. Where appropriate the work is conducted within the research group, but collaborative efforts with other research groups have always proven important in our work. We have established collaborations in areas of synthetic and computational chemistry, diffraction and materials characterisation such as gas sorption and magnetic measurements. Such collaborations often provide opportunities for group members to visit and work in other research labs.

Professor Anthony Meijer
a.meijer@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests:

Our research focuses on the theoretical/computational study of chemical reactions. The systems studied vary from small fundamental gas-phase reactions via gas-surface reactions to reactions involving flexible molecules. The results of these calculations are used together with the results of sophisticated experiments to obtain insight into the fundamentals of the reactions involved and to get a fundamental understanding of reaction dynamics. Below are given some projects to illustrate the work.

Gas-surface scattering

We are currently working on the formation of H2 on graphite. H2 is the most abundant molecule in interstellar space and it plays an important role in the formation of stars and in interstellar chemistry through reactions with ions and radicals. Moreover, the energetics of the reaction directly influences the thermal balance of the interstellar medium. H2 is generally supposed to be formed on interstellar dust grains for which the graphite is used as a template. Our calculations complement experiments done in the group of Prof. S. D. Price at UCL and astronomical modelling and observations done in the groups of Prof. D. A. Williams and Dr. J. Rawlings at UCL through the Centre for Cosmic Chemistry and Physics.

Gas-phase reactions

We have done extensive work on the H + O2 combustion reaction in the past, in particular focusing on the role the total angular momentum in this reaction. This lead to the first-ever rigorous theoretical cross sections, which compared well with experimental data from the Wolfrum group at the University of Heidelberg. We are re-investigating this reaction in collaboration with Dr. M. Hankel of the University of Queensland.

We are also currently applying the methods developed to the photo-dissociation of molecules inside van der Waals complexes, such as Ar-H2S and Ar-H2O, where angular momentum effects allow the van der Waals molecule to survive when one of its constituent molecules, such as H2S, is dissociated. We also have plans to apply the developed methods to the calculation of rates for reactions between radicals at low temperatures, which is important for our understanding of the interstellar medium and our understanding of extraterrestial planets and moons.

Reactions and Structure of conformationally flexible molecules

As molecules become larger, they generally become more flexible. As a consequence the potential energy surface becomes more complicated with many local minima, which may or may not be accessible at thermal energies. Each of these minima will be a distinct structure with e.g. a distinct IR spectrum. We are currently working on methods to allow us to generate many minima, which can then be screened for further investigation. This work ties into a number of collaborations we have, such as with Dr. Mathias Schäffer of the University of Cologne, who studies conformationally flexible molecules in the gas-phase using IRMPD spectroscopy as well as internal collaborations on the structure, reactivity, and properties of organic and organometallic compounds.

Algorithm development for Quantum Dynamics Calculations

Quantum Dynamics calculations are significantly harder than standard electronic structure calculations due e.g. the exponential scaling with respect to the basis set size. We are working on methods that will allow us to solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation more quickly. In particular, we develop efficient parallel methods to make calculations tractable.

Dr Nicole Baumgarten
n.baumgarten@sheffield.ac.uk

School of Languages and Cultures

 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

 

Dr Joanne Britton
n.j.britton@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Research interests

My research focuses on the meaning and role of race and racism and the significance of social identity in a range of contexts including the criminal justice system, legal profession and voluntary sector. In keeping with developments in these areas, it has a specific focus on critical whiteness and mixed race studies. I have a long standing interest in European Muslims and have completed research which examined the interplay of race, ethnicity, gender and generation in the lives of Muslim men.

I welcome applications to study for MPhil or PhD research degrees with me, either full or part-time, in any  of the following areas linked to my research interests:

  • Social identity
  • Race and racism
  • Intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender and generation
  • European Muslims
  • Multiculture and multiculturalism
  • Qualitative and ethnographic research methods
Professor Guy Brown
g.j.brown@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

Speech and Hearing

Professor Brown's main research interest is Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA), which aims to build machine systems that mimic the ability of human listeners to segregate complex mixtures of sound. He has particular interests in reverberation robustness, models of auditory function in normal and impaired hearing, and sound localisation via binaural models. He is the co-editor (with DeLiang Wang) of Computational auditory scene analysis: Principles, Algorithms, and Applications (IEEE Press/Wiley-Interscience). A recent strand of work in his lab is looking at AI-enabled tools for music generation.

 

PhD Supervision

Professor Brown is particularly interested in hearing from research students interested in the following areas:

  • Sound source separation
  • Models of hearing impairment
  • Noise-robust methods for binaural sound localisation (e.g. by mobile robots)
  • Applications of AI to music generation
  • Deep neural networks for audio analysis
Professor Chris Burton
chris.burton@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Academic Unit of Medical Education
Division of Population Health

I am an academic GP with a particular interest in how doctors and patients deal with persistent physical symptoms. My work aims to help doctors explain symptoms constructively. We recognise that symptoms have both peripheral (body) and central (brain) processes and the challenge is to translate developments in science, particularly neuroscience, into explanations which safely make sense of symptoms for patients and lead to better management

I have other interests around diagnosis, testing and reassurance, and healthcare use in relation to both mental and physical ill-health. I use a variety of methods including analysis of large data, development and evaluation of clinical interventions, and technological innovation.

Within the university I lead the Academic Unit of Primary Care, and represent the Academic Unit of Medical Education on faculty research committees. I am a member of the Centre for Urgent Care Research within ScHARR.

Dr Emma Cheatle
e.cheatle@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Architecture

My research is humanities based and critically explores architecture and urban space, using methodologies of critical-creative writing, ethnography, autotheory and feminism towards new cultural and social histories and theories. Key topics include combinations of architecture, health, domesticity, wellbeing, the body and the city. I use a variety of interdisciplinary sources including archives and English Literature. My current research, Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity, examines the role of architecture in the construction of the maternal body and maternity practices.

Potential PhD supervision areas: gender, domesticity and architecture/cities; health/wellbeing/medicine and architecture/cities; documentary, autotheory, ethnography and observational methods in drawing, writing and film; ideas of care and intersectional and decolonial feminism. I supervise both 'by design' and 'written' PhDs

Dr Dani Densley Tingley
d.densleytingley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

Her research interests centre around reducing the whole life carbon of the built environment, exploring the effectiveness of different methods to achieve this, across multiple scales - predominately buildings and cities. She has a particular interest in the use of materials to reduce whole life carbon.

The building level approach explores design strategies to reduce whole life and embodied carbon, this includes areas such as design for deconstruction and material reuse, design for adaptability, use of low carbon materials and material efficiency.

At the city scale, an urban metabolism approach is taken, exploring the material metabolism of cities, seeking to answer the question, what are our cities made of? A greater understanding of city stocks enables strategic planning decisions and retrofit and can highlight future reuse potential thus faciliating greater material salvage.

Dr Harry Hill
harry.hill@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

I am interested in supervising research students and have interests in the following areas:

  • Health inequalities and equity considerations in economic evaluation
  • Measuring and valuing quality of life
  • National health policy e.g. NHS service reorganisation, impact of population health change and large scale public health interventions, economic efficiency of the health service or NHS staff
  • Epidemiology of chronic diseases
  • Health condition areas:

            o Chronic kidney disease
            o Dentistry
            o Breast cancer screening
            o Diabetes
            o Obesity
            o Respiratory disease
            o Mental disorders
            o Occupational health

Research methods I can supervise:

  • Decision modelling.
  • Applied microeconometrics, particularly quasi-experimental research.
  • Economic evaluation.
Professor Caroline Jackson
c.m.jackson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Archaeology

Research interests:

My research interests are very varied and diverse. For instance I have worked on lithics in Swaziland, conducted surveying work with the University of Cardiff at the Sacred Animal Necropolis in Saqqara and excavated at Amarna in Egypt.

My main research is however, on the study and scientific analysis of archaeological materials, specialising in glass and other vitreous materials such as faience. The primary focus of this work is in Bronze Age Egypt and the Aegean mainly from production sites and on Roman glasses from consumption contexts. I use scientific methods to analyse archaeological glass and experimental archaeology to elucidate patterns relating to provenance, trade and consumption in the ancient and historic world.

  • Material culture in the Roman and Ancient Egyptian worlds.
  • The technology of glasses
  • The analysis of glasses to explore production and consumption patterns
  • Experimental archaeology
  • Craft production in Egypt
  • Provenance studies
Dr Frazer Jarvis
A.F.Jarvis@shef.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

Dr Jarvis works in the area of algebraic number theory, an area which uses techniques from algebra, algebraic geometry and classical number theory, amongst others. In particular, he studies the relationship between modular forms, elliptic curves and representations of Galois groups. That this is currently an active area of research is clear from the recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles; Wiles uses exactly these methods in his proof. Dr Jarvis is particularly interested in generalisations of these ideas (known as the Langlands Philosophy), and even in possible generalisations of Fermat's Last Theorem. For example, one might ask whether the Fermat equation of a given degree (or a similar equation) has solutions in a given field extension of the rationals. Within this speciality, there are a number of possible research topics.

Dr Helen Kemp
e.h.kemp@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism

Research Interests

I have a long-standing interest in the autoimmune responses and genetic aspects of the depigmenting disease vitiligo, and work on projects to profile autoantibody responses against melanocytes in vitiligo as well as in melanoma. I am also interested in characterising autoimmune responses against the calcium-sensing receptor in patients with parathyroid autoimmunity. I have an interest in the aetiology of autoimmune thyroid disorders and have characterised autoantigens, autoantibodies, cytokine gene expression, and genetic susceptibility factors in these diseases. I have international collaborations with respect to all these research areas. A further interest is the use of siRNA and anti-sense oligonucleotides for the treatment of Cushing’s disease.

Research Methods

Molecular biology; immunoassays; cell culture; phage-display

Dr Shannon Li
xinshan.li@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering
Dr Li's research interest is in the human musculoskeletal system, particularly on personalised finite element modelling of bones and skeletal muscles. Dr Li is particularly interested in applying these modelling methods to study a range of clinical problem, from bone fracture to improvements on female health. Dr Li is currently creating a database for bone strength in young children, in order to create a tool for the diagnosis of unexplained fracture in children. She is collaborating with Sheffiled and Germany to improve women's health using computational modelling. Dr Li is also interested in the biomechanics of skeletal muscles to understand the healthy and diseased states.

Research keywords
  • Biomechanics of bones and skeletal muscles
  • Nonlinear finite element analysis
  • Organ-level modelling of the musculoskeletal system
  • Continuum mechanics
Dr Juliana Matos De Meira
j.m.meira@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Lecturer in Management Accounting

Juliana’s research interests range from management accounting to inter-disciplinary accounting.

PhD supervision:

Juliana would be interested in supervising students with projects on:

  • supply chain and accounting,
  • managing reverse logistics, retails returns, and circular economy
  • performance measurement and balanced scorecard
  • strategic management accounting, including beyond budgeting
  • accounting and human resource management, including HR monitoring in the supply chain and cost-benefit analysis of adaptations for people with disabilities at work

She is interested in all three aspects of sustainability: people, profits and planet. Juliana has also an interest in extending her research to include environmental accounting, closing the sustainability loop. Her research is based on mixed methods, utilising mainly case studies and surveys as methodological approaches.

Dr Oleksandr Mykhaylyk
o.mykhaylyk@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

Scattering methods

Much of my research focuses on the structural analysis of soft matter materials and in particular polymers. We live in a Golden age of Materials Science and Biology, based on a solid underpinning from Chemistry and Physics. One of the keys to this success is recent progress in structural characterization techniques where scattering methods, giving access to structural organization of matter from atomic scales to microns, occupy a dominating role. Experimental data obtained by scattering methods (SAXS, WAXS, XRD, SANS and SLS) provide structural information associated with Fourier space. My research investigates how this information can be transformed into real space, convenient for our understanding. This involves structural modelling, Monte-Carlo simulations and Fourier transformation techniques. An advantage of scattering methods is that they can be used for kinetic studies of materials in-situ in different environments. Therefore, an other aspect of my work is design of dedicated experimental set-ups for studying materials under external impact such as shear flow or extensional flow, temperature or pH changes. I have a continuous interest in fat crystallization, colloids and nanoparticles structure, in particular core-shell systems (examples of my research are nanodiamonds to carbon onions transition, a phase separation of polyurethane confined by a nanosized spherical shell). My current research is on thermo-responsive block-copolymer micelles and vesicles.

Research Oleksandr Mykhaylyk

Mechano-optical rheology

Rheology is widely recognized as a basic method in processing of polymers, food and cosmetics. In addition, visualization can be used as an effective tool for studying phenomena taking place in fluids. Since soft matter materials subjected to flow often demonstrate a related anisotropy in their refractive index and stress, this causes birefringence visualizing the flow. I have recently developed a new combinatorial technique, shear-induced polarized light imaging (SIPLI), for rheo-optical measurements of polymeric liquids. The SIPLI technique has already been successfully used for studying shear-induced nucleation and crystallization of polyolefins (see the figure), fibrillation in natural silks and flow alignment of block-copolymer self-assembled structures. My present research focuses on further development of SIPLI for in-situ studies of shear-induced phenomena such as stress, orientation and structural transitions taking place in gels, polymers, copolymers, liquid crystals and colloids.

Polymer crystallization

Microstructure of solidified polymers depends on thermo-mechanical process history. In general, processed thermoplastics are composed of two structural morphologies: spherulitic (isotropic) and shish-kebab (anisotropic). Ratio of these morphologies in the end-product controls its mechanical properties and material performance. While spherulitic structure is reasonably understood there is still no a reliable theory for structural formation of shear-induced shish-kebabs. My work is on physical understanding of how the formation of shear-induced morphologies is related to polymer polydispersity, thermodynamics and flow conditions. Based on our research we have proposed a four-stage model for shish-kebab formation including stretching of molecules, nucleation, aggregation and fibrillation.

Dr Behzad Nematollahi
b.nematollahi@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Civil and Structural Engineering

Behzad has research interest and expertise in:

(a) Sustainable (low carbon) concrete materials, such as geopolymer concrete;

(b) High-performance fibre-reinforced cementitious composites, such as strain-hardening cementitious composites (SHCC) and ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC); and

(c) State-of-the-art digital fabrication with concrete technologies, such as 3D concrete printing.

Combination of expertise and high-quality research in (a), (b), and (c) has enabled Behzad to develop new generation of concrete materials and innovative construction methods, which:

(i) leads to simultaneous increase in resilience and sustainability of buildings and civil infrastructure under natural disasters (e.g. cyclones, floods and earthquakes) and manmade attacks; and

(ii) enables ‘free-form’ construction of sustainable, commercially viable, and architecturally elegant buildings and civil infrastructure with complex geometries that are not currently possible or too expensive to build.

Dr Venet Osmani
v.osmani@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School
The Medical School

Research Interests

My research interests are in developing machine learning methods, to address some of the fundamental questions in medicine. These include:

- predictive modelling

- explainable AI

- generative adversarial approaches (GAN)

- causal inference

- health inequality and bias

My work focuses on analysis of large-scale, longitudinal health records, including:

- biomarkers

- imaging

- multi-omics

- routine care data 

The aim is to optimise treatment strategies, improve patient care, and provide novel insights to health institutions.

Apart from clinical data, I also work on incorporating human behaviour data, such as those generated from wearable devices, with a particular focus on mental health.

The overarching objective of my research is to integrate predictive modelling in the bedside and bring the acquired evidence back, in a continuously improving feedback loop, consequently establishing a learning health system.

 

PhD Supervision

I will consider project proposals that relate to the aspects mentioned above.

Professor Jags Pandhal
j.pandhal@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

My Research interests are:

  • Metabolic Engineering
  • Quantitative Proteomics (Metaproteomics and Glycosylation)
  • Synthetic Microbial Communities
  • Algae Biotechnology
  • Biomanufacturing

It is widely recognised that the fundamental training of a biologist and an engineer is different. Mathematical theories and quantitative methods are at the forefront of engineering approaches, and therefore their application to complex systems, including biological, is a useful attribute.

However, biologists have the advantage of formulating better testable hypotheses, experimental designs and data interpretation from these complex biological systems. This is namely due to different techniques and strategies used by life scientists to qualitatively decipher complex systems.

The skills of an engineer and life scientist are therefore complementary. I work at this interface to reveal (hopefully useful) information about complex biological systems.

Dr Louise Preston
l.r.preston@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

My interests lie primarily in undertaking evidence reviews of complex interventions, specifically in service delivery areas and in the identification of evidence for reviews. I have led a variety of different reviews for organisations including the HS&DR Evidence Synthesis Centre, the What Works Centre for Wellbeing and the ScHARR Public Health Collaborating Centre and have been involved in a number of publications from this work. I have also published on methods relating to searching. From my prior research projects, I maintain an interest in health services research with a particular interest in information use by patients and carers. I obtained my PhD in 2005 from the University Of Sheffield. It examined the impact of the MMR vaccine scare on parents in terms of their decision making and information requirements.

Dr Sophie Rutter
s.rutter@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research Interests

My research interests are at the intersection of critical studies of technology and society, social change, and information ethics. I focus on social appropriation and embodied experiences of technologies by different social groups, digital poverty, information privacy in the context of people’s migration and displacement, critical studies of information and communication technologies within sustainable development, and the role of public access to information in mis/disinformation. My research is qualitative and I use participatory and visual methodologies of research.

Research supervision

I am particularly interested in hearing from research students focusing on the following areas:

The design and evaluation of health communications (text, images, different technologies and so on) and interventions

How different people (i.e. children, professionals and so on) search for, and use, information, as well as the influence of the environment and the context of use

The design of inclusive research methods / methodologies


Professor Don Webber
d.j.webber@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Professor of Managerial Economics

Although Don has a background in applied economics, he is better described as a researcher of policy-relevant, social science issues. Specifically he is interested in research that puts people and social issues (rather than money) at the core of economic concern.

Don has written over 90 academic peer-reviewed articles and led or collaborated on £2.2m of externally funded research. His work has been discussed at the United Nation's International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Welsh Government and elsewhere. He is part of a consortium that recently completed an AHRC-sponsored project investigating the influence of design on the Bristol and Bath economy.

Prospective PhD students who wish to study productivity (very broadly defined), health, education and/or geographically-related issues are encouraged to contact him for further discussion. He is very open to qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research.

Dr Graham Williams
g.t.williams@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of English Language and Linguistics

Research interests

Broadly speaking, my specialty is Late Medieval and Early Modern English language, and my research methods are derived from historical linguistics, especially pragmatics. In particular, I have worked extensively with manuscript and digital letter collections in order to study actual English, dating from c.1400-1650.

I also have strong research interests in manuscript studies, paleography, digital editing and corpora - in particular the implications these perspectives have for the historical study of language.

At the moment, I am developing research on: 1) the history of verbal irony (e.g. sarcasm, mock (im)politeness and banter) in English, as evidenced by both literary and non-literary texts; and 2) the letters and language of Margaret Tudor (1489-1541), princess of England and Queen of Scots.

Dr Ashley Willis
A.P.Willis@shef.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

Research interests

* Patterns in fluid flows and their stability to perturbations.

* Transition to turbulence and chaos in shear flows.

* Generation of magnetic fields by the motion of fluids, e.g. the geodynamo.

* Founder of - openpipeflow.org -


A description of the mathematics behind the following videos can be found here.

I am interested in supervising motivated students with a strong mathematical background, in applying their knowledge and learning new techniques for the study of dynamical systems. An excellent setting for new methods, perhaps the traditional test-bed, is the modelling of fluid flows. Unexpected transitions in flow patterns and chaotic behaviour are commonplace, and our understanding of nature is greatly enhanced through numerical simulation and experiments. I am particularly interested in the appearance of turbulence in fluid flows, and modelling of the flows inside planets. The latter is usually responsible for the generation of planetary magnetic fields. For further information please contact me. The following links may also be of interest: Turbulence. Dynamos.

Professor William Zimmerman
w.zimmerman@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Research Interests:
  • Energy efficient generation of microbubbles and their applications (particularly biofuels and bioreactors).
  • Plasma microreactors, especially low power consumption generation of ozone.
  • Fluid dynamics of helical turbulence and mixing.
  • Thin film dynamics and microrheometry.
  • Computational modelling with inverse methods.
Perlemax Ltd.

Perlemax Ltd, a University spinout company, was founded to exploit his research and technological advances. Perlemax and Zimmerman have won the below awards and recognition:

  • 2009 IChemE Moulton Medal
  • 2010 Royal Society Innovation Award (Brian Mercer Fund) (Video)
  • 2010 CleanTech Open, AXA UK Global Ideas Champion
  • 2010 CleanTech Open, International Finalist, Global Ideas
  • 2011 Zayed International Future Energy Prize, Semifinalist
Professor Jo Bates
jo.bates@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research interests

My research is in the field of Critical Data Studies. Critical Data Studies is an interdisciplinary field that uses social theory to inform examination of the social drivers, implications and power relations of emergent forms of data and algorithmic practices.

My recent research broadly breaks down into three areas: (1) data and AI cultures of practice - including issues around Responsible data/AI practice, (2) data journeys & data friction - particularly climate and energy data flows, and (3) digital labour - particularly crowdwork. You can read more about my research in each of these areas on my website: https://lifeofdata.org/site/category/research-areas/

I am currently working on the following projects, which involve collaborations with a variety of organisations including GSK, JISC, BBC and DWP:

- Patterns in Practice (Principal Investigator). AHRC funded. https://lifeofdata.org/site/patterns-in-practice/

- Living with Data (Co-investigator). Nuffield funded. https://livingwithdata.org/current-research/

- Energy data-sharing scoping study (PI). Internally funded.

PhD Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD projects that advance the critical study of emerging data and algorithmic practices and flows. By critical I mean projects that in some way grapple with issues of power, ethics and justice as they relate to topics of data, automation, data science and/or AI. I tend to use qualitative research methods, including ethnographic methods and (policy) document analysis. There is a wide range of potential projects in this area. Applicants are advised to check out recent papers in key journals (e.g. 'Big Data and Society' and 'Information, Communication and Society') and conferences (e.g. Data Power, Data Justice) to get a sense for emerging topics.


Professor Atul Bhaskar
A.Bhaskar@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research Interests

Solid Mechanics & Cellular Media: Linear and non-linear mechanics of beams, plates and shells, mechanics of composites, sandwich constructions, contact mechanics, statics, dynamics & acoustics of cellular media, asymptotic analysis applied to the statics & dynamics of solids, dynamics and acoustics of poro-elastic media, end effects in solid mechanics, multi-scale mechanics, scaling laws, lattice structures, solid foams, elastic metamaterials, mechanics of additively manufactured matter, elastic stability.

Structural dynamics and Vibrations: Linear vibrations of discrete and continuous systems, wave propagation, vibration of periodic structures, experimental modal analysis, linear and non-linear vibrations of composite plates, structural dynamics of porous media, damping in vibrations: analytical, numerical and experimental aspects, random vibrations, crashworthiness, dynamics of gyroelastic continua, aeroelasticity, impact of space debris of elastic satellite structures.

Mechanics & manufacturing of bio-structures: Additive manufacture of lattice scaffolds, cardiovascular stent design: response, plasticity, dynamics, mechanical response of scaffold structures, bio-tribology and micro-patterning.

Design search & optimisation: Sensitivity analysis, structural dynamic modification, application of design search methods for structural dynamics problems, evolutionary structural optimisation, response surface analysis, hybrid methods.

Applied mathematics: R-function theory, Differential transforms and their application to mechanics, Dynamical systems theory applied to reaction-diffusion systems, parameter dependent eigenvalue problems in structural dynamics & structural stability.

Professor George Panoutsos
g.panoutsos@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

My research focuses on explainable and trustworthy machine learning (ML). Explainability is multifaceted in this context; I work on mathematical and computational methods in Computational Intelligence (CI) that enable enhanced understanding and transparent information use for neural networks, visual and numerical performance measures for many-objective optimisation algorithms, as well as linguistic interpretations of models, and safe control systems. Explainability and trustworthiness are key barriers in using machine learning in a range of critical applications, e.g. in engineering, and healthcare. A multitude of research questions still need to be addressed, for example how neural network - based systems learn and perform when information/data is imperfect, how can we exploit prior knowledge for enhanced learning, and how can we develop performance metrics that will allow us to understand the optimisation of systems at scale.


Towards formulating research questions in machine learning, I often use challenge-driven research e.g. in manufacturing, healthcare, as case studies. This way,  applications drive the research questions, towards maximising impact. I also use explainable machine learning for translational research and to create innovation to address global challenges (e.g. sustainability, energy). The advanced monitoring, optimisation and control of manufacturing processes is such an example, where ML-based methods can be used to reduce material waste, and minimise energy use.


I welcome PhD applications in topics that fall under Computational Intelligence, in particular when these are concerned with explainable machine learning. Examples of recent PhD projects include, physics-guided neural networks, physics-guided generative models, new performance metrics for decomposition-based many-objective optimisation, information theoretic explainability in neural networks, safe reinforcement learning, and linguistic interpretations of Convolutional Neural Networks.

 

 

Dr Ben Partridge
b.m.partridge@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

Research in the Partridge group focuses on the development of new methods for the synthesis of organic molecules. We design our methods to make chiral molecules, controlling the stereochemistry in our reactions. To achieve this, we use our two main interests: catalysis and organoboron chemistry. Ultimately our work aims to:

  • make it easier for chemists to synthesise libraries of complex molecules.
  • improve the sustainability of organic synthesis.

Catalytic Transformations of Alkylboron Reagents

Organoboron reagents have been described as the “Universal Functional Group” as they undergo a wide range of transformations while exhibiting broad functional group compatibility. In particular, arylboronic acids are used in many catalytic C–C and C–heteroatom bond forming reactions, e.g. the Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling (awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize). In contrast, transformations of alkylboronic esters are highly underdeveloped, often requiring harsh conditions.

We aim to develop new, mild catalytic transformations of alkylboron reagents, particularly new amination and halogenation reactions. These reactions should be stereoselective, using the inherent stereochemistry of the alkylboron, or through catalyst control. Building a toolbox of catalytic transformations of alkylboronic esters will ultimately allow us to generate libraries of compounds from common alkylboron precursors. This approach has potential applications in drug and agrochemical discovery.

Frustrated Lewis Pairs as Green Catalysts

Normally if you combine a Lewis acid and Lewis base, a neutralisation reaction occurs. However, by building steric hindrance around either the Lewis acid or Lewis base (or both), neutralisation can be prevented. Instead you get a highly polarised complex known as a Frustrated Lewis Pair (FLP). These species have been shown to have many interesting properties, such as the ability to spilt H2 and catalyse hydrogenation reactions. 

We are interested in designing new FLP catalysts for metal-free hydrogenation. This area has potential to make a significant impact towards making organic synthesis more sustainable. FLPs, derived from cheap, readily available main-group elements could replace traditional transition metal catalysts, which are comparably more scarce, expensive and toxic

Professor Graham Leggett
graham.leggett@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Introduction

Our work centres on the structures, properties and reactivity of molecular surfaces (organic thin films and monolayers) on nanometre length scales. There are two principal foci: nanofabrication (the construction of molecular objects smaller than 100 nm) with a particular emphasis on nanoscale biological interfaces (the organisation of biomolecules, and the study of their structure and function, on molecular length scales); and nanotribology (the study of sliding contacts between nanometre scale molecular objects).

Nanofabrication

The integration of top-down (lithographic) with bottom-up (synthetic chemical) methodologies remains a major challenge in molecular nanoscience. There is a critical length range, between ca. 100 nm and the dimensions of a single biomacromolecule, in which there are few established methods for the execution of chemically specific molecular transformations. Our work on nanofabrication revolves around the use of photochemical methods to execute selective molecular transformations in nanometre-scale regions at surfaces. Photochemistry is an attractive tool, because organic chemistry furnishes us with a wide choice of photochemical strategies, and because photolithography remains the go-to fabrication tool many years after its eventual demise was predicted. The challenge is to find ways to execute photochemical transformations on nanometre length scales. We have found that near-field methods yield exquisite control at length-scales down to a few tens of nm, and interferometric lithography offers remarkable performance over macroscopic areas via fast, inexpensive, simple approaches. Interferometric techniques have enabled us to fabricate dense arrays of structures as small as 25 nm covering square cm regions. Arrays of gold nanostructures have been used in spectroscopic investigations of light-harvesting complexes, and have led to the exciting discovery of strong coupling between localised surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs) and excitons in these molecules.

Nanotribology

Tribology is the study of sliding contacts between materials, and includes the phenomena of friction and wear. Our particular interest is in nanometre-scale contacts between molecular materials. Nanometre-scale sliding contacts are important for a variety of reasons; the following are examples:

  • Miniaturised devices, such as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), rely upon tiny mechanical contacts, and the lubrication of these presents substantial problems - a drop of oil will not suffice! Organic thin films and monolayers may provide solutions.
  • Macroscopic materials may have properties that depend on microscopic sliding interactions. For example, conditioners in laundry formulations are used to modify the sliding interactions at tiny contacts between between textile fibres that are only a few micrometres in diameter (see below).
  • Measurements of the tribological properties of surfaces at nanometre length scales provide a powerful means for mapping variations in chemical structure and composition; friction force microscopy is an invaluable tool for the characterisation of molecular nanostructures (see nanofabrication page).
  • Studies of tribological phenomena may yield insights into the fundamental nature of forces at surfaces; a current focus in our research is exploring the relationship between nanotribology and the thermodynamics of non-covalent molecular interactions.

Surface Analysis

I am director of the Sheffield Surface Analysis Centre (SSAC) which is home to a variety of state-of-the-art surface characterisation equipment, including an imaging secondary ion mass spectrometer and two X-ray photoelectron spectrometers.

Dr Erica Ballantyne
e.e.ballantyne@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Senior Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management

Research

Erica is a member of the Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LSCM) Research Centre, and the Centre for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (CEES), and the Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre (AREC) here at the University of Sheffield.

Research interests include: Sustainable urban freight transport and logistics operations; city logistics; sustainable urban supply chains; and local authority freight transport planning and policy decision making. She welcomes exploring future collaborations with industry partners and research academics.

Prospective PhD candidates

Erica is interested in supervising doctoral students in the field of logistics, freight transport and supply chain management. In particular, she is keen to supervise students who have an interest in using qualitative methods in logistics related research. Prospective PhD students with related research interests are invited to send a research proposal and a CV for consideration.

Publications

Ballantyne, E.E.F., Lindholm, M. and Whiteing, A.W. (2013). A comparative study of urban freight transport planning: addressing stakeholder needs. Journal of Transport Geography, 32 93- 101.

Ballantyne, E.E.F. and Boodoo, A. (2010). Freight in an Eco-town: How does freight fit into eco-town planning? Logistics and Transport Focus, 12(6) 28-32.

Full list of publications

Professor Fiona Boissonade
f.boissonade@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Clinical Dentistry

I have a major research interest in the mechanisms of altered neuronal excitability that occur under the pathological conditions of nerve injury and inflammation, and which contribute to the development of chronic pain, including that in the oro–facial region. Much of this research has been done at the academic–industrial interface. Collaborations with GSK, Pfizer and Eli Lilly have funded a wide range of pre-clinical translational studies, using pre-clinical models and human tissues to identify and validate a range of regulators of neuronal excitability as potential targets for the development of novel analgesics and anti-inflammatory mediators.

Other research projects are directed towards improvement of nerve regeneration. This work investigates methods of improving nerve repair through the use of a range of anti-inflammatory and anti-scarring agents, and includes collaboration with the Department of Engineering Materials at the University of Sheffield to develop bioengineered conduits to enhance nerve regeneration. In other projects I collaborate with the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) investigating the role of chemokines in CNS disease.
I also have a significant research interest in neural–immune interactions and their role in the development of disease. I have a number of pilot projects underway in this field investigating neural interactions in the generation of cancer pain and tumour progression.

Dr Jessica Bradley
jessica.bradley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Education

Jessica is an interdisciplinary linguist and ethnographer, with particular research interests in creative practice and the arts (see her personal website https://sites.google.com/sheffield.ac.uk/dr-jessica-bradley/home). Her research expertise is in creative and artistic methods, ethnographic approaches, and multilingualism, in particular lived experiences of multilingualism. She has led a series of funded research projects in creative approaches to linguistic landscapes, including developing cutting edge participatory and arts based research approaches to language in public space. Recent esearch explores how the arts can support new mothers, parents of young children and communities who experienced isolation during the COVID19 pandemic. Her professional background is in educational engagement in the arts and social sciences and in particular widening participation. She welcomes applications from potential doctoral researchers which engage with lived experiences of multilingualism and difference, motherhood and autoethnography, and is particularly keen on arts based research, ethnographic approaches, and co-production with creative practitioners, children and young people, all areas in which she has published widely.

Dr Penny Breeze

Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Penny is currently a research associate in ScHARR within the Health Economics and Decision Modelling Section. Penny has been at ScHARR for over 4 years, first as a PhD student and more recently working as a health economics modeller. Before working in ScHARR Penny was working as a health economics consultant at IMS Health developing cost-effectiveness models for pharmaceutical products. The subject of her thesis was to investigate the use of health economic models to develop drug development programmes for new treatments for systemic lupus erythematosus. Since working at ScHARR Penny has been working on a project funded by the School for Public Health Research (SPHR) to provide a coherent, model based framework for the evaluation of strategies for the prevention of type 2 diabetes. Penny has developed a new cost-effectiveness model to evaluate a broad range of type-2 diabetes prevention interventions in the United Kingdom. Penny's research interests are in methods for longitudinal data analysis for use in decision-analytic modelling. Specifically in complex natural history models with multiple dynamic risk factors.

Mr Adam Carter
adam.d.carter@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Adam joined the department in 2019 as Research Associate on the ‘Brexit and Everyday Family Relationships’ project, led by Dr Katherine Davies. This explored how families negotiated the politics of Brexit in their everyday lives, and traced how Brexit’s influence mapped onto and worked through established family practices. The research drew on a suite of qualitative, ethnographically-inspired methods including interviews, diaries and ‘Gogglebox’ video observations.

Previously, he completed his PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, under the supervision of Dr Vik Loveday and Professor Monica Greco, on how the live stand-up comedy environment is permeated by social power relations. While completing the PhD, Adam taught on undergraduate programmes about value and identity, culture and communication, and social theory. He also convened a module at Birkbeck, University of London on ‘Class’ from a psychosocial perspective. 

In early 2021 he started his Leverhulme ECF project ‘Laughing through life? Humour’s role for families facing challenging times.’ The research will use a participatory video method to explore the positive and negative potentials of humour as a coping strategy for negotiating tough life course situations.

Dr Yu Chen
yu.chen@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of East Asian Studies

Research interests

Dr Chen’s research interests are in China’s urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration. China is experiencing the largest migration wave in human history, with hundreds of millions of people moving from the countryside to cities to seek better life. She is interested in the social, economic, spatial and environmental consequences of such massive urbanisation.

She is currently working on the following projects:

ESRC/CASS Urban Transformations: Urban Development, Migration, Segregation and Inequality (2015--2018). This project aims to bring together researchers from the University of Glasgow, University of Sheffield and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, to develop new ideas, innovative methods and analysis on the impacts of migration on urban development, the related social-spatial segregation and public policy challenges.

ESRC/GCRF: Dynamics of Health & Environmental Inequalities in Hebei Province, China (2017–2018). This project aims to develop the data infrastructure and to examine the social and health impacts of rapid urbanisation and air pollution, in order to improve decision support tools for economic and social policy.

She is also interested in rural-to-urban migrants and their life prospects. Her previous projects examined the aspirations and socio-economic integration of new-generation migrants in urban China.

She welcomes applications from prospective PhD students in the fields of urbanisation, migration, urban development and housing.

Dr Tim Craggs
t.craggs@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

Single-molecule approaches provide unprecedented detail to the understanding of essential biological processes, as was recognized in the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Their unique advantage stems from the ability to go beyond the ensemble- and time-averaging of common biochemical techniques, enabling the identification and interpretation of asynchronous reactions, transient states, and rare sub-species.

ResTDC

Research in the Craggs Lab involves the development and application of single-molecule fluorescence techniques to addressing crucial questions across physics, chemistry and the life sciences.

Recent work has focussed on the development and application of single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET – a molecular ruler for the 30-90 Å scale) to questions of protein folding, and DNA transcription, replication and repair. These methods are capable of observing individual molecules and molecular interactions in real time, and understanding their dynamics.

In addition to this mechanistic work, we have shown we can use smFRET to measure absolute distances with angstrom accuracy, opening the door to FRET driven structural biology.

Dr Dana Damian
d.damian@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

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,

Professor Jeremy Dawson
J.F.Dawson@Sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

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.

Dr Joel Foreman
j.foreman@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering
A combination of experimental and modelling approaches to polymer and polymer composite science. Development of experimental structure property relationships in polymers of use in the composites industry, primarily epoxy and phenolic resins. Various modelling techniques for predicting material properties ranging from continuum to atomistic and some finite element methods. 

Research interests
  • Tailoring the structure of epoxy resins by altering the resin/hardener chemistry and stoichiometry to understand how the chemical structure influences thermo-mechanical properties.
  • Tailoring the structure of phenolic resins by altering the reactant stoichiometry, cure schedule and catalysts to understand how the chemical structure influences thermo-mechanical properties.
  • Monitoring epoxy and phenolic resin cure through DSC, DEA and NIR to understand how the curing reactions influence the final structure of thermosetting resins.
  • Manufacture and mechanical property testing of composite panels based on epoxy and phenolic resins in order to improve properties by tailoring the properties of the matrix phase.
  • Group Interaction Modelling of polymer properties.
  • Multi-scale modelling of polymer composites using Group Interaction Modelling for material properties of the fibre and matrix combined with FEA and statistical fibre failure model for composite properties.
  • Predicting and measuring the effect diluents (e.g. water) have on polymer and polymer composite properties.
Dr Philipp Horn
p.horn@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Research interests

My research interests centre around inclusive urban development planning in the global South, with a regional focus on Latin America. My work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with debates in urban studies, planning, geography and global development. Within this broad agenda, my research focuses on urban indigeneity, territorial contestation, alternatives to development, and citizen-led and participatory planning. My current research documents emerging patterns of indigenous urbanisation in Bolivia and looks at the everyday lived experience of urban indigenous peoples, paying particular attention to intersectional differences around age and gender. Through direct engagement with indigenous youth activists and local authorities, my research examines opportunities and challenges around integrating specific interests, demands and alternatives to development promoted by indigenous peoples into urban planning policy and practice. Methodologically, I prefer making use of co-productive, decolonial and participatory approaches and deploying creative methods such as participatory filming, counter-mapping and photovoice. 

Projects

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who have interests in the following areas:

  • Indigenous urbanisation and promoting marginalised groups in urban policy and practice;

  • Participatory and citizen-led approaches to planning in cities of the global South;

  • Alternatives to (urban) development in practices

  • Collaborative and co-productive urban studies research approaches

Dr Mordechai Katzman
M.Katzman@shef.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

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 xxp. 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.

Professor Ali Khurram
s.a.khurram@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Clinical Dentistry

My main research interest is in the interaction of chemokine receptors and their ligands in the pathogenesis of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC). During my Masters and PhD., I have studied the expression and role of various receptors including CXCR4 (receptor for CXCL12/SDF-1alpha), CXCR1 and CXCR2 (receptors for CXCL8/IL8) and XCR1 (receptor for XCL1/lymphotactin). My PhD findings showed the expression of the XCR1 receptor outside the immune system and on epithelial cells for the first time where it facilitated cancer cell signalling, migration, invasion, proliferation in addition to stimulating adhesion to ECM components and release of Matrix Metalloproteinases. I am also currently looking at the role of XCR1 and lymphotactin interaction in OSCC metastasis and involved in a study to design an antagonist for XCR1 in liaison with the Chemical Engineering department.
My main clinical research interest is studying extracapsular spread in OSCC as it reduces the 5-year patient survival by 80-85%. In addition, I have also been working on a number of collaborative projects for reducing postoperative salivary leakage in Head and Neck Cancer Resection patients. I am also involved with testing and optimisation of cancer treatment drugs and novel methods of delivery to reduce the associated side effects. In addition, I am also involved in numerous clinical audits/interventions with my surgical colleagues.

Professor Nils Krone
n.krone@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism

Research interests

His main clinical interests are inborn errors of steroidogenesis, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, disorders of sex development (DSD), and PCOS; his main research interests are on inborn errors of steroid hormone biosynthesis and steroid hormone metabolism in health and disease.

Current efforts of his work concentrate on the implementation of model systems to study genetic variants and the integration of diagnostic methods in adrenal disease and DSD. His group has implemented various in vitro assays to study enzymatic defects in steroidogenesis. The most recent work of his group explores the consequences of disrupted steroid hormone synthesis and action on whole organism employing zebrafish as a model organism in translational steroid hormone research (Endocrinology 2013; Endocrinology 2016). This research is based at the Bateson Centre.

The main focus of this clinical research program is on CAH. He leads on a multicentre, 17 tertiary paediatric endocrine centres in the UK, NIHR RD TRC funded project to establish the evidence basis on the current health status in children and young people with congenital adrenal hyperplasia in the UK. In addition, he works on a program to improve health care deliver for children and young people with adrenal conditions and DSD.

Dr Antonios Ktenidis
Antonios.Ktenidis@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Education
Antonios is interested in (the construction of) 'non-normative' bodies in education e.g. dis/abled bodies, and how developmentalism as a discourse and ideology permeates and materialises in educational spaces e.g. ableist underpinnings of school furniture, curriculum, body pedagogies and biopedagogies. He also has a keen interest in the role height plays in education or, put differently, how height(ism) manifests and matters in education. 
 
Furthermore, Antonios' research focuses on social in/justice in education, looking at how dis/ableism, racism, classism, fatism, heightism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are (re)produced in education, especially from an intersectional perspective.    
 
His research is interdisciplinary and brings into dialogue a range of disciplines, such as Critical Disability Studies (phenomenological disability studies, poststructuralist disability studies, posthuman and dis/human disability studies), Disability Studies in Education, Critical Psychology, Sociology of Education, Sociology of the Body, Sociology of Stature, Sociology of Space, and Children's Geographies.
 
Methodology wise, he is interested in inclusive qualitative methodologies, such as narrative inquiry and creative and art-based methods. He is also passionate about research ethics, especially in relation to sensitive topics and discourses of vulnerability.  
Dr Aidas Masiliunas
a.masiliunas@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Economics

Research Interests

Aidas is an experimental economist who uses laboratory, online and field experiments, as well as game theory, to understand human behaviour.

Aidas is interested in understanding how boundedly rational decisions depend on the framing, information or feedback in the game. To address these questions, Aidas compares the predictions of agent-based models to experimental data in games where convergence is slow or there are multiple equilibria to which choices could converge. Results from this research shed some light on whether behaviour is driven by beliefs, preferences or bounded rationality, and how the policymakers could use information design to shift behaviour in a desirable manner.

Aidas is also interested in using experimental methods to address problems such as climate change, income inequality and collusion in oligopolies. Some aspects of each problem can be modelled by appropriately designed games and the consequences of potential policy interventions can be investigated using both behavioural game theory and laboratory experiments. Specifically, his recent research explores whether exposure to income inequality has a negative effect on productivity, whether the outcomes of climate change negotiations depend on historical responsibility and whether collusion is more likely in more concentrated markets.

Dr Pamela McKinney
p.mckinney@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research interests

My research interests focus on:

Pedagogy for Information Literacy in Higher Education.

The relationship between Inquiry-based Learning and Information Literacy, including how learners can be supported in their inquiries through the development of Information Literacy capabilities and how Information Literacy can be taught using Inquiry-based pedagogies

Reflective practice for teachers and learners in Higher Education

The development of teaching competencies in librarians.

Students working in groups and the tools and technologies groups use to communicate and collaborate.

Information Literacy and Information behaviour in everyday life contexts with a specific focus on health information literacy in marginalised comunities

Self-tracking information practices

PhD supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD research projects in the areas of:

Information literacy and Information behaviour in educational or everyday life contexts

Health information literacy in marginalised communities

The teaching practices of librarians, and professional development for teacher-librarians

Self-tracking information practices

I am interested in qualitative approaches to research, and welcome proposals for Phenomenography, grounded theory, situational analysis and visual methods


Dr Denis Newman-Griffis
d.r.newman-griffis@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research interests

I study practical effectiveness and responsible design of artificial intelligence technologies for medicine and health. This includes:

  • The intersection of data science and disability, including critical disability perspectives on data and technology.

  • Data science design processes, including responsible and ethical design as well as understanding translational challenges of data science in practice. 

  • Practical natural language processing for health, including design of new NLP technologies and real-world evaluation.

  • Text analysis for insight into data, including assessment of data bias and interactive exploration of text datasets.

I am also interested in LGBTQ+/queer perspectives on data science processes, and on developing technology-enhanced pedagogical methods for teaching data science.


Research supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD research projects in areas such as:

  • Critical evaluation of data science/AI technologies and development practices

  • Design and implementation of disability-focused informatics technologies

  • Real-world evaluation of health NLP technologies

  • Intersections of NLP/text mining techniques and social inequalities in text data

  • Data science pedagogy, including group-based and technology-enhanced learning

Dr Lois Orton
l.orton@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

My research questions the way we understand and address
inequalities in health, particularly as experienced by migrant and
ethnic minority groups. There is a focus on the intersection of three
main axes of inequality: race/ethnicity, gender and poverty and,
within this, on the role of power/control as an underlying social
determinant of health. My research takes an interdisciplinary
perspective, drawing on the theory and practical application of a
range of complementary methods drawn from sociology, political
science and history. Recent work, for example, has involved
developing critical methodologies that help us think differently about
the ‘problem’ of ‘Roma health’ and the types of knowledge that inform
how it is understood/addressed.


I have supervised Masters and PhD students in a range of social
science projects exploring pathways to and from health inequalities
among various disadvantaged groups (ethnic minorities, those living
in excluded communities, older people.) I am particularly interested to
hear from prospective students whose research explores the
intersection of health and social science with a focus on inequality
and critical methodologies.

Professor Penelope Ottewell
p.d.ottewell@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism
The Medical School

Research Interests

My research is focused on advanced breast and prostate cancer with particular emphasis on bone metastases. Primarily, this involves using a complement of in vitro and in vivo model systems to investigate the molecular alterations responsible for metastases to bone and response to treatment. Metastases are a result of a stepwise accumulation of genetic/epi-genetic mutations promoting distinct molecular alterations that drive different stages in the metastatic process; mutations involved in intravasation are not the same as those involved in tissue homing and colonisation. Importantly, molecular alterations acquired by tumour cells have profound effects on cytokine production and immune cell regulation. My research team hypothesise that cytokine driven changes to the tumour immune environment promotes metastatic spread and that pharmacological regulation of immunity may provide effective treatment methods for, currently incurable, bone metastasis. The aims of my research are to: (A) Identify specific molecular and immune cell regulatory determinants involved in tumour cell intravasation, homing to bone and colonisation of the metastatic site. (B) Decipher how these determinants impact on treatment efficacy in different cancer subtypes. (C) Establish more effective treatments for metastatic breast and prostate cancers.

Professor Beth Perry
b.perry@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Beth’s research focuses on critically interrogating and developing pathways to more just sustainable urban futures. She focusses on urban governance, transformation and the roles of universities, with an emphasis on socio-environmental and socio-cultural transitions.

She is currently leading three major UK projects focussed on co-producing urban transformations, with a team of researchers working across the Urban Institute and Sheffield Methods Institute:

  • Jam and Justice: Co-producing Urban Governance for Social Innovation is a three-year project funded by the ESRC Urban Transformations programme, with partners at the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation and the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham.
  • Whose Knowledge Matters? Competing and Contesting Knowledge Claims in 21st Century Cities is a collaboration between the University of Sheffield and University of Twente in the Netherlands funded by the Open Research Area initiative and focussed on citizen knowledges in sustainable urban development projects.
  • Realising Just Cities is the four-year international collaboration programme of Mistra Urban Futures focussed on Greater Manchester and the Sheffield City-Region.
Professor Stephen Pinfield
s.pinfield@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Information School

Research interests

My research interests focus on scholarly communication, research data management, open access and open science, digital scholarship, digital information resources management, research policy, and managing information and technology services in organisations. Recently, this has included work on open-access publishing and dissemination, library and information strategy, and higher education research policy. I work at the intersection between technology deployment, policy development, and cultural practices, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Much of this has to date concentrated on applied areas, stemming from my professional background as an information services manager before moving into an academic role. I have, however, combined this with working with a number of theoretical models in order to understand patterns of uptake of innovative approaches to scholarship and communication. I am interested in the relationship between theory and practice, and in how researchers interact with practitioners in information-related and knowledge-producing organisations.

PhD Supervision

I am interested in supervising PhD projects in any areas of my research interests.

Dr Alice Pyne
a.l.pyne@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Alice’s expertise is in high resolution single-molecule microscopy. She has achieved unprecedented resolution for single biomolecules in solution through the development of new Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) methods in collaboration with Bruker (CA, USA). Her research has resulted in both the highest-quality AFM images of the DNA double helix achieved to date, and the first visualisation of variations in the DNA double helix structure on a single molecule. Alice's research exploits these techniques to improve our understanding of DNA structure, interactions, and therapeutics.


Through close interdisciplinary collaboration we work to determine to develop new ways to determine how the complexity of biomolecular structure relates to its function. Major avenues of research include:

  • Development of high resolution AFM techniques
  • Combining high resolution AFM with other single molecule techniques
  • Determination of DNA structure under superhelical stress
  • Understanding how variations in DNA structure affect DNA-protein interactions
  • Evaluation of novel therapeutics
Professor Ning Qin
n.qin@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

The Aerodynamics Research Group's interest is in the development and application of computational aerodynamic tools to a wide range of industrial problems in aerospace, automotive, and environmental industries. These advanced tools provide in-depth analyses and design optimisation for engineering products, such as aircraft wing drag reduction, racing car down force enhancement, and gas turbine and wind turbine blade efficiency improvement.

The aerodynamic analysis and design tools vary from very fast panel methods to popular commercial CFD packages, from the most advanced adjoint method for optimisation (adj-MERLIN) to the detached eddy simulation software (DGDES) for massively separated turbulent flows, developed within the group.

Current projects include: flow separation control, shock control for drag reduction, adjoint based shape optimisation for transonic wing performance, hybrid RANS/LES for synthetic jet, VG and plasma flow control, MAV low Reynolds number aerodynamics, and feature aligned adaptive mesh techniques. 

Dr Muhammad Saddiq
M.I.Saddiq@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research Interests

Broad research interests:

My research interests are in the areas health policy and systems where I draw on my doctoral research and extensive experience working in this area in Nigeria (has worked for significant periods in all three tiers of government) and West Africa providing technical assistance to government officials at all levels in implementing strategies to strengthen health systems and deliver disease prevention and control programs.  I have worked with national, regional and local governments in design, implementation and evaluation of malaria control and health systems strengthening programs.  I have been involved in complex negotiations with different private sector suppliers of health commodities, addressing cost barriers to access for consumers as well as addressing prescriber behaviour in Nigeria, Ghana and Mali.  I have also worked with an international NGO in deployment of new and effective technologies in addressing high burden, high impact conditions in sub-Saharan Africa.

Methods I can supervise: 

Case studies

Specific Areas of Interest:

Health Systems Management

Dr Ranjan Sen
ranjan.sen@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of English Language and Linguistics

Research interests

My primary research interest lies in developing techniques to reconstruct and account for phonological change over time, and investigating to what extent synchronic structure plays a role in diachronic phonology. One aim is to improve methods used to access fine-grained phonetic evidence from dead languages, to allow a better evaluation of theories of change grounded in phonetics. We can then better address the much-debated question of whether phonetics and analogical pressures alone drive sound change, or if structural constraints play a role.

My current research focuses on three areas: (1) investigating the role played by prosodic structure in sound change, examining the roles of syllable and foot structure in Latin and other languages; (2) working in collaboration with Professor Joan Beal (University of Sheffield) and Dr Nura Yáñez-Bouza (University of Manchester) to construct a database of eighteenth-century English phonology from contemporary sources, (e.g. pronouncing dictionaries), in order to address problems in English phonology, both historical and contemporary; (3) working in collaboration with the Oxford Phonetics Laboratory to investigate theories of speech production and phonological representation in the mind, from the evidence of reading aloud non-words, examining questions of both phonological and psycholinguistic significance.


Dr Sarah Son
s.a.son@sheffield.ac.uk

School of East Asian Studies

Dr. Son’s research background is in the role of identity in international relations, particularly as it affects the inter-Korean divide – both at the state level and at the level of social interactions between North and South Koreans.

Her research is interdisciplinary at times, drawing on aspects of anthropology, sociology and history to understand the role of social relationships in the complex politics of the region.

Her past research has looked at questions of identity in the policy practice of North and South Korea on a number of issues, including North Korean escapees, international human rights norms and multiculturalism policy.

As a result of her professional work in the NGO sector on North Korean human rights issues, her current research concentrates on methods of monitoring and recording human rights abuses in North Korea, through interviews with North Korean escapees in South Korea.

She is involved in a long-term project based in Seoul that uses Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) technology to map locations of abuses, as well as relevant event information.

Dr. Son also conducts and supervises research on themes including migration and diaspora, contemporary social movements, popular culture, international relations, nation branding, identity, security and peace-building, with a focus on the Korean Peninsula and East Asia more broadly.

Professor Mark Strong
m.strong@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

My Research interests

I have three related research interests that fall under the general banner of Uncertainty Quantification: (1) how do we properly account for all relevant uncertainties when we build a computer model of a physical, biological or social system? (2) how do we (efficiently) compute value of information? (3) how do we work out the value of a computer model? How much should we pay to make a simple model more complex? When do we stop increasing the complexity of a model?

Jeremy OakleyJim Chilcott and I have proposed an "internal" discrepancy-based method for managing model uncertainty. See this paper in JRSS Series C, and this paper in SIAM/ASA Journal of Uncertainty Quantification. The method is discussed in more detail in my PhD thesis.

We have proposed an efficient method for computing partial EVPI. This method works for any number of parameters of interest and requires only the PSA sample. See this open access paper in Medical Decision Making. R functions to implement the method can be downloaded here. This paper uses Gaussian process-based methods that are nicely described in the  Managing Uncertainty in Complex Models (MUCM) toolkit.

The partial EVPI method extends nicely to the computation of EVSI. See here for our open access paper on the efficient computation of EVSI.

Dr Enrico Vanino
e.vanino@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of Economics

Enrico's research interests are focused on applied microeconometrics, particularly the interaction between international economics and economic geography, regional and urban economics, economic development, firms' innovation and productivity. Specifically, his research looks at firms’ behaviour, and the industrial and spatial analysis of globalization, applying econometric methods and GIS techniques to industrial and trade data at the micro-level, mainly using granular longitudinal data on firms’ characteristics, innovation and internationalization.

Research strands include:

  • the effect of trade policies and trade shocks on the behaviour of firms, analysing the impact of trade defence instruments on affected firms and their externalities, or looking at the role played by policy uncertainty in changing the behaviour of internationalized firms
  • analysing the uneven distribution of economic activities across space, for instance looking at the role of infrastructure and foreign direct investments in fostering economic diversification in developing countries, or also studying the regional and industrial disparities in terms of productivity, skills and innovation across developed economies.
  • Enrico is also interested in environmental economics issues, in particular considering the adaptation of businesses to extreme natural event and climate change.

Enrico is interested in supervising PhD students in applied microeconometrics, specifically in topics related to trade and international economics, regional and urban economics, micro-level analysis of firms’ behaviour in terms of internationalization, productivity and innovation, development economics with specific focus on Sub-Saharan Africa or the Chinese economy, and environmental economics.

Dr Philip Watson
p.f.watson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Oncology and Metabolism
The Medical School

Research interests

My main research interests center on the aetiology of autoimmune disease, with a particular focus on the thyroid. Autoimmune thyroid disease is the most prevalent form of organ-specific autoimmunity in the population and affects approximately 1-2% of individuals. Antigenic targets in autoimmune thyroid disease are well characterised and this, together with the availability of patient material, makes the disease and important model for other forms of autoimmunity. In seeking to better understand the origins of thyroid autoimmunity we have developed techniques to study the nature of the immune response. In particular we have used phage display methods to analyse the autoantibody repertoire of thyroid disease patients.
Recombinant antibody technology is a major component of our research efforts, and we are using this approach in a number of areas, including the analysis of human autoimmune disease and the development of novel therapeutics. Aside from recombinant antibodies we have also employed phage display strategies to identify novel human autoantigens by synthesis and screening of cDNA expression libraries.
In a further development of our research effort we are now employing these techniques commercially in the rational design of novel antibody-based enzyme antagonists for use as therapeutic agents in the treatment of chronic kidney disease. This work is funded by the MRCT.

Professor Jennifer Coates
jennifer.coates@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of East Asian Studies

My research and teaching is situated at the intersection of Japanese Studies, Film Studies, History, History of Art, and Anthropology, and can best be characterized as Japanese Cultural Studies.

My wider research interests include Japanese and East Asian cinema, photography, gender studies, filmmaking, and ethnographic methods. I have published on these topics and others in Cultural Studies, Participations, Japanese Studies, Japan Forum, the U. S.-Japan Women’s Journal and The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.

I am developing a book manuscript entitled 'Feelings Without Words: Growing Up With the Cinema in Postwar Japan', based on four years of ethnography in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. The book explores the role of cinema in the development of a sense of self for those who grew up during the Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) and its aftermath. Framed as an ethno-history of cinema attendance and reception in the Kansai region of Western Japan, this original study positions cinema as a discursive object in the living memories of the era. Individual chapters deal with the origin stories of cinema in Japan, gender and the cinema audience, the gap between Occupation authorities’ expectations of the audience and lived experience, and cinema's relation to activism.

Many of my research outputs take a cross-regional and interdisciplinary approach, including publications on Manchurian-Japanese wartime co-production films, postwar Japanese co-productions with Hong-Kong, and transnational star personae. I have conducted research on the simultaneous development of ethno-fiction filmmaking techniques in France and Japan, and on Taiwanese and Korean co-productions set in Tokyo, and co-authored an article on film-motivated tourism in China. I have also collaborated with affect theory specialists in the UK, USA, and Japan, and with a group of art historians in Zurich on two projects on photography. Moving beyond traditional research publication methods, I completed a short documentary titled When Cinema Was King (2018) on the topic of Japanese cinema audiences and their memories.

Before joining SEAS, I studied, researched, and taught in many areas of the world. I was an AHRC Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (2012), a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National University (2011), Assistant Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University (2014-2018), and Senior Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia.

Dr Briony Hannell
B.Hannell@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Briony joined the Department of Sociological Studies in early 2021. She initially joined the department as a University Teacher in Digital Media and Society (Grade 8), before transitioning to her current role as a University Teacher in Sociology in September 2021. In addition to her primary role as a University Teacher, Briony has also undertaken a fixed-term role as a Research Associate in Digital Technologies with Professor Helen Kennedy, as well as a HEIF-funded fixed-term role in the Sheffield Methods Institute as a Research Associate in the Creative Industries. 

Briony previously worked as an Associate Lecturer and Associate Tutor at the University of East Anglia, where she spent three years teaching across gender studies, political communication, digital sociology, and digital politics. Briony completed her studies in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia, completing her BA (Hons) in Society, Culture and Media (1:1*) in 2015, her MA in Media and Cultural Politics (Distinction) in 2016, and her PhD in Politics in 2021.

Briony is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and is currently enrolled on the Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PG Cert LTHE) at the University of Sheffield. She is currently co-lead of the Critical Diversities and Everyday Life Research Theme.

While Briony is formally trained in cultural politics and the sociology of media and culture, her interdisciplinary research spans across feminist sociology, feminist cultural studies, media and communications, internet studies, girls’ studies, and fan studies. Briony is a qualitative feminist researcher and she uses ethnographic methods (both online and offline), including participant observation, focus groups, interviews, surveys, discourse analysis, and textual analysis. Her ethnographic research locates digital media fan communities as an important space for young people to produce, negotiate, and contest the meanings of feminism(s) in an informal and everyday context. In doing so, her work locates digital youth cultures on Tumblr as a fruitful site for young people to engage in feminist activism, community building, and knowledge sharing, while also complicating utopian framings of these digital spaces to reveal the contradictory and ambivalent processes of inclusion and exclusion at work within them. Broadly speaking, she is interested in the following:

  • Youth and the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality
  • Popular culture as a site of struggle
  • Participatory culture and fandom
  • Digital cultures and platforms
  • Girls’ and young women’s media cultures
  • Belonging, (cultural) citizenship and civic engagement
  • Digital feminist pedagogy and knowledge sharing
  • Feminist methodologies

Briony’s research on Tumblr has been featured in WIRED magazine, and she has been invited to interview as an expert on gender, popular culture, and fan culture for The Observer, Mashable, Vice, and BBC Radio, amongst others. Her first monograph will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in late 2023.    

Dr Jacob Macdonald
j.macdonald@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

My research focuses broadly around the application and methods of urban and environmental economics and data science. I am particularly interested in the interplay and spillovers of natural (environmental) urban amenities, the built environment and neighbourhood dynamics. This work emphasizes quantitative methods and leveraging big, novel, and geographic data. I have a background in spatial statistics, econometrics, data visualization, machine learning and capturing measures of the urban environment through remote sensing and secondary administrative data sources. I’m a broad champion of open data/ software, open (and accessible) science communication, and making use of increasingly available and new sources of data. My current work looks to better understand how the built urban environment and amenities in a local area can influence broader economic, socio-demographic or environmental processes. This falls generally along the following streams. 1) Measuring and Valuing Urban Amenities and Spillovers: This area looks at how to best capture, measure and incorporate features of the urban environment and amenities into spatial statistics and models. I am particularly interested in using quasi-experimental policy evaluation for valuing the impact of urban greenery, trees, open spaces and water amenities (among others) and their spillover effects on local hazards like flooding or pollution risks. 2) Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Local Housing, Employment and Retail: Using big, geographic data sources can help to better understand detailed variations and similarities in the overall economic vitality and homogeneity of markets across urban areas. I’ve worked extensively with housing, employment and retail data to better understand spatial patterns in local economic and consumer behaviour, identifying, mapping and delineating small area neighbourhoods and urban zones. 3) Patterns of Human Activity and Interaction in the Urban Area: As new forms of granular location data over time capture high detailed patterns of mobility and urban movement, a wide range of work can explore how the local population interact with the built and urban environment. Mobility patterns and spatio-temporal urban data not only help to inform on the relative attractiveness of certain spaces (e.g. parks and open spaces), but can also help in better understanding how our behaviour influences dynamics like congestion or pollution.

Dr Joab Winkler
j.r.winkler@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Computer Science

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.
Professor Serena Cussen
s.corr@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Energy storage research:

Moving towards a more electrified world presents considerable energy storage challenges. Amongst these, the development of low cost, durable, high energy density, safe batteries is paramount for delivery of an all-electric vehicle market. A major theme of our research is to develop novel, facile routes to functional materials using our expertise in solid state and wet chemical methods to provide new battery electrodes and electrolytes across a range of chemistries. We apply a comprehensive range of lab- and synchrotron-based techniques to fully interrogate these materials to elucidate their structure and morphology, investigate their physical and dynamic properties and evaluate their electrochemical performance. Specific research projects include:

High nickel-content electrodes for Li-ion batteries: The benefits of moving to high nickel-content electrodes include potentially higher energy densities and reducing the cobalt content, which addresses the ethical implications and cost associated with this metal. Our group work on the synthesis of micron and nanosized NMC variants. Together with our collaborators in the Faraday Institution Degradation project, we investigate degradation mechanisms in these materials through a holistic approach and design methodologies to mitigate those deleterious effects.

Next generation cathode materials for Li-ion batteries: We are interested in new electrode architectures that enhance long-term performance and durability. Our group has experience in core-shell structures, faceted particles and composite materials. We are developing new synthetic strategies for garnering control over particle morphology to interrogate the effect this has on battery performance. We investigate higher nickel content cathodes, disordered materials, polyanionic and high Li content cathodes, in addition to coating strategies for electrode particles.

New materials for safer all solid-state batteries: Current batteries rely on flammable organic electrolytes that are potentially hazardous and limit performance. Research in the Corr group is ongoing to develop new solid ceramic electrolytes which present more stable alternatives and display high ionic conductivities. Classes of materials we currently study include perovskites, garnets, NASICONS and agyrodites.

Developing microwave approaches to battery materials: Post-processing of novel metallorganic precursors can afford nanostructured materials. By careful design, nanoparticles with specific properties may be tailored. This opens up a ‘bottom-up’ design approach to new materials. We are interested in new heterometallic precursors which afford the opportunity to tune stoichiometries and resulting particle shape.

Chemistries beyond Li-ion: Magnesium-ion batteries represent a potentially transformative approach to current electrochemical energy storage technologies yet their translation to market remains hindered due to a lack of appropriate candidate cathode materials. Our group is developing new Mg-ion cathode materials, in combination with new electrolyte systems.

Materials for Conservation

Working with collaborators at the Mary Rose Trust, we are designing a new approach to the conservation of Mary Rose artefacts, going beyond current methods where potential acid sources remain in the wood through the use of smart multifunctional magnetic nanocomposites. These target and remove harmful entities lodged inside wooden structures. We can direct magnetic nanoparticles to desired areas inside the wood, optimising the removal of harmful species. We use state-of-the-art synchrotron tools to evaluate the structure and speciation of species found within these priceless artefacts.

Dr Sarah Brooks
s.brooks@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Sheffield University Management School

Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour

Sarah joined the University of Sheffield in 2012 after being awarded a Management and Business Development fellowship jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) and the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies (SAMS). The fellowship was designed to improve practitioner experience within the academic field. In December 2015, Sarah became a full-time lecturer in Organisational Behaviour with specific focus on Occupational Psychology, Human Resource Management and Leadership.
Prior to joining the University, Sarah held a number of positions in the fields of operations management and management consultancy, leading change management projects in both the private and public sector. She is currently in the fourth year of a PhD at the Institute of Work Psychology focusing on understanding the role of formality on upward challenge in the UK Police Service.

Research

Sarah’s research interests include all aspects of voice and silence and organisational communication. As a qualitative researcher, Sarah is keen to use innovative and unique methods designed to provide insight into cognitive and mental models of individual behaviour such as card sort, repertory grid and thinking aloud technique.

PhD Supervision

Sarah is interested in hearing from anyone interested in studying voice and silence or wider communication issues in the workplace.

Working with Organisations and Public Engagement

If you are interested in knowing more about the reasons why employees don’t speak up to their managers, or why managers might not encourage voice, please contact me. I am happy to run workshops designed to raise awareness of these issues. If you would like to work with me on a piece of research in your organisation, I would also be delighted to hear from you.

Publications

Brooks, S. (2014). Understanding workplace voice and silence. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology in Practice, 6 26-38.

Full list of publications

 

Dr Alasdair Campbell
a.n.campbell@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

My research interests are centred on buoyant, reactive flow. This work can be can be broadly split into work in two general areas, namely process safety (incorporating combustion, explosion and the dispersion of reactive chemicals) and the energy-water nexus, focussing on the use of low-cost technologies for the production of potable or irrigation water in arid regions.

My work has focussed on understanding the interaction of fluid mechanics and chemistry on a fundamental level using a combination of numerical and analytical techniques, coupled to simple experiments. My broad areas of interest are summarised below.

Combustion

The heat released by combustion reactions can result in significant changes in the density, and thus can induce natural convection. This work has led to numerous publications in high ranking chemical engineering, combustion and interdisciplinary journals and involves a theoretical and numerical investigation of natural convection coupled with two combustion phenomena, namely cool flames, which are a feature of low temperature combustion, and thermal explosion.

Turbulent Plumes

I work on the development new integral models describing plumes in which a chemical reaction alters the density. Such plumes can arise in a variety of circumstances ranging from industrial accidents (e.g. the Gulf of Mexico oil spill) to volcanic eruption columns. The development of new models to describe such plumes is vital for designing effective responses to such events.

Energy-Water Nexus

I am interested in the investigation and deployment of low cost methods of solar energy capture and storage. In particular, I work on solar ponds, where salinity gradients can be used to trap solar energy and industrial waste heat for use in driving desalination processes.

Professor Iain Coldham
i.coldham@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

New methodology in organic chemistry.

Synthetic chemistry depends on reliable, high-yielding and selective reactions that access a wide variety of different structures. The discovery of new methods in synthesis is crucial to expand the range of novel compounds that can be made easily. Especially important is the development of new carbon-carbon bond-forming reactions. Our research group is studying the use of organometallic compounds in asymmetric synthesis, especially for carbon-carbon bond formation of nitrogen-containing compounds, prevalent in many biologically active molecules. We have found that 2-lithiopyrrolidines, piperidines and other cyclic amines undergo dynamic resolution in the presence of a chiral ligand (L*), leading to highly enantioenriched 2-substituted cyclic amine products. We have determined the kinetics of enantiomerization of several chiral organolithium compounds.

Synthesis of biologically active compounds.

We are using dipolar cycloaddition chemistry to access a variety of alkaloid structures. Intramolecular cycloadditions provide an efficient means to build up bicyclic and polycyclic ring systems in a rapid and stereocontrolled way. We have shown that this chemistry is applicable to the synthesis of the core ring system of the alkaloid manzamine A, which has significant biological activity (anti-cancer, anti-malarial, and other activity). One dipole that we use is an azomethine ylide, that we make by condensation of a secondary amine with an aldehyde. Intramolecular cycloaddition sets up two new rings and up to four new stereocentres in a single step. We have prepared simpler analogues of manzamine A and other heteroaromatic compounds to probe their biological activity.

Recently, we have found that primary amines (such as amino-acids, amino-esters, hydroxylamine) can be used to condense with an aldehyde and promote a cascade process involving imine formation, cyclization, ylide formation and cycloaddition all in one pot. This chemistry provides an efficient method to prepare three rings directly from an acyclic aldehyde in a stereocontrolled way and has been applied to the total syntheses of several alkaloids (such as aspidospermidine, aspidospermine, quebrachamine and myrioxazine A).

Dr Jill Edmondson
j.edmondson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences

My interdisciplinary research aims to address the challenge of improving the sustainability and resilience of ecosystems, with a focus on urban and agricultural systems.  I have a particular interest in the interaction between soils, plants and the ecosystem services they provide to a growing global population.  

Urban horticulture

My research addresses the current and future potential of urban horticulture to make a contribution to local and national food security. This includes growing at a household level in gardens and allotments and using controlled environment agricultural systems in grey infrastructure.  I am also interested in the ecosystem service co-benefits of growing food, from soil quality to health and wellbeing.  As part of this research I run a national-scale citizen science project called Measure Your Harvest (MYHarvest.org.uk), that works people to collect long-term home grown crop yield data. My research also addresses the bioavailability of urban soil pollutants to fruit and vegetable crops and potential risks to human health. I work closely with local authorities and NGOs to deliver this applied research.

Soil and vegetation carbon budgeting

I have developed methods for soil carbon budgeting in complex urban ecosystems in both greenspaces and beneath greyspaces.  I am really interested in the role of black carbon in soil carbon storage and sequestration. 

Understanding the urban forest

Trees have been demonstrated to contribute disproportionately to ecosystem service provision in cities and towns but we have less understanding of how the unique combination of pressures in the urban environment, e.g. pollution and encasement in greyspace, affect their health and resilience to future climate change.  My research addresses both the role of urban trees in provision of ecosystem services e.g. heat island mitigation and carbon storage, and the effects of urban pressures on tree health and resilience at a species specific scale and the consequences for ecosystem service provision.

Professor Susan Fitzmaurice
S.Fitzmaurice@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of English Language and Linguistics

Research interests

Fitzmaurice's research focuses on the history of the English language, using methodological perspectives provided by historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. She is particularly interested in exploring the methods and kinds of evidence employed in historical approaches to language study.

She is currently focussing on semantic change and exploring different approaches to historical semantics. She recently delivered the plenary lecture at SHEL 8 (Studies in the History of the English Language) in Utah on the role of contingent polysemy in the changing meanings of politeness in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (summer 2013).

Her research on English in the eighteenth century utilizes the frameworks of social networks analysis, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. Her data are drawn principally from the Network of Eighteenth century English texts (NEET). This is a large unconventional historical electronic corpus of letters, fiction, prose drama and essays produced by Joseph Addison and the members of his social milieu.

Fitzmaurice is currently investigating on the history of the English language in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. The first publication in the project on the history and structure of the colonial variety, ' L1Rhodesian English', appears in The Lesser-Known Varieties of English, (eds.) Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar W. Schneider, & Jeffrey P. Williams. Cambridge University Press (2010), pp. 263-285. She has also contributed a chapter on White Zimbabwean English (WhZimE) to the Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE), 2013.

She has received British Academy support to investigate undocumented varieties of spoken English in Zimbabwe and is collaborating with scholars and students at the University of Zimbabwe on this strand of the larger Zimbabwe project.

Professor Russell Hand
r.hand@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Research interests

Radioactive waste vitrification
Research is focussed on glass composition development for the immobilisation of "difficult" anionic species and legacy wastes into vitreous wasteforms. His group is currently working on developing novel glasses for the vitrification of Mo containing wastes and understanding the crystallisation of Mo containing phases in current waste glass compositions.

Durability of nuclear waste glasses
Research is focussed on understanding the effects of high pH environments on the durability of nuclear waste glasses using laboratory based durability test methods. In addition he is responsible for the field based long term glass burial site at Ballidon (a limestone environment), an experiment now in its 44th year, and which involves collaboration with Dr Strachan from Pacific North-West National Laboratory, USA.

Mechanical properties of glasses
Research is focussed on examining the effects of composition on the mechanical properties of silicate glasses. His group has previously demonstrated the important role of MgO in these glasses and we are currently investigating this further. We have also studied the mechanical properties of nuclear borosilicate glasses. His group is also focussing on assessing the changes in near surface mechanical properties of glasses due to hydration by nanoindentation and at the effects of high temperature mechanical contact on surface damage and thus the practical strength of bulk glass.

Sensing using reinforcing fibres in polymer matrix composites
Research is focussed on developing novel glasses for reinforcing fibres that can be used for both chemical and damage sensing in polymer matrix composites. This research is being undertaken in collaboration with CSIC.

Professor Nigel Harwood
n.harwood@sheffield.ac.uk

Department of English Language and Linguistics

Research Interests

I am interested in hearing from PhD applicants who wish to conduct qualitative or predominantly qualitative projects relating to academic writing, academic literacies, ESP/EAP, or language teaching materials/textbooks.

I am a qualitative researcher, and the primary research methods I use in my work are interviews and textual analysis. My doctoral thesis is a corpus-based study of how the personal pronouns I and WE are used in academic writing across four disciplines (Business, Economics, Computing, and Physics) by ‘experts’ writing journal articles and postgraduate students writing dissertations. I have published papers on taking a lexical approach to ELT and on taking a corpus-based critical pragmatic approach to English for academic purposes. More recent work includes research on citation in academic writing, on proofreaders’ beliefs and practices when working on student texts, and on supervisors’ and supervisees’ experiences of master’s dissertation supervision. I have published my findings in outlets such as Applied Linguistics, Written Communication, Text & Talk, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Pragmatics, Studies in Higher Education, Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, and Journal of Business & Technical Communication.

In general, my research interests lie in the following areas:

  • Analysis of academic writing—analysing the text and interviewing writers about their texts
  • Citation analysis
  • Academic literacies in higher education
  • Academic socialisation in higher education
  • English for specific and academic purposes
  • Development and use of and language teaching materials and textbooks
  • Critical pedagogy
  • English language teaching and learning


Professor Neil Hyatt
n.c.hyatt@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Research interests

Radioactive waste management and disposal.
Our focus is on developing strategy, materials, processes and policy to support the safe, timely and efficient clean up of the UK radioactive waste legacy. A key aspect of our research is the design, manufacture and performance assessment of glass and ceramic materials for the immobilisation of plutonium residues, legacy intermediate level wastes, and high level wastes from reprocessing operations. We work closely with industrial organisations, including Sellafield Ltd., the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and National Nuclear Laboratory to address real world challenges of radioactive waste management. Our work has supported development of thermal treatment strategy by Sellafield Ltd. and Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the acceptance of vitrified intermediate level wastes wastes in conceptual designs for the UK Geological Disposal Facility.

Advanced nuclear materials.
Research is focused on the development of new materials and processes for application in future nuclear fission and fusion fuel cycles. We are currently developing novel processing methods for advanced cermet fuels with application in naval reactor concepts, ceramic clad materials for accident tolerant nuclear fuels, and the application of molten salts technology to reprocessing of nuclear fuels. We are also working on new waste management strategies for future fuel cycles, to reduce the ultimate geological disposal footprint.

Structure-property relations in mixed metal oxides.
Research is focused on the study of structure-property relationships in perovskite related oxides showing a range of useful physical properties such as high temperature superconductivity, colossal magnetoresistance and anisotropic magnetic exchange. Recent work has investigated structure-property relationships in layered perovskite ferroelectrric oxides and oxide-fluorides.

Professor Jonathan Leake
j.r.leake@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Biosciences
  • Plant-to-soil carbon fluxes - Quantitative analysis of carbon fluxes from plants to soil in grasslands and forests, and the storage of carbon in soils and vegetation. Development of methods for carbon budgeting in urban greenspace and its potential contribution to sustainable urban environments.
  • Mycorrhizal fungi- their networks of power and influence - from nano-to-global scales - Use carbon isotope tracers to quantify energy passing from plants to their symbiotic root-infecting mycorrhizal fungi and how it is used by these fungi: (i) To drive mineral weathering, (ii) in nutrient and carbon cycling and (iii) to empower interactions with other soil organisms (fungi, plants, and fungal-feeding collembolans).
  • Myco-heterotrophy: plants parasitic on fungi - About 10% of all plant species are myco-heterotrophic for part of their life, including most orchids. Over 400 species are fully myco-heterotrophic. My interests are in understanding their evolution, adaptive features, life-cycles, ecology, physiology, functioning and their critical fungal partners.
  • Specialised root functioning - Root adaptations as an alternative strategy to mycorrhiza- spatial and temporal foraging precision and uptake of phosphorus by dauciform roots in sedges.
  • Pollution impacts on plants, soil biology and chemistry, and health - Impacts of long-term nitrogen pollution on grassland soil and plant ecology, and recovery following reduced pollution inputs. Health risks and benefits associated with urban food production. Effects of urban greenspace and soils in trapping and sequestering black carbon.
Dr Natalia Martsinovich

Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

My research is focussed on studying the properties of surface-adsorbate interfaces and processes taking place at these interfaces. Important applications include photovoltaics and photocatalysis. I use a range of theoretical methods, mainly density-functional theory, and also charge transfer theory and molecular mechanics.

Photovoltaics
Photovoltaics uses solar cells to convert solar energy into electricity. Several types of solar cells have been developed; the current market leaders – silicon solar cells – are efficient but expensive. Solar cells based on organic molecules (such as organic and dye-sensitised solar cells (DSSC)) and recently developed perovskite solar cells, are cheap and are currently a subject of active research. The efficiencies of these solar cells are controlled by light absorption properties and rates of charge transfer within the solar cell. I recently developed a model for calculating the rates of charge transfer between semiconductors and adsorbed dyes, to identify semiconductor-dye interfaces which lead to efficient DSSC.

Photocatalysis
Photocatalysis is a process which converts the energy of the Sun into the energy of chemicals. One of the most important photocatalytic processes is the splitting of water into molecular oxygen and hydrogen. This process is particularly interesting because hydrogen is a promising fuel and an environmentally friendly "clean" alternative to petrol. I study semiconductor metal oxides (such as TiO2) and carbon nitrides to investigate light absorption and charge separation in photocatalysts - essential processes for photocatalytic oxidation and reduction reactions.

Molecular self-assembly
Another area of interest is molecular self-assembly – the process whereby molecules assemble into ordered patterns, thanks to specific interactions between these molecules. These ordered structures have the potential to be used as circuits in molecular electronics. I have modelled the structures and dynamics of two-dimensional assemblies of organic molecules (e.g. carboxylic acids) on graphite, in collaboration with the experimental group of M. Lackinger in Munich.

Professor Cheryl Miller
c.a.miller@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Clinical Dentistry

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).

Professor Gwendolen Reilly
g.reilly@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Research interests

Our research has applications in orthopaedic and dental medicine, where clinicians are looking for improved methods to repair skeletal tissues; bone, tendon and cartilage.

Bone tissue engineering.
The aim of bone tissue engineering is to create bone matrix in the laboratory for clinical implantation and as an experimental tool. Our research in this area focuses on two main themes; the effects of mechanical stimulation on differentiation and matrix formation by bone cells and the interactions between precursor bone cells and their biomaterial substrate. Mechanical stimuli examined include dynamic compression, stretch and fluid flow induced shear stresses using a range of bioreactors (including a collaboration with Bose ElectroForce systems group).

Musculoskeletal cell mechanobiology.
We are interested in how skeletal cells respond to extrinsic and intrinsic stimuli by organizing the proteins and mineral they secrete in a way which enhances the strength of the matrix. This information can then be used to manipulate tissue engineered structures in order to induce structurally sound matrix formation. We specifically focus on mechanosensation mechanisms found on the cell membrane; the cell’s proteoglycan (sugar-based) coat and a small organelle that protrudes from the cell membrane – the primary cilia.

Orthopaedic biomaterials.
We investigate the interactions between musculoskeletal cells and orthopaedic and dental materials that are implanted into bone. Materials investigated include porous metals, polymer scaffolds and peptide coated surfaces (in collaboration with Orla Protein Technologies). This research encompasses study of the mechanical properties of biomaterial scaffolds, cell-material interactions, cell mechanics and cell signalling.

Professor Anthony Ryan
a.ryan@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research interests

The common theme in my research is phase transitions in polymers. Most recently we have used the knowledge of the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase behaviour in polymer blends and block copolymers to develop new processing methods based on self-assembly. This has led to the development of the new field of Soft Nanotechnology where synthetic and natural macromolecules are harnessed in a way that makes use of their intrinsic flexibility and susceptibility to Brownian motion to generate work from changes on molecular conformation. Developments in polymers responsive to their environment have lead to research into molecular machines, specifically the fabrication of molecular valves and motors.

We do polymer synthesis in order to have well defined systems to study. The dynamics of phase behaviour are studied by calorimetry, spectroscopy, rheology, microscopy and light, X-ray or neutron scattering. A full suite of microstructural analysis (atomic force, optical and electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and mechanical testing) is used to confirm the dynamic experiments and where appropriate computer modelling is also used.

My main contribution to the field has been the development and application of the techniques of time-resolved structural tools to polymers. This work was the subject of prizes in 1990 by the Plastics and Rubber Institute, in 1992, 1999 and 2003 from the Royal Society of Chemistry and in 1999 from the Polymer Processing Society.

I have been active in promulgating the public understanding of science since my graduate student days. This culminated in my appointment as the Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer for 2002 where my theme was the science and technology of everyday things. The lectures were seen on Channel 4 by 4.5 million viewers and have also been broadcast in Europe, Japan and Korea. I was also the 1st EPSRC Senior Media Fellow to allow me to combine world-class research and popular understanding of the impact of science and technology on society. I was awarded an OBE in 2005 for "services to science".

Dr Phil Shackley
p.shackley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Population Health

Research interests

  • Developing and applying the contingent valuation methodology, in particular the technique of willingness to pay. Applications include: estimating the social value of a quality adjusted life year (QALY); using willingness to pay values to aid priority setting in publicly-financed health care systems; investigating how willingness to pay can and should be used alongside randomised trials; the use of willingness to pay to evaluate the benefits of public health interventions such as the fluoridation of drinking water supplies and the supplementation of flour with folic acid; evaluating minimally invasive surgery; assessing patient preferences for diagnostic radiology; and assessing preferences for an expanded newborn screening programme.
  • The identification, measurement and valuation of (dis)benefits that are not captured in the QALY approach. Applications include: assessing the value of patient health cards; eliciting patient preferences for out-of-hours primary care services; establishing and quantifying the preferences of mental health service users for day hospital care; eliciting patient preferences for the organisation of vascular services; and assessing preferences for access to a general practitioner.
  • The application of economic evaluation techniques to assess the efficiency of health care programmes and interventions. Applications include: screening in primary care; antenatal screening; management of lower respiratory tract infection in general practice; computerised cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety and depression; methods for assessing patients with intermittent claudication; drug treatments for epilepsy; stroke incidence and prevention in Tanzania; venous leg ulcers; and treating upper limb spasticity due to stroke with botulinum toxin.
Professor Annette Taylor
a.f.taylor@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering

My research involves reaction engineering: the design and optimisation of chemical/biochemical systems through consideration of catalytic reaction networks coupled with mass transport. The research combines experiments with kinetic modelling and has a wide range of applications such bio-reactors for fuel or food, materials formation or degradation, drug delivery and sensing.

I'm particularly interested in aqueous phase catalysis and control of dynamics in cellular biological or bioinspired chemical systems. Taking inspiration from nature or the use of natural components allows us to design functional materials and processes that are greener or more sustainable, but also harness the unique properties arising from feedback in natural systems including collective behaviour (e.g. quorum sensing in bacteria) and self-organisation.

Some current projects include:

  • New methods for the bio-catalytic control of gelation for natural adhesives and repair with Prof Pojman (Louisianna State University).
  • Enzyme loaded colloids or vesicles for biotechnology and healthcare applications with Dr Rossi (Salerno) and Dr Beales (Leeds).
  • Self-organisation in precipitation processes with Prof’s Horvath and Toth (Szeged) and Prof Meldrum (Leeds).
  • Bio-based and biodegradable materials: Optimising ester hydrolysis in polymers and lignocellulose processing for bioethanol production.
  • Engineering applications of biomineralisation and biofilm formation with Dr Karunakaran and the SCARAB team (Sheffield).

COST Action on Emergence and Evolution in Complex Chemical Systems

Gordon Research Conference on Oscillations and Dynamic Instabilities in Chemical Systems

Dr David Tobin
d.tobin@sheffield.ac.uk

School of East Asian Studies

David’s research uses discourse analysis and ethnographic methods to explore the relationship between identity and security in global politics. How and why are identities treated as security matters? What are the effects of treating identity as a security matter? His research answers these questions by focusing on the ethnic and international politics of China, specifically ethnic relations and violence in Xinjiang.

His first book, Securing China’s Northwest Frontier: Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang (Cambridge University Press) bridges the gap between Global IR theory and micro-fieldwork approaches to ethnic relations in Chinese Studies. It employs an innovative theoretical approach drawn from Postcolonial theory and critical IR to analyse the relationship between identity and security in Chinese policy-making and ethnic relations between Han and Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The book is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Xinjiang, including during the 2009 violence, from interviews to participant-observation of security practices. The book argues that China’s party-state exacerbates cycles of violence between Han and Uyghurs in Xinjiang by targeting Turkic and Islamic identities as national security threats.

David was invited to present his book to the UK All-Party Parliamentary China Group in October 2020 and to provide evidence to the Uyghur Tribunal. He considers public-engagement and providing robust analysis for policymakers to be core components of research and knowledge production.

David’s current research builds on his fieldwork to explore both the official thinking behind China’s current “fusion” ethnic policies, including interment camps and inter-generational separation practices, and the social and emotional impact of state violence and family separation on the global Uyghur diaspora.

Dr Rachel Tomlinson
r.a.tomlinson@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Research interests

As part of the Experimental Mechanics Laboratory, current research projects are in the development and use of optical instruments to measure strain in a wide range of applications, such as particulate reinforced materials, automotive glass, and aircraft components.

Digital Image Correlation techniques are being used to study damage in particulate reinforced materials. A range of particulate toughened polymers are being studied: to investigate experimentally the deformation mechanisms around the particles; to identify and characterise the potential failure mechanisms through experiment; and to explore how these mechanisms can be modelled mathematically. The work is sponsored by Cytec Engineered Materials Ltd, who are global providers of technologically advanced composite materials for high performance aerospace and automotive applications.

Within safety critical industries, such as in aircraft manufacture, numerical analyses need to be verified by experiment. However both the cost of development tests and the time taken to perform them are considerably greater than the cost and time required to conduct Finite Element Analyses (FEA). Airbus are sponsoring research into the use of Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) techniques to accurately produce scaled structural models for the aerospace industry with the aim of improving efficiency of design.

Asymmetric stress profiles through glass may be measured using magnetophotoelasticity. Pilkington plc are sponsoring research into developing a full-field magnetopolariscope system, which will enable more effective measurement of residual stress in glass. Non-destructive methods to measure stresses in three-dimensional photoelastic models of engineering components are being investigated. A joint research project with The University of Manchester is developing a new instrument using tomographic techniques, which will allow experimental verification of design prototypes to be performed quickly and efficiently.

Thermoelastic stress analysis techniques are being used in a number of different areas including exploring why a crack grows in the direction that it does, and investigating damage in polymers and elastomers used in the oilfield industry.

Other areas of interest are with birefringent fluids with applications in a wide variety of practical engineering problems, e.g. flow through micro-channels; unsteady flows; biological flows; and classic fluid dynamics problems, and using photoelasticity in medical and dental applications.

Dr Alison Twelvetrees
a.twelvetrees@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Division of Neuroscience

Neurons form complex extended cellular structures; for example motor neurons have cell bodies in the spinal cord whilst extending axons down to the muscles of the hands and feet. Dendritic trees are also highly branched and spatially specialised structures. These morphological specialisations of neurons are essential to their function, but also hugely challenging as the majority of newly synthesised protein is made in the cell body and then actively transported to its site of use, up to 1 meter away. In addition, retrograde transport back to the cell body is required to remove ageing proteins and organelles from the distal neurites for degradation, as well as to relay neurotrophic survival signals back to the cell body.

Almost all the long distance transport events in neurons fall under the label of ‘microtubule mediated transport’. This label masks a complex set of co-dependent intracellular trafficking events of a huge array of cargos critical for maintaining neuronal homeostasis. There is now a large body of evidence demonstrating deficits in transport in multiple unrelated adult-onset neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, as well as motor neuron diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSPs). In addition, deficits in transport are frequently found as an early event in disease models.

Our research is focused on how the microtubule cytoskeleton and its motor proteins, kinesin and dynein, build and maintain neurons. We aim to understand the molecular mechanisms of this process and create new avenues for translational research into neurodegnerative conditions.

Current research themes include:

  • Discovering neuron specific functions of motor proteins, defined by the inclusion of neuron specific motor protein subunits.
  • Understanding the molecular level difference between fast and slow axonal transport by using biophysical approaches to dissect kinesin activation.
  • Establishing whether augmenting kinesin activation has therapeutic potential in neurodegenerative conditions.
  • Developing new tools and strategies to study and analyse axonal transport in real time.
We use the methods of biochemistry, biophysics, neuronal cell biology and translational neuroscience to apporach our research questions in a truely multidisciplinary fashion.


Dr Sara Vannini


Information School

Research Interests

My research interests are at the intersection of critical studies of technology and society, social change, and information ethics. I focus on social appropriation and embodied experiences of technologies by different social groups, digital poverty, information privacy in the context of people’s migration and displacement, critical studies of information and communication technologies within sustainable development, and the role of public access to information in mis/disinformation. My research is qualitative and I use participatory and visual methodologies of research.

 

PhD Supervision

-Sustainability, Social Justice, and Sustainable Development: Issues connected to Information Systems/Information and Communication Technologies and social, socio-economic, and environmental sustainability / sustainable development.

-People’s migration and human displacement and information issues - information practices, information activities, policy, politics, data justice, data privacy and security, datafication of migration, migration digital traces, digital identity, and digital status.

-Digital poverty and public access to information - including role and potential for libraries or telecenters to address mis/disinformation; digital literacies and public venues to access information and communication technologies; role of digital inclusion networks.

-Digital push backs - motivations not to adopt and not to use digital technologies by specific social groups.

-Participatory methodologies to understand information activities, digital inclusion, or other information systems-related topics (e.g.: photo-elicitation, photo-voice, visual methods, theatre, playing and games).

Dr Stefania Vicari
s.vicari@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

Stefania's overarching research interest is in dynamics of civic engagement on digital platforms of communication. Her approach to online data is based on a variety of textual analysis techniques - with an increasing focus on text analytics - informed by social network and framing theories. Stefania specifically focuses on:

  • Digital activism: Stefania's early research focused on how digital media ease upward and downward scale shifts (i.e., from local to transnational and vice versa) in framing grievances. Work in this camp investigated the Global Justice Movement and the World Social Forum. She is also particularly interested in social media use with relevance to public sphere processes in the context of protest events, issue publics, everyday talk. Her work in this field has specifically focused on interactional and deliberative processes in the Cuban blogosphere and on meaning construction on Twitter streams relevant to anti-austerity protests in Italy.
  • Digital health. Stefania is interested in the role of digital media in health democratizing processes, especially in processes of self-care, patient advocacy, health public debate, and health activism. Her main interest is in if, how and to what extent digital media may enhance bottom-up, patient-centred health practices. Stefania's work in this area is currently looking at online affordances for rare disease patient organisations in advocacy and activist dynamics and rare disease discourse practices on Facebook and Twitter.


Stefania has supervised PhD projects looking at different aspects of digital media use, among which, digital literacy, digital activism and online political participation. She is particularly interested in supervising students investigating digital activism, social media and health and/or who wish to apply digital methods approaches.

Dr Kate Weiner
k.weiner@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Sociological Studies

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
Dr Sara Whiteley
sara.whiteley@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of English Language and Linguistics

Research interests

My research interests lie at the interface between language and literature, in the disciplines of stylistics, cognitive poetics and discourse analysis. My research examines issues of textual effect and interpretation in relation to contemporary prose and poetry. I am particularly interested in studying the experience of reading and researching reader responses to literary texts using empirical methods

  • Emotional responses to literature: Some of my recent research examined the emotional effects of three novels by the author Kazuo Ishiguro, drawing on reader responses from face-to-face and online reading group discussions and using the cognitive-linguistic framework Text World Theory. My article ‘Text World Theory, Real Readers and Emotional Responses to The Remains of the Day’ won the 2012 Poetics and Linguistics Association prize.
  • Creative Writing in the Community project: In 2010 I collaborated with colleagues at the University of Sheffield on the year-long ‘Creative Writing in the Community’ project, examining the impact of literary reading and writing on the local community. My strand of the project involved the comparative analysis of discussions held by groups of readers both within and outside of University about the same poetic texts. The project culminated in a Forum event which brought members of the public, academics and the poet Simon Armitage together to discuss notions of literary interpretation and the relationships between authors and readers.
  • 'Book of the Festival’ project: In 2013 I collaborated with staff at Off the Shelf literary festival, Sheffield Libraries and Dr David Peplow from Sheffield Hallam University on the ‘Book of the Festival’ project. This project saw academic research into reader responses running alongside public events at the literary festival. The novel selected as ‘Book of the Festival 2013’ was The Universe versus Alex Woods by Sheffield-based author Gavin Extence. A number of local reading groups were recorded discussing the novel over the summer of 2013, and the text formed the focus of a series of events involving the author, readers, University researchers and the wider public. My strand of the project involved comparative analysis of the different reading group discussions, and continuing analysis of the relationship between the language of the novel and the discourse of readers.


Dr Simon Willerton
S.Willerton@shef.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

School of Mathematics and Statistics

Dr. Willerton is interested in various ideas in low-dimensional topology coming from quantum physics, and in their relationship to geometry and algebraic topology. 

In particular, methods from quantum field theory give rise to new invariants of knots and three-manifolds -- these are the so-called quantum and Vassiliev (or finite-type) invariants. A large part of the motivation for Dr. Willerton's work is to understand these invariants from a topological or geometric point of view. For instance, the Kontsevich integral is a construction which takes a knot and gives back a sort of Feynman diagram expansion: this embodies a rich algebraic structure that is reminiscent of certain objects from algebraic topology, but it is not clear at the moment how to relate these. 

Well-studied examples of quantum invariants arise when one fixes a Lie group. Motivated in part by trying to understand the Kontsevich integral, Dr. Willerton has considered (with collaborators in San Diego and Oxford) the less well-studied invariants which arise when one fixes a hyper-Kahler manifold. This work has revealed unexpected algebraic structures in the derived category of coherent sheaves on a complex manifold. 

The theory of gerbes is a related interest of Dr. Willerton. Gerbes can be thought of as the next step beyond line bundles. Ideas from this area feed into K-theory, string theory and the quantum invariants mentioned above. 

In recent times Dr Willerton has been interested in the connections between metric spaces and category theory. This has lead in particular to him studying measures of biodiversity.

Dr Anthony Haynes
a.haynes@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

The Haynes group investigates mechanistic aspects of homogeneous transition metal catalysed reactions, particularly industrially important processes such as methanol carbonylation and alkene hydroformylation. Synthetic, spectroscopic, kinetic and computational methods are used to study the structure and reactivity of organometallic complexes and their roles in catalysis.

Mechanisms of rhodium and iridium catalysed methanol carbonylation

The catalytic carbonylation of methanol to acetic acid is one of the most significant industrial applications of homogeneous transition metal catalysis. We have a long-standing research collaboration with BP Chemicals, who operate methanol carbonylation plants worldwide, and introduced a new process(Cativa TM) in 1995 that uses a promoted iridium/iodide catalyst. Highlights of our mechanistic studies include the first spectroscopic detection of a highly reactive Rh-methyl intermediate in the rhodium-catalysed process[1] and elucidation of the role of promoters in the iridium-based system.[2] We recently showed that the rate of migratory CO insertion in [Ir(CO)2I3Me]- is dramatically increased by isomerisation to place a CO ligand trans to methyl.[3]

Ligand effects on oxidative addition and migratory CO insertion
 
We are interested in how the rates of key steps in catalytic cycles can be influenced by the electronic and steric properties of "spectator" ligands, e.g. phosphines, imines and N-heterocyclic carbenes. Strongly donating ligands tend to promote oxidative addition and retard migratory CO insertion, whereas sterically bulky ligands tend to have the opposite effects on these steps.[4] In a recent study of the mechanism of rhodium/xantphos-catalysed methanol carbonylation it was found that the key intermediates contained xantphos coordinated as a tridentate "pincer" ligand and the nucleophilicity of the metal centre is enhanced by a Rh---O interaction.[5]

Computational studies
Our experimental studies are complimented by theoretical calculations, carried out in collaboration with Dr. Anthony Meijer in this department. We are interested in modelling trends in organometallic reactivity and spectroscopic properties, e.g. vibrational spectra of metal carbonyl complexes.

Facilities
The department is well-equipped with modern instrumentation for NMR spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography, mass-spectrometry and chromatography. In addition, the group has dedicated FTIR instruments for kinetic measurements, including high pressure and stopped-flow IR cells.

References
1. (a) JACS, 1991, 113, 8567; (b) JACS, 1993, 115, 4093.
2. JACS, 2004, 126, 2847.
3. Inorg. Chem., 2009, 48, 28
4. (a) JACS, 2002, 124, 13597; (b) Organometallics, 2003, 22, 1047; (c) Organometallics, 2003, 22, 4451.
5. Organometallics, 2011, 30, 6166.

Dr Michael Hippler
m.hippler@sheffield.ac.uk
Personal Webpage

Department of Chemistry

Research Interests

The aim of my research is the development of new methods and applications of ultra-sensitive, high-resolution laser spectroscopy to study the structure and dynamics of molecules and clusters. The understanding of intramolecular primary processes in polyatomic molecules at the fully quantum dynamical level remains among the most challenging research questions in physics and chemistry, with applications also in biology and environmental sciences. High-resolution spectroscopy is among the most powerful tools in advancing such research and it is crucial in this context to develop new and ever more powerful spectroscopic experiments.

In my work in Zürich, I successfully developed new experimental techniques for the infrared laser spectroscopy of gas-phase molecules. These techniques have been applied to the study of intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution, vibrational mode-specific tunnelling of hydrogen-bonded clusters and stereomutation dynamics. In one class of experiments, pulsed IR laser systems are used to excite vibrational transitions and a second, subsequent UV laser pulse to ionise the excited molecules. Ionisation detection of IR excitation has been coupled with a mass spectrometer thus adding a second dimension to optical spectroscopy. In another class of experiments, the extreme sensitivity of cavity-ring-down (CRD) spectroscopy (effective absorption path lengths of several km) is combined with the very high resolution of continuous wave (cw) diode lasers (100 kHz). This technique has been applied to measure accurately the transition strengths and weak overtone transitions of molecules (nitrous oxide, methane) and of hydrogen-bonded clusters (HF dimer).

So far in Sheffield, I have studied molecular association by FTIR, Raman spectroscopy and high-level quantum-chemical calculations. For this purpose, I set up a very sensitive stimulated Raman experiment with photoacoustic detection ('PARS'). Among the intermolecular forces, the hydrogen-bond X-H...Y is particularly relevant. A hydrogen bond usually exhibits a characteristic 'red'-shift (shift to lower wavenumbers) of the X-H stretching vibration, but more unconventional 'blue'-shifting hydrogen bonds also occur and have become a hot topic of current research. In Sheffield, I have recently studied some unusual, "blue-shifting" hydrogen bonds (e.g., CHCl3...SO2 in the gas phase and open HCOOH structures in liquid formic acid) by theory and experiment.