Research Newsletter - Issue 76: Funding Success
Please click on the headings below to see further information:
Congratulations to Dr Marcia Kirwan, School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health, on her prestigious Investigator-Led Projects 2022 Award from the Health Research Board.
Dr Kirwan will receive 4 years of funding to enable her to carry out her project focused on addressing the economic and human cost of hospital acquired and nurse-sensitive adverse events in older patients through optimal use of routine discharge data and measurement of missed nursing care.
We wish her the very best of luck with this important work.
Congratulations to Dr Sinéad McNally, Dr Mel Duffy and Dr Caitriona Dowd on their COALESCE awards. The COALESCE awards fund excellent research addressing national and European-global challenges across a number of strands:
- Dr Sinéad McNally (School of Language, Literacy & Early Childhood Education) will be collaborating with Dr Mary Rose Sweeney (School of Nursing, Psychotherapy & Community Health) on the project entitled “Autism-friendly schools: including the voices of autistic pupils in educational provision in Ireland”
- Dr Mel Duffy will be collaborating with Prof. Anthony Staines (both from School of Nursing, Psychotherapy & Community Health) on the project “Homecare, Inclusive & Diverse (HID) - Person-Centred Homecare Services for Community Dwelling Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, & Intersex (LGBTI) People”
- Dr Caitriona Dowd’s (School of Law & Government) project is entitled ‘Gendered Dimensions of Hunger in Peacebuilding (GDHP)’ and she will be collaborating with researchers in Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) in South Africa.
We wish all the awardees the very best in their research and look forward to hearing the results of the collaborations.
Congratulations to all DCU awardees of the SFI-IRC Pathway 2021 awards! These awards will allow researchers to advance their work and further develop their careers towards becoming the next generation of research leaders in Ireland.
- Dr Arpita Chakraborty - project “They are Here Too: Gendered Violence in the South Asian Immigrant Community in Post-COVID Ireland”
Project Summary: Domestic violence remains one of the most significant challenges to achieving gender equality under the sustainable development goals in Ireland. This project will improve understanding of domestic violence within the South Asian migrant community in Ireland, focusing on the socio-culturally specific forms of exclusion survivors face. The project will propose policy changes as well as create a community space called ASHA where survivors can communicate with each other. This space will put into praxis the suggested changes in an experimental version.
- Dr Pieternella Pieterse - project “Unsalaried health workers in Sierra Leone: What impact does their unpaid status have on their lives and on the health services they deliver to populations?”
Project Summary: In Sierra Leone, which has some of the worst rates of maternal and child mortality in the world, almost half of the health workers do not receive a salary. This research focuses on exploring how health workers cope without salaries, and what impact this has on their ability to carry out their work. The presence of so many unsalaried health workers is thought to have a negative influence on Sierra Leone’s wider society, on access to healthcare, on health worker migration and on reducing corruption among public service providers. This research aims to highlight the need to prioritise this issue.
- Dr Amanda Dillon - project “The New Illuminators: Women in Search of Spiritual Authority and Resilience”
Project Summary: Bible Journaling and Qur'an Journaling are an emerging trend among women readers of these books. As part of their own spiritual practice and engagement with these spiritual writings, women journal, in words, drawings and other creative means, sometimes directly in the printed book itself. Traditionally, male authority figures have determined the meaning of these scriptures. They have also used them to undermine women’s place in religious communities, denying them roles in spiritual leadership. This project analyses these journaled pages to discover how this practice advances women's spiritual authority. What happens when women become the primary interpreters of their own texts?
- Dr Loanda Cumba - project “MultiMAT – Development of Functional 3D printable advanced (bio)inks”
Project Summary: At present, the range of multicomponent printable conductive materials available is limited and there is scope for the development of more interesting innovative bioactive materials that can increase the array of analytes that can be monitored by the possibility of incorporating different classes of biomolecule, e.g., proteins, enzymes, and nucleic acids. MultiMAT will enable 3D sensor platforms to be printed in a single step at a low temperature, allowing the stable incorporation of bioreceptors in the core material. It can open up a new range of applications from sensors for medical devices to nerve and even neuron regeneration.
Congratulations to all awardees and we look forward to hearing more about these exciting projects!
We are delighted to congratulate Dr Nicholas Clarke, School of Psychology, and Dr Rebecca Murphy, School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health (incoming Assistant Prof) on being awarded the highly-sought after Health Research Board Emerging Investigator Awards 2022.
These highly-prestigious awards are designed to support talented individuals at a critical career transition stage to establish themselves as independent health investigators. Dr Clarke and Dr Murphy will both receive funding for 4 years to carry out their projects:
- Dr Nicholas Clarke: "Investigating the role of thinking style and defensive information processing in cancer screening participation: A opportunity to improve uptake of organised screening".
Project Summary:
The purpose of cancer screening is to find cancer at the earliest possible stage, or even before a person develops cancer. Finding cancer early can reduce the possibility that a person will die from a cancer diagnosis, but it also results in better outcomes for the patient. Organised screening is free for people in Ireland for breast cancer, cervical cancer and bowel cancer. The success of these screening programmes depends on high uptake of screening tests. However, screening uptake is often low.
How people react to and think about, the invitation to take part in screening can influence their decision to be tested. A person’s reaction to a screening invitation can sometimes be negative, sometimes because of the fear of a cancer diagnosis. Negative reactions to cancer screening can lead to people making a decision not to be tested. In partnership with Irelands National Screening Service, this research project will investigate how negative reactions to screening invitations might influence people’s decisions to be screened for breast, cervical and bowel cancer. Understanding how people think about the screening invitation, and the reaction they might have to the invitation, will help in designing interventions to increase the number of people who take a cancer screening test. This project will review evidence on negative reactions in cancer prevention interventions, and carry out surveys and face-to-face interviews with people who have decided to take part, or to not take part in cancer screening in Ireland. Public representatives will also be asked to assist in designing an intervention to improve cancer screening uptake in Ireland.
Increasing uptake in cancer screening will help reduce the number of people who are diagnosed with cancer, and reduce the number of people who die from breast, cervical and bowel cancer.
- Dr Rebecca Murphy Co-producing actionable knowledge to strengthen cultural humility in Irish mental health services".
Project summary:
Ethnic minority populations experience mental health difficulties at an unequal rate compared to the general population, as well as difficulties getting their mental healthcare needs met. People have tried to help this by training mental health professionals to be ‘culturally competent’. However, this is not enough alone and there is also a need for ‘cultural humility’. This asks us to think and act on how the ‘normal’ ways of thinking, being, and doing in the mental health services contribute to the unequal mental healthcare experiences of ethnic minority populations. It is a new idea and research is missing on what activities it includes, and how to action and test it. This study will begin this work by coproducing a model of cultural humility in mental healthcare that can be realistically used and tested.
We wish both Dr Clarke and Dr Murphy the very best of luck with their projects and their developing careers.
Congratulations to Dr Andrew Kellett (School of Chemical Sciences) on winning the prestigious SSPC Director's Award "Investigator of the Year".
Andrew is an investigator in SSPC’s Molecules III project and has published extensively within this theme, as well as establishing new industry-funded collaborations with MSD Carlow and Nanotemper GmbH, and filing two patents in the area of gene-directed therapies.
Please see a full press release on the SSPC website here .