Kickstarting research during COVID: a Centre for Aquatic Environments networking and collaboration conference

Date:   Thursday 28 January 2021 

Time: 11.00 – 12.15 hours viaTeams 

Join code qqsqlrb

 

Join us for an online session where we help you kickstart and maintain your research during COVID. We bring together researchers from across the University to discuss ways to collaborate on water-themed research during these challenging times. The aim of the session is to find solutions to research challenges made difficult by the COVID pandemic– whether quantitative and/or qualitative, lab based, field based or people based research.

We start with a briefing from Tony Inglis, Head of Research Development at the University, on the changes to the research landscape since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.  What funding opportunities now exist?  How can we approach our research in new and innovative ways?

We then hear from Dr Sarah Purnell and Dr Corina Ciocan from the Centre for Aquatic Environments who have started important research projects during the past year to find out how they overcame obstacles, and suggestions they have for reinvigorating your research and working with new university colleagues or to support novel research avenues.

We would like to connect researchers working on watery themes across the University – so time is then dedicated for ‘elevator pitches’ of two minutes each (with two slides).  This is where research ideas/proposals are presented to enable people who have not worked together before, and who may not even have considered their work as fitting within the ‘Centre for Aquatic Environments’ research umbrella, to share ideas and initiate potential new collaborations.  Please send your two PowerPoint slides to Suzy Armsden by 20 January 2021 for consideration in the programme.

Pitch themes include: Green/blue infrastructure; health and wellbeing in waterscapes; water quality and remediation; water access, water use and human rights; maritime and coastal environments; water pollution; rivers and wetlands; drainage law and riparian rights; aquatic ecosystems, biodiversity and climate change; climate change and environmental communication.

 

We look forward to seeing you and sharing ideas together.

Please contact the CAE’s research administrator Suzy Armsden s.m.armsden@brighton.ac.uk for further details

Programme:

 

Name	Topic	Duration
Prof Chris Joyce	Introduction and welcome	5 mins
Tony Inglis	Research landscape changes	10 mins + 5 mins Q&A
Dr Sarah Purnell	A data mining research approach to comparing pollution incident performance across the water and sewerage sector in England	10 mins + 5 mins Q&A
Dr Corina Ciocan	Beginning with the end – from microplastics pollution to the sustainability of the boating industry	10 mins + 5 mins Q&A
Dr Heidi Burgess & Dr Mary Gearey	Introductions to elevator pitches (2 x slides per person)	Maximum 20 mins

 

Biographies and Abstracts:

 

Tony Inglis

Head of Research Development, Research, Enterprise and Social Partnerships (RESP), University of Brighton – managing the small team of Pre-Award Research Development Officers (RDOs) who support external research grant applications (bids) from initial notification through internal approvals and submission to the funder.

Previously a Business Relationship Manager at the University of Kent, Programme Manager at the University of Bristol – managing research framework relationships between lead academic researchers and large corporate funders. Has also worked at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) as a Senior Higher Education Relationship and Policy Adviser, as a proposal writer for a U.S. educational software company and at a Regional Development Agency as a manager of one of the EU-funded Innovation Relay Centres responsible for transnational technology transfer and licensing agreements; From 2012 -2015 Manager of the Grants team at the University of Brighton – in the university’s Research Office, now RESP – supporting research grant applications to external funders.

Dr Sarah Purnell

A data mining research approach to comparing pollution incident performance across the water and sewerage sector in England

The presentation will give details of a recently completed research funded by Southern Water in 2020, which focused on the analysis of existing pollution incident data from the National Incident Recording System provided by the Environment Agency. Comparison of pollution performance for water and sewerage companies is made difficult by differences in environmental and operational conditions across companies operating areas. The deterioration in pollution incident performance across the industry, made it important to investigate common trends that can be addressed at a national level and factors driving region-specific deterioration in performance. This project aimed to analyse available pollution incident data to compare pollution incident performance for water and sewerage companies in England.

Dr Corina Ciocan

Beginning with the end – from microplastics pollution to the sustainability of the boating industry

 

This presentation will focus on the up scaling of a small project on microplastics pollution, initially funded by CAE, in 2017, which established a strong partnership able to co-produce ground breaking research.

 

The oyster fishery in Chichester Harbour, successfully running for hundreds of years has closed in 2018, due to the low number of adult oysters. Our initial investigations revealed microplastics accumulation in oysters and mussels, reaching thousands of particles per kg flesh. However, alongside microplastics, fiberglass particles were also detected in bivalve samples collected from downstream an active boatyard. Fiberglass particles (GRP – glass reinforced polymer) evoke similarities with naturally occurring fibres (asbestos) and therefore, our results raised questions regarding the environmental and human health impact of the boating industry, from GRP manufacturing to boatyard activities and disposal/recycling of fibreglass boats.