UEA’s grant and funding success – April 2025
By: Communications
Expecting the unexpected: Understanding 'dangerous' volcanic transitions
Project lead: Dr Jess Johnson
Collaborators: Dr Lidong Bie, Dr Richard Herd, Dr Zoja Vukmanovic, University of Bristol, University of Oxford, University of Manchester, University of Plymouth
Researchers in the School of Environmental Sciences are part of a multidisciplinary team that has been awarded £3.6m to address one of the grand challenges for volcanology: to understand the drivers of eruptive transitions.
Many volcanoes transition between gently effusive and violently explosive behaviour, or show rapid fluctuations in explosivity during eruption, leading to dangerous escalations in eruptive hazard. Because of this, unsteady eruptions are associated with significant disruption and fatalities in both historical and contemporary records.
With key international partners, they will forensically examine eruptions with rich records of unsteady and dangerous eruptions to define the drivers of change and create physics-based models to forecast these dangerous transitions.
The birth of public broadcasting and the rebirth of the public poet
Project lead: Prof David Nowell Smith
This Leverhulme Research Fellowship will constitute the first scholarly study of 'broadcast poetry'.
Grounded in archival research, and combining poetics, sound studies, and media history, the project will:
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Show how poets and broadcasters sought to forge a 'new poetry for the new audience', combining vocal art and public speech
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Identify broadcast poetry's historical dynamics and institutional conditions
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Taxonomise its formal and technical repertoire
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As digital sound archives transform literary study, establish new methodologies for analysing poetry broadcasts.
The project will result in a monograph on broadcast poetry and will contribute to the development of a new European network for the study of poetry sound archives.
BBSRC DTP iCASE studentship: "Developing novel methods to watch membrane proteins move"
Project lead: Dr Fraser MacMillan
Partners: Nanotemper Technologies, Munich (Dr Nathan Adams)
This project studies the architecture and functional dynamics of medically relevant membrane proteins with high precision and specificity observed in both time and space using magnetic resonance techniques in combination with molecular biological, and biochemical approaches.
It aims to study LeuT, a small amino-acid transporter from Aquifex aeolicus, a structural homologue of human transporters implicated in several diseased states including depression, anxiety and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Several prescribed medications target these transporters and illicit street drugs like cocaine or amphetamine interact with them.
World class training, including with industry, in a team environment using state-of-the-art equipment will deliver science with huge societal impact.
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