UEA’s grant and funding success – June 2025
By: Communications
PROSE: Evidence-policy pathways for Prosopis management in the Horn of Africa
Project lead: Prof Roger Few
Partner: Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA)
The spread of the invasive shrub Prosopis juliflora has brought ecologically damaging, economically disruptive and visibly dramatic environmental change across swathes of territory in the drylands of eastern Africa.
Yet, despite extensive research on the problem and potential solutions, and repeated attempts to feed this knowledge into policy and intervention, progress in managing the Prosopis invasion has been generally weak and fragmented.
The PROSE project, led by the School of Global Development and funded by the British Academy, is examining this knowledge-to-intervention gap, reviewing research dissemination and policy activity within the region, engaging experts from multiple sectors, and undertaking analysis designed to foster more equitable and sustainable policymaking.
NIHR funding awarded to re-assess UK dietary reference values for iron
Project lead: King’s College London
UEA leads: Prof Sue Fairweather-Tait, Dr Lee Hooper, Dr Jack Dainty
Researchers from King’s College London and UEA have been awarded a £500,000 grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) for a project that will inform the re-assessment of current UK dietary reference values (DRVs) for iron.
The two-year project will be led by Dr Jeannine Baumgartner from the Department of Nutritional Sciences at King’s, alongside co-leads Dr Yemisi Latunde-Dada and Dr Karen O’Callaghan from the same Department.
For the two-year project led by King’s, researchers will work closely with Prof Sue Fairweather-Tait, Dr Lee Hooper and Dr Jack Dainty, as well as Emeritus Professor Peter Aggett, a paediatrician and iron expert. The research will also be supported by an advisory group and an independent Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) group, ensuring the findings are relevant to and benefit the wider public.
The project will involve detailed modelling using nationally representative data to estimate iron bioavailability. The modelling work will be informed and complemented by reviews of evidence to better understand iron bioavailability from different diets, and iron requirements in children and young people at different stages of growth.
£614k grant for NISD 2.0 to boost impact-driven research
Project lead: Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development (NISD)
A £614,000 grant for the NISD will support impact-oriented research projects as part of a second five-year phase of the Institute, based at UEA’s School of Global Development.
The projects supported all build upon successful transdisciplinary research activity in the first phase of NISD. The emphasis in this second phase will be to ensure the translation of research outputs into sustainable development impact.
The projects will help farmers in South Asia, East Africa and the UK adapt to a changing climate and will include both new crops and hands-on engagement to facilitate the adoption of the best crops for the farmer.
Farming for Sustainability, Peace and Planetary Health: A Case Study of Japan
Project lead: Prof Heike Schroeder
Partners: Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) at Hiroshima University, Japan
Heike Schroeder (DEV) has been cross appointed as Professor at Hiroshima University for the next two years to carry out research on “Farming for Sustainability, Peace and Planetary Health: A Case Study of Japan”. The appointment comes with a £22,500 income to DEV.
The study engages conceptually with the interlinkages across sustainability, peace and planetary health and examine empirically what strong sustainable agriculture, holistic and planetarily healthy agriculture and positively peaceful agriculture look like, and if Japanese agriculture is fulfilling any or all of these.
Land, soil, food, water and energy will provide material evidence for the interlinked concepts and a governance framing will add a scalar component given that, whilst farming is local, its impacts are global.
Climate mobility and forced migration
Project lead: Dr Mark Tebboth; Roland Smith
Partners: InsuResilience Solutions Fund; Frankfurt School
Dr Mark Tebboth (School of Global Development) and Roland Smith (School of Environmental Sciences) have secured €130,000 from the InsuResilience Solutions Fund and Frankfurt School to develop innovative methods for modelling the long-term impacts of climate-related disasters on population displacement.
Focusing on Madagascar, the project integrates catastrophe modelling and climate mobility analysis to assess how disasters drive diverse mobility outcomes and influence vulnerabilities. The findings will inform policy interventions to enable more resilient responses to climatic hazards.
Disabling by Design? Recasting the Future of Higher Education Policies in Africa
Project lead: Dr Abass Isiaka
Dr Abass Isiaka (CHERPPS) has been awarded the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, tenable for 36 months in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning from January 2026, for a project titled "Disabling by Design? Recasting the Future of Higher Education Policies in Africa".
The project has been awarded a £98,648 grant to develop a social history of disability inclusion in higher education in West Africa, tracing developments from 1940 to the present by drawing on speculative ethnographic and archival research (SPEAR) from the UK and Nigeria.
The project will adopt a histo-futurist approach and involve collaboration with a Disabled People’s Organisation to reimagine an alternative future for persons with disabilities in West Africa.
SHAPE: The system of shape representations in cognition, development and across languages
Project lead: Prof Larissa Samuelson
Partners: Mila Vulchanova, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway; Linda Smith, Indiana University Bloomington, USA; Frank Seifart, Centre National de la Reserche Scientific (CNRS), France; Pamela Perniss, University of Cologne, Germany; Caroline Larson, University of Missouri, USA
The main goals of SHAPE are to map out the relationship between the visual perception of shape and its encoding across languages in the world and to identify the factors which constrain the observed cross-linguistic variation.
The project is interested in the two-way relationship between spatial cognition and language across speakers in different cultures, across development and the factors which conspire to produce difficulties in this domain in children on atypical developmental paths.
As part of this work, Prof Samuelson will be conducting a three-year longitudinal study examining variation in children's trajectories of vocabulary development.
BBC-AHRC New Generation Thinkers 2025 scheme
Project lead: Dr Reetika Revathy Subramanian
Dr Subramanian has been selected as one of six New Generation Thinkers for 2025, a scheme run by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in partnership with BBC Radio 4. Chosen from hundreds of applicants, the programme supports early career researchers in sharing their work with wider audiences.
As part of the scheme, Reetika will work as a Researcher in Residence on Free Thinking and Thinking Allowed. Her contributions will draw on her research at DEV on migration as adaptation in South Asia (SUCCESS project, supported by IDRC and FCDO) and her multimedia project Climate Brides, which explores the links between climate change and child marriage.
The scheme aims to bring academic research into public conversations in engaging and accessible ways.
Managing shelf sea carbon cycles and greenhouse gas release from physical disturbance of the seafloor (C-floor)
Project leads: Prof Kerry Turner; Dr Gaetano Grilli
Partners: University of Southampton; National Oceanography Centre; Plymouth Marine Laboratory; University of Exeter
At the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), Prof Kerry Turner (ENV) and Dr Gaetano Grilli (NBS) have received funding for £253,925 from the Natural Environment Research Council to explore opportunities to sustainably manage marine ecosystem services and fisheries.
The project brings together economics, marine science and engineering to aid a holistic understanding of how bottom-trawl fishing modifies carbon cycles in seabed sediments and influences greenhouse gas exchanges.
The UEA team at CSERGE will co-create, deliver and implement a natural capital-based decision support system for UK marine waters to identify and inform management options to sustain productive fisheries, while also helping achieve net zero.
Related Articles
UEA’s grant and funding success – April 2025
Discover the latest research and funding grant successes happening within the University of East Anglia.
Read more
Willis and the University of East Anglia launch wildfire risk partnership in response to escalating global threat
The University of East Anglia has launched a major new partnership with Willis, a WTW business, to advance global understanding of wildfire risk in the face of intensifying fire seasons.
Read more
New partnership offers University of East Anglia qualifications in Singapore
The University of East Anglia (UEA) and Amity Global Institute have launched a new partnership to provide communication with business management and computing science courses in Singapore.
Read more