This research project aims to investigate the use of an abridged carbon footprinting methodology to allow designers to calculate the carbon footprint of 'product' design concepts. These concepts are not yet sufficiently developed to be assessed via traditional carbon footprinting methods. The developed resource will be aimed at designers involved in NPD . Key activities will include:- Investigation and identification of CO2 and CO2e conversion factors relevant to designers.- Investigation of methods through which industrial designers can calculate the carbon footprint of 'product' concepts.- Investigation of the feasibility of the selected methodology through action research with practising designers within the collaborating companies.Currently carbon footprinting methodologies rely on the existence of a tangible product within a defined supply chain. Co2ncept will make it possible for carbon footprinting to be carried out before a product is made. This will allow: - comparisons to be made between concepts,- impacts to be identified, and improvement options considered, at a stage where they can be addressed quickly and at considerably lower financial cost, and will - enable designers to be more aware of the consequences of their design decisions.This tool will be the first of its kind and has the potential to answer a need that has not yet been catered for by existing carbon footprinting methods. 'Co2ncept' will be the first tool to allow designers to calculate an abridged carbon footprint for 'product' concepts. This will be done through the use of standard CO2 and CO2e conversion factors. Providing this function will allow designers to make more considered decisions at the early stages of the product development process with regards to concept selection, at a time where changes are neither costly or time consuming.Current ecodesign theory supports the belief that designers have a valuable role to play in ecodesign because of their positioning at the early stages of the product development process (PDP), where the design brief is most flexible and the most critical decisions are made. Product development timescales are getting shorter and shorter, and the burden and requirement for evidence early on in the development process in order to support key development decisions is increasing. In addition to this, it is recognised that providing industrial designers with the ability to be able to implement ecodesign at the operational stage will vastly improve the likelihood of ecodesign products making it onto the market. The project proposed here aims to support this theory. There are a number of resources currently available to designers which allow the quick calculation of environmental impacts, the commercial success of these resources show that there is a need for tools that allow the quick assessment of the environmental consequences of 'products' in the early stages. The limitations of LCA of any kind is that it requires a product to have been developed before it can be assessed. Carbon is increasingly becoming a hot topic within government and business because it allows a tangible comparison between things which couldn't previously be compared. This research project will capitalise on this but investigate the use of carbon footprinting methodologies created specifically to calculate the carbon footprint of 'product' concepts rather than fully developed products.

The aim of this project is to provide a critical review of the role of digital engagement and access in shaping cultural experiences in the context of museums, galleries and heritage. Since the late 1990s the potential of the digital world for generating new ways of engaging with the heritage sector, widely defined, has been a key focus of both academic work and cultural practice. Academics and practitioners alike have explored the potential of digital technology for offering new insights into our understanding of the past for an ever wider section of society. This has taken a number of forms, from 3D modelling of archaeological sites to large-scale digitisation projects for the long-term preservation and curation of material heritage. At the same time, colleagues have explored the ways in which the digital world can be used as a tool for increasing and broadening public participation in heritage culture. On the one hand, this has focussed on how the internet can help provide a 'shop window' for museums, galleries and heritage, and translate this into physical visits to sites. On the other, the sector increasingly seeks to use the digital sphere to provide a space for more dynamic, two-way engagement with heritage culture, aimed at providing a complementary experience to the physical visit that can, in turn, enhance the cultural value of heritage through a range of phenomena (e.g. user-generated content, online communities, crowdsourcing projects). The last decade has seen a huge number of digital projects take place on a variety of scales operating in a whole host of heritage cultures around the world. These provide a plethora of case studies for the potential of the digital both to widen access to the world's heritage and provide new ways for individuals and communities to experience and consume heritage, from the Europeana Foundation - an interactive forum which provides access to millions of artefacts from across Europe - to small scale projects such as the 'Ostalgie Kabinett' which helps support community engagement with the historical memory of the former East German State. At the same time, there has been a growing emphasis, both amongst scholarly and grey literature, on how we measure the value of this activity and what we mean by value in this context. As Parry (2010) highlights, this is an area of activity which can easily 'fetishise the future, and neglect the past'. Or it has potential, somewhat counter intuitively perhaps, to help limit access to material culture, locking it away behind a 'protective' digital wall (Cameron and Kenderdine 2010). Our review will examine this tension through the critical lens of 'cultural value', placing discussion of digital engagement within the broader literature on interactivity and participation with heritage per se, the potential for co-production in research and the ramifications this can have on the question of the 'ownership' of heritage, all issues that shape current conceptualisations of the relationship between the physical and the digital sphere. The aim of this CR is threefold. 1) It will give an overview of the ways in which the heritage sector currently engages with the digital world, providing a range of international case studies in order to highlight leading-edge practice globally. 2) These case studies will be embedded within a critical analysis of the scholarly and grey literature, and in particular an investigation of how the literature has sought to understand the issue of 'value' in this context. 3) The findings of the critical review will be evaluated, via a workshop to be held at Leeds, by an international group of heritage professionals in order to explore what they perceive to be the continuing gaps in the literature and potential new directions for museological and heritage practice. This will, in turn, also lead to the production of briefing document for heritage professionals looking to enhance their digital engagement with audiences.

Human beings have always worried about ageing, with special worry reserved for premature ageing. Consequently, we have tried numerous different methods to try and achieve rejuvenation - a state of renewed youth or the appearance of youth. The everyday methods with which we are perhaps most familiar - skin care products, dietary and exercise regimes - have long histories but were transformed in the decades following the First World War, when a wealth of scientific research and new anti-ageing products appeared to promise the ability to prolong youthfulness, fertility and vitality. This Fellowship sets out to examine the impact of the most widespread methods of rejuvenation - injection and application of hormones, using electricity on the body, skincare products, specific diets and exercise regimes - on post-WWI Britain. We already know from previous historical work that the unique socio-political context of interwar Germany precipitated the rise of eugenic ideals about race and biology, as well as beauty and ugliness, whilst at the same time the rising consumer-culture context of the United States enthusiastically embraced technological and scientific developments linked to human ageing. However, Britain in this period has remained largely unstudied, and consequently we risk overstating the significance of developments elsewhere. Concerns about the overall fitness (and fertility) of the population were increased by Britain's participation in the two World Wars, and it is clear that the perceived need for rejuvenation of both individuals and society became a topic of intense debate both in medical and scientific circles and in the wider public sphere. Especially prior to the NHS, manufacturers and entrepreneurs attempted to exploit this fascination, and they claimed that a number of existing therapies had rejuvenating properties, as well as trying to introduce new devices and products. The domestication of electrical lighting and the increasingly wide reach of cinema and photography also placed added pressure on the British public, and particularly women, to look at their best. The Fellowship will explore why rejuvenation was such a prominent matter of public interest in this period, and it will show in what ways the methods used to slow, stop or even reverse ageing helped to define some of the most fundamental elements of what it means to be human. The principal goals are to (i) explain the diversity of approaches to rejuvenation, (ii) examine the different advertising and marketing strategies and their relationship with contemporary scientific perspectives on ageing, and (iii) uncover how everyday habits were changed by anti-ageing products, procedures and lifestyles. Allied to this, the Fellowship will explain how manufacturers of rejuvenation preparations and devices attempted to convince British publics of the efficacy of their products, and show to what extent the target audiences of these products were persuaded by such claims. The Fellowship seeks to explain how and why this period in Britain became such a fruitful environment for different rejuvenation strategies. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials, including the papers of manufacturers and retailers of rejuvenation-related products (such as Boots, Pond's and Elizabeth Arden), newspaper and periodical sources, objects, specialist scientific and medical texts, personal accounts and fictional representations of rejuvenation, the project will link together histories of the body, ageing, the limits of biomedical explanation, everyday medical practice, the impact of global conflict on health and wellbeing, and the medical marketplace, amongst other themes. The Fellowship will consequently deepen our understanding of the historical body and the human condition by demonstrating that ageing and rejuvenation were intimately connected with a wide range of medial, social, cultural and economic factors, including beauty, gender, class, race, warfare, and eugenics.

It is now clear that our health depends largely on the microbes that exist in and on our bodies i.e. the microbiome. Skin is no exception and we now know that bacteria living on our skin provide us with many essential functions such as combatting infections and helping to enhance the role of skin as a barrier. The skin and its microbiome are unique in that they are regularly exposed to sunlight. For a long time it has been known that sunlight can damage the DNA of skin cells. DNA damage is associated with 'sunburn' which is perhaps, along with tanning, the most well known response of skin to sunlight. However, even exposure which does not cause a sunburn can be sufficient to damage DNA but usually, the skin cells are able to repair this damage very quickly. However, any damage that is too bad to repair is dealt with by the cells undergoing a process called 'apoptosis' which is a very controlled way of the cells dying. This process is essential to stop cells with damaged DNA from multiplying and is part of the skin's defence against forming tumours. How exposure to sunlight affects our skin microbiome is not really known. However, we have shown that there is a particular bacterium on our skin which promotes apoptosis in skin cells that have been exposed to sunlight. This bacterium does this by producing a molecule in response to sunlight that induces apoptosis in skin cells. This shows that our skin microbiome produces molecules that alter how our skin cells work following sunlight exposure. In this project we will be investigating this more. Our first question is: 'Does the presence of the microbiome affect the sunburn response in humans?'. We will answer this by removing the microbiome (by cleaning with alcohol) from an area of skin in 10 volunteers and then exposing them to several doses of 'simulated sunlight'. We will be looking at how the sunburn develops in areas of skin without the microbiome compared to with the microbiome. We will take a 'biopsy' - a small piece of their skin which has been sunlight exposed and we will perform experiments in the laboratory to determine whether cells in this piece of skin have undergone apoptosis. Successful completion of this work will answer a fundamental question as to the role of the skin microbiome in the sunburn response in humans. Our second question relates to the molecule produced by the bacterium that promotes apoptosis. At present we have data as to its effects in isolated skin cells. We now want to look at this in actual skin. We are able to obtain skin from elective plastic surgery procedures and we have methods already established to keep this skin 'alive' in the laboratory. We will be using this to investigate the effects of the molecule in real human skin. We also aim to purify the molecule from the bacterium and try to identify what it is. We will also be studying how the molecule causes apoptosis in skin cells. Successful completion of this work will shed light on the possible role of bacteria in protecting skin against the multiplication of damaged skin cells. Our final question is: 'Are there other bacteria in the skin microbiome that can protect against DNA damage following exposure to sunlight or promote DNA repair?'. We have already (in a previous project) isolated over 150 types of bacteria from healthy humans. We will be testing these bacteria to find out whether any of them can reduce DNA damage or speed up repair of damaged DNA. Successful completion of this work will identify bacteria that could be used as novel sunscreens or 'after sun' treatments for skin. This project benefits from having Walgreen Boots Alliance (aka 'Boots the Chemist') and Croda PLC (a global leader in the manufacture of speciality chemicals) as project partners. A better understanding of the ways in which the microbiome protects skin against sunlight will be beneficial in helping these project partners develop new ways to help consumers protect their skin.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.