A lack of sleep is harmful to our cognition, mental health, and our brains. Sleep is particularly important in infancy because of the need for continuous consolidation of new information. Thus, similar to adults, a lack of sleep has been shown to be detrimental to cognitive and neural development, particularly for those with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). Despite this, the specific effects of poor sleep (tiredness) on aspects of infant cognition have not yet been determined. This project fills this crucial gap by exploring the effect of tiredness on attention and word-learning, two crucial cognitive skills affected by sleep. A novel neuroimaging method, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), will be used to record brain activation in the frontal and parietal cortices, key brain regions for attention and word-learning. Three studies will be conducted. The first will relate tiredness (via a questionnaire) to attention (via fNIRS and a wordless picture-book task), in 52 10 month-olds. The second will relate tiredness to attention and word-learning (also using fNIRS) in 52 16-24-month-olds. Lastly, parent sleep and mental health will be explored as predictors of infant tiredness. These studies, together, have the potential to make a significant impact. They will uncover novel findings about tiredness and bring a new perspective about the role of sleep in development. The study will bring new knowledge to those researching effective interventions for NDDs, highlighting the importance of sleep and tiredness across development.

This research seeks to explore the meanings women attach to their diagnosis and treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). As BPD is a frequently misunderstood and under-researched disorder, those who carry the diagnosis face great stigma in both social and clinical settings. By engaging with women who have had a diagnosis of BPD, I will provide an original account of how women navigate the experience of marginalisation via the label of a complex psychiatric disorder. For my methodology, I will take a sample of 30 women from BPD support groups in the North East. I will utilise a combination of art-based workshops, semi-structured interviews and focus groups using visual stimuli to provoke discussion and create rich data. I will also analyse literature which details the treatment of women diagnosed with hysteria in the 18th and 19th centuries to uncover shared discourses between contemporary and historical practices, themes, and assumptions underpinning women's mental illness. This data set will be interpreted using discourse analysis, which will engage with the complex ways women construct and reconstruct their identities and lives following a diagnosis. This research will provide an original contribution to the sociology of psychiatry, filling a gap in the sociological literature regarding BPD by integrating the voices of the women who have been diagnosed with the controversial disorder into the work.

In high school, students learn that the equation x^2-x-2=0 has two solutions: x=-1 and x=2. But what if there are more equations and variables like x^2+11*y^2+x+3y+1 = 0 and x^2+13*y^2+2x+y+5 = 0? Such polynomial systems appear in many applications, they describe the dynamics of reactions in a chemical production process or the movement of robot arms along an assembly line. Solving these systems is an important but computationally difficult task. A go-to method for solving such systems is homotopy continuation, which involves picking an easy start system with known solutions and deforming it to the target system. If done carefully, every solution of the start system can be traced to a solution of the target system. For the system above, a potential start system to the target system above is x^2-x-2 = 0 and y^2-y-2 = 0. However, picking the start system requires an accurate estimate on the number of target solutions. This is especially challenging for systems arising in applications, where the variables carry meaning and the equations have structure. Because meaning and structure vary from application to application, it is difficult to find a method that works in general. This is the main project for which we will be using using tropical geometry. In tropical geometry, each polynomial is assigned a piecewise linear object, and from how these so-called tropical varieties intersect each other, we can estimate the number of target solutions. Tropical varieties also arise naturally in many other areas, like phylogenetics, economics or machine learning. This diversity is one of the key strengths of tropical geometry which we will be exploiting. It serves as a bridge between vastly different areas, allowing for an exchange of ideas and solutions. Problems that appear impossible in one area may very well be solvable in another.

During my PhD, I examined the assumed role that cricket has in reconciliation efforts in Sri Lanka. Though I concluded that cricket had some positive influence on individuals and could improve interpersonal relations in the country, my findings also posed a problem: that sports like cricket are unlikely to promote structural change in their current form. Through in-depth anthropological fieldwork with cricketers in Sri Lanka, I found that sports promote certain narratives that perpetuate a narrow view of society, in which ideas of change are mostly individual. While cricketers learn how to make change in their own lives, the sport rarely leads them to question or challenge their social constraints. Many Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) practitioners tend to leave change up to individuals, simply providing opportunities for people to change through sport, rather than addressing the systemic problems that perpetuate social issues. Consequently, I concluded that work was needed to assess the relationship between sport and change further, to challenge these dominant sporting narratives in order to transform sport. The fellowship proposed here is a first step towards this goal of shifting the narrative on sport, and transforming thinking about sport in society. It builds on my specific findings in the Sri Lankan context, working to make them more impactful at the local scale, and more relevant to a wider audience. So far, my research has had impacts at a mostly academic level, stimulating conference papers and publications, including a book chapter on nationalism in Sri Lankan cricket, and a journal article on innovative techniques for exploring embodied movement. I run a Sri Lanka research group, and the International Network of Sport Anthropology (INSA), which I founded in 2020. An ESRC fellowship will enable me to develop this publication record and grow these networks further, positioning me as an expert within the growing anthropology of sport, who has important things to say about social change. Most importantly, a fellowship would enable me to disseminate my findings in Sri Lanka, to continue building networks with local SDP actors, and provide concrete evidence of impact at local level. The first major aim of this fellowship is to disseminate my findings about cricket and reconciliation in Sri Lanka, developing and improving their impacts at various scales. The second is to create a sub-field of anthropology surrounding sport and change, which would generate robust theory to better drive sport initiatives, and support my aims of establishing a career in academia. These aims will be achieved through four interlinked objectives: 1. Generating impactful publications from my PhD material, including journal articles which build theory that contributes to a sub-field of anthropology in sport and social change. 2. Communication and dissemination of findings, particularly in Sri Lanka, through a series of workshops that will impact SDP practitioners at local and national level. 3. Establishing Research Networks & Partnerships in the UK and internationally, through an overseas institutional visit to Ottawa to work with a renowned expert in Sport for Reconciliation, and by expanding the International Network of Sport Anthropology to create my own network. 4. Formulating a grant proposal, which will extend this work on sport and change into the future by broadening my findings to include wider contexts and across various academic disciplines. These objectives will maximise the impact of my PhD by ensuring that my findings reach a larger audience, leading to both instrumental and conceptual benefits. Ultimately, this fellowship will provide space to make the findings of my PhD more actionable and give them far greater impact. An ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at Durham will help me to change the field, challenge hegemonic narratives on cricket, and drive change in Sri Lanka and global Sport for Development and Peace.

The 2022 cost-of-living crisis and the UK's exit from the European Union, the already rising levels of inequality in the UK have increased dramatically. Understanding the underlying causes of rapidly rising inequality is of vital concern to UK policymakers. However, existing economic models could not anticipate nor explain this acceleration in the growth of inequality following the changes in trade barriers caused by Brexit, particularly given the backdrop of the persistent stagnation of UK productivity growth (known as the UK Productivity Puzzle), which has worsened since Brexit. The proposed policy-oriented research sits at the nexus of international macroeconomics and household economics, addressing the dynamic interactions between inequality and two large interconnected economic forces: international trade and productivity, both of key importance in predicting the future of inequality in the UK. The cutting-edge theoretical modelling framework proposed, incorporating stylised facts informed by disaggregated Big Data empirical analysis into a state-of-the-art dynamic macroeconomic model of international trade, allows quantifying the impact of trade deliberalisation on inequality, through changes in productivity. Additionally, the modelling framework will allow an examination of interaction between inequality and productivity, to explain both the long-running stagnation of UK productivity and structural trends in inequality. By improving our understanding of the general equilibrium interactions that lead to increased inequality and slower productivity growth - especially important as the UK transforms its trading relationships post-Brexit, the proposed research not only has direct implications for policymakers, but could also offer another potential pertinent explanation for the UK Productivity Puzzle.