tbc

Following advancements in manual wheelchair technology in the 1930s, wheelchairs have become increasingly central to the movement of individuals within the hospital environment. The significance of the wheelchair, however, extends far beyond transportation. As material objects, they continually cross boundaries between the medical, the sensory, and the emotional. Nor do wheelchairs solely shape and change users' sensory experiences of hospital environments and perceptions of illness; they also change how individuals in their presence, consciously and unconsciously, behave, feel, and act. Utilising the wheelchair to access sensory phenomena provides the project significant scope to examine, for example, how changing NHS and governmental policy since 1948 has affected the accessibility of the hospital setting. The project will also provide excellent opportunities for public engagement and has the potential to assist museums' increasing drive to widen accessibility, using an interactive sensory exhibition to uncover the everyday experiences of the NHS hospital.

The early life experiences of newborn babies and infants are a key determinant in their future mental health. Early life adversity within the mother-infant relationship is highly significant in determining a child's future susceptibility to a range of psychiatric disorders including anxiety and depression. Early life adversity causes stress in infants which raises cortisol levels and activity in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. However, we know very little about the changes in brain circuit development caused by early life adversity and stress. The circuits controlling positive and negative affect (or emotions) and those that regulate the stress response to emotional situations are thought to reside principally in the amygdala and hippocampus. In particular, positive and negative affective behaviour is thought to be encoded by the strength of synaptic inputs to genetically and anatomically defined subsets of neurons in the hippocampus and amygdala. Thus we propose that adverse early life events will lead to altered synaptic strengths in these hippocampal and amygdala circuits compared to normal early life experiences. Furthermore, reversing these changes in synaptic strength could ameliorate the behavioural effects of early life adversity in adults. This project will test this hypothesis using rodent models of maternal separation and behavioural tests of positive versus negative affective behaviour developed by the Robinson group. The primary objective will be to determine how these early life effects on developing circuits impact on adult behaviour, particularly affective behaviour and decision-making. By making electrophysiological measurements of synaptic transmission coupled with genetic and anatomical identification of neuronal subtypes we will investigate how these circuits are altered by the model of early life adversity. The aim is to subsequently reverse these circuit changes using optogenetics or pharmacology guided by a mathematical model of the circuit dynamics. The ultimate goal will be to find out if manipulating synapses within the circuits underlying behaviour using pharmacological or optogenetic tools is capable of changing the balance of positive and negative affect in adult animals. The student will be trained in animal behavioural paradigms, in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology and genetic manipulation of neuronal subtypes. In addition, through collaboration with Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova the project also aims to use computational models to predict the likely outcome of synaptic modifications on behaviour.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest cosmic objects. They contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies which swarm around in a giant cloud of gas that is so hot that it glows in X-rays. However, these components are the tip of the iceberg and about 90% of the material in a galaxy cluster is dark matter. In the heart of galaxy clusters lie the most massive galaxies in the Universe, and these in turn host supermassive black holes in their cores. Amazingly, there appear to be feedback loops connecting the hot gas on scales of millions of light years to those supermassive black holes which occupy regions the size of the solar-system (hundreds of billions times smaller). We believe that the hot gas can cool and fall to the centres of galaxies where it ultimately spirals into the black holes. As it does so, it is superheated, powering jets of material and radiation which can, in turn, heat and push around the large-scale gas in the cluster. The details of this complex process are not fully understood, but it is clear that these feedback mechanisms have a profound impact on the growth of the black holes, the evolution of the galaxies, and the properties of the galaxy clusters themselves. For this reason, feedback is one of the most important topics studied by astrophysicists. In our project we will shed new light on this problem by combining data from two new space telescopes, eROSITA and Euclid. eROSITA is an X-ray telescope which is surveying the whole sky and can make sensitive measurements of the hot gas in galaxy clusters. Euclid, meanwhile, will survey large parts of the sky cataloguing galaxies out to the distant Universe, and is ideally suited for detecting hundreds of thousands of galaxy clusters for our research. We will use eROSITA to measure the gas properties for this huge sample of galaxy clusters from Euclid, and study how much the feedback from supermassive black holes has been affecting that gas. By making these measurements for galaxy clusters of different masses, and looking how they change over cosmic time, we will be able to test and refine the best current models for the feedback processes that are so influential in shaping cosmic structures.

Over 10% of the UK's land surface is covered by peat, representing the country's largest carbon store. Much of this land has now been modified by drainage to support grazing, crop cultivation and forestry, as a result of which peatlands are believed to emit over 18 Mt CO2 equivalent per year, around 4% of all the UK's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Over half of these emissions derive from the relatively small area of lowland peat, the majority of which has been converted to arable and grassland agriculture. These areas are now among the most intense sources of GHG emissions from the land sector. Following the UK Government's commitment to Net Zero GHG emissions by 2050, there is an urgent need to reduce these emissions, and where possible to reinstate the natural function of peatlands as carbon sinks. However, drained lowland peatlands also support some of the UK's highest value farmland, and restoring these areas fully to wetland could have severe impacts on UK food security and the rural economy, as well as potentially 'offshoring' our emissions to other countries from which we import food. Recognition of this challenge led to the formation of the Defra Lowland Agricultural Peat Task Force, which will publish its report in October 2022. The report is expected to make detailed recommendations on the future management of peatland areas under cropland, such as those of East Anglia, which have been extensively researched by UKCEH and others. In comparison, areas of peat under grassland management, such as those of the Somerset Levels and Moors, are recognised to be a significant evidence gap, despite the fact that they typically retain far deeper peat and larger carbon stocks than the cropped Fenland peats. This PhD will seek to address this evidence gap.