Month: September 2024

This blogpost was authored by Professor Sharynne McLeod. Prof. McLeod is a speech-language pathologist and professor of speech and language acquisition at Charles Sturt University, Australia. She visited the University of Bristol as a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor April-May 2024 and collaborated with Professor Yvonne Wren in the Bristol Dental School on the project ‘Children born with cleft palate: Intelligibility and participation’.

As a Bristol Benjamin Meaker Visiting Distinguished Professor, Prof. McLeod collaborated with colleagues in the Bristol Dental School, the Faculty of Health Sciences, and the wider University of Bristol community to advocate for communication for all, acknowledging the untapped potential of those who are underrepresented in society’s conversations. Prof. McLeod was hosted by Prof. Yvonne Wren, who leads the Cleft Collective Cohort Study, a national longitudinal cohort study with over 11,000 participants from over 4000 families in the United Kingdom. The Cleft Collective uses the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS), an outcome measure developed by Prof. McLeod and team, that is also recommended in the International Consortium of Health Outcome Measures (ICHOM) Set of Patient-Centered Outcome Measures for Cleft Lip & Palate. During this visit, Prof McLeod worked with the Cleft Collective team to generate reference data at ages 3 and 5 years and found significant differences based on cleft type and whether a syndrome was present. Despite being available in over 70 languages, this is the first time the ICS has been studied longitudinally. In addition to her well-received lectures, Prof. McLeod undertook capacity building workshops and mentoring to support students and staff across the wider University of Bristol community.

You can read more about Prof. McLeod’s experiences on her blog: Speaking my languages.

This blogpost was authored by Dr Joseph Keating, from the School of Earth Sciences. In May 2024, Dr Keating and Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol and Dr Bethany Allen from ETH Zürich were awarded Bristol International Research Collaboration Activities (BIRCA) funding to collaborate on writing activities at Bristol.

Dr Bethany Allen is a rising star in the field of computational palaeobiology. Bethany’s cutting edge work harnesses computational tools and statistical models to understand the fossil record and the evolution of life through time. Bethany has applied her expertise to a broad range of problems, including understanding the future distribution of plant species due to  climate change, investigating whether dinosaurs were already in decline before their extinction and elucidating the spatial pattern of  invertebrate evolution. Bethany has a long affiliation with the University of Bristol. She is a Bristol alumnus, having completed her Masters degree here in 2017. She then completed a PhD at the University of Leeds, supervised by fellow University of Bristol alumnus, Dr Alex Dunhill.  

I first met Bethany during the Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting 2023 in Cambridge. Bethany was presenting her latest research looking at how fossils impact our ability to estimate the ancestral condition of a trait. As I was working in a similar field, I immediately saw an opportunity to collaborate. Eventually I managed to pin her down and we discussed potential collaboration ideas. We settled on writing a review paper outlining the theory, methods and pitfalls of ancestral state estimation using fossils. This was largely born out of a shared frustration (as I imagine a lot of review papers are) that very few people in our field use these methods, and those that do often interpret their results incorrectly!

Bethany’s visit, supported by the BIRCA award, was for one week. Within that week we aimed to plan and write a manuscript draft intended for submission to Trends in Ecology and Evolution. On top of this, we would also jointly deliver a tutorial on ancestral state estimation, which would be free to attend for interested postgraduates and postdocs in Earth Sciences, Geographical Sciences or Biological Sciences. Bethany would also deliver a 1hr seminar to the Palaeobiology Research Group and an informal presentation to the lab group of Professor Mike Benton. This was a lot to squeeze in over one week, but we would rise to the challenge.

Bethany’s seminar and presentation were both excellent and well attended. During her seminar, she showcased her work on skyline models applied to macroevolutionary problems. In her presentation to Professor Benton’s lab group, she discussed some of her past projects and fielded questions from lab members. The tutorial we conducted together was also a great success, attracting many PhD students and postdocs who were actively engaged and asked relevant questions. In hindsight, I believe extending the workshop by an extra hour would have been beneficial, as it felt a bit rushed towards the end. We live and learn.

For my part, the biggest revelation was the collaborative writing sessions. As a postdoc, opportunities for collaborative work are rare, since postdoc research is typically independent. Therefore, working with Bethany was incredibly refreshing. We were able to exchange ideas, quickly develop a cohesive plan for the manuscript, and draft substantial portions of text. As an added benefit, I found working collaboratively helped keep me focussed and engaged. By the end of the week, we had written close to 10 pages of the manuscript.

Bethany’s visit was a great success and honestly one of the most fun weeks I have had at Bristol. I cannot emphasise how reinvigorating it was to undertake such an intensive collaborative project with someone passionate about your specialist subject. Please give it a try! We are now in the process of finishing off the manuscript and catching up over regular zoom meetings. We hope to get our manuscript submitted this summer. Watch this space!

This blog was authored by Dr Shu Minakuchi and Dr Vincent Maes. Dr Minakuchi is currently Associate Professor and runs his own lab within the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at The University of Tokyo. He visited the University of Bristol as a Next Generation Visiting Researcher in March 2024 and was hosted by Dr Vincent K. Maes, Dr Neha Chandarana, and Dr James Kratz, who are part of the Bristol Composites Institute. 

Composite manufacturing is a growing business around the world. Across all industries, companies struggle with parts not coming out of the manufacturing process as desired. The underlying issue being that consolidation, the process by which the base materials are turned into finished parts is highly dynamic and complex. While many models have been developed to analyse the process and help optimize it, validating them has been difficult due to the limited experimental tools available to monitor and inspect the consolidation behaviour in real parts. 

To resolve this, Dr Minakuchi and his hosts as the Bristol Composites Institute (BCI) have combined their research developments to achieve “Enhanced Consolidation Monitoring”. Dr Minakuchi brought across his expertise and novel strip-sensor, which leverages fibre optic cables to allow shape sensing of the composite part throughout the manufacturing process. This was then combined with pressure sensor mats and thermocouple sensors, which the BCI has been using to capture the consolidation conditions. Together these provide a more complete picture that can elucidate the consolidation behaviour. 

During the visit, successful experiments were carried out, the results of which will be published in a joint journal paper. The experiments and subsequent discussions have also allowed further research activities to be identified for future collaborations. 

Further, Dr Minakuchi delivered 2 seminar sessions to present his broad research activities and 1 demonstration workshop to allow BCI researchers to get hands on experience with the novel shape sensors and evaluate where they may be valuable in their own activities. A visit to Southampton, which included tours of their facilities, enabled Dr Minakuchi to further expand his network in the UK.