Athena SWAN

A warm welcome to all staff and students, old and new. We hope you enjoy this latest edition of the School newsletter, covering all the fantastic things that you have achieved between April and June 2023.

We start with the brilliant success of Dr Sobia Kauser, Dr Richard Telford and the rest of the CAYMAN team in securing recognition from the Vice Chancellor’s Outstanding achievement awards. It is great to see the hard work of our staff being recognised and held up as inspirational examples to the wider University.

The Centre for Skin Sciences have had an excellent quarter for research income with a new BBSRC grant led by Prof Julie Thornton and a Brad-ATTAIN studentship being awarded to Dr Karthic Swaminathan.

From all your pictures, we can see that conference season is in full swing and hope everyone is enjoying showcasing the high quality
research that our School produces, whether that be in the USA and Europe, or just down the road in Manchester! We’ve also had some exciting innovations in teaching and it’s brilliant to see this being recognised by other Universities as well.

Thanks again for all your submissions and please do keep them coming – they are always a pleasure to read!

Download the full Newsletter here!

A warm welcome to everyone to the first newsletter covering 2023! The sun is shining, the weather is starting to get warmer, and our students and staff have been out and about demonstrating the fantastic quality of work that is conducted within our School. Read on to see our research being discussed as far afield as the US (and in the glamour of Monaco). Learn about how we’ve been feeding into national teaching benchmarks and how our teaching expertise is recognised internationally. And lets not forget, our newest doctors who have completed their vivas over the last few months. We also have a number of new starters and we would like to take
this opportunity to welcome them to our School.

The School is very sorry to hear of the passing of Prof Nic Barry in March 2023. Nic was part of the School between 2016-2021 and contributed to development of the Chemistry submission of REF2021 as part of the School and University REF groups. Anyone who wished can sign a condolences card for his wife Dr Anais Pitto-Barry who also worked in the School during the same time period.

The summer months are prime recruitment time for our undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Please do volunteer to help out at applicant experience days so that we can continue to attract robust numbers of students and keep the School financially sound.

Next month, we are delighted that so many of our staff are taking part in the pint of Science events. These are excellent
outreach activities that can help the public to understand the ground-breaking research being carried out at the University
of Bradford. The events are dependent on sales so please do buy your tickets (£5) and encourage others to do so if they
are able. More information on the talks and the link for the website can be found in the outreach section.
Thank you again to all students and staff who have been in touch and contributed to the newsletter – we couldn’t compile
all this positivity without your continued engagement. It is very much appreciated and we look forward to seeing everything
you are up to over the coming months!

Download the full Newsletter here!

Happy new year to all – we hope you are all settled back in to work now and are surviving the January blues! It is always a hectic time of year with the end of semester 1, exams, marking, starting semester 2 and January intakes (not to mention research deadlines) but February is on the horizon and hopefully things will start to level off.

This newsletter is covering the last quarter of 2022, and we are delighted to welcome a number of new staff and PGR to the school. It was a busy time for attending conferences both locally and internationally, and congratulations to all who received grant funding or published their work during this time.

Outreach has been particularly strong with funding awarded to promote STEM in schools and colleges, and we were very happy to hear about our PhD student Gwyn Dahlquist-Axe speaking to school children about research all the way over in British Columbia!

Please do keep sending in your good news stories – it is truly enjoyable to read about the wealth of experiences and impact that you have across all sectors and it is important to celebrate these successes when we have them! You don’t have to wait until the next call to email us – we’re happy to receive items as and when for collation. Whilst we do scour Anne’s fortnightly briefing, feel free to contact us with more detail (or photographs, flyers etc) for inclusion in upcoming editions.

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A warm welcome to the 2022-23 academic year! We hope you are all doing well and that students and staff alike are settling into semester 1. The beginning of term can always be stressful as we get back into the swing of things so remember to give
yourselves time to adjust!

In this issue we have a bumper crop of student achievements which is great to see. Head to the Student Zone at the end of the newsletter to learn about our undergraduate student prizes at the recent graduation, our postgraduate students showcasing their work at the annual PGR symposium, and the great work that some of our undergraduates have achieved during summer studentships within the school.

At the staff level, conference season has been in full swing and our intrepid researchers have been traveling the globe (or going to Manchester) to keep abreast of all the most recent developments in our fields. Most conferences are back in person now which is great for networking and fully immersing yourself in the experience, but are perhaps not quite so accessible. Our students have done a
great job of putting themselves out there and presenting whenever they can.

Another highlight over the summer has been the recognition that our teaching technicians have received – both from their students and from the wider University. Technicians underpin much of the fabric of our teaching and are often the ‘unsung heroes’ of our courses so we are delighted to see them getting the recognition they deserve!

We hope you enjoy reading the newsletter and celebrating our collective successes. If you have anything you would like to
see in future editions please do get in touch.

Download the full Newsletter here!

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2022! In this edition we’re covering all the news from the first half of the year, and what a busy year it has been. Thank you all for your patience (there was no newsletter in April this year) but I’m glad to say we are back bigger and brighter than ever.

We would like to thank Dr Andrew Tedder for all his hard work and efforts that he contributed to the newsletter. He was co-editor from the inception of the newsletter and a key part of it’s design; Andrew stepped down from the newsletter team when his tenure as Director of Marketing and Admissions came to an end. That means we have a new face on the editorial team, so we offer a warm welcome to Dr Mark Sutherland who is happy to contribute to spreading all the positive news we have as he takes up the Director of Marketing and Admissions mantle.

We kick off this edition with the news of Prof Diana Anderson’s award in the New Years Honours list. Diana is an inspiration to the University and the scientific community and we offer her our warmest congratulations.

Our new technicians are introduced on page two – both former graduates of our School who enjoyed their with us time so much that they are using the skills and knowledge that they learned with us to contribute to the smooth running of the laboratories. This is a vital (and often under-appreciated) role and we look forward to getting to know them better over the coming years.

As the country continues to open up following the pandemic, national and international travel is back on the agenda and it has been great to read about all our researchers’ adventures around the world. We are sure this will continue to expand there will be lots of gorgeous images from far-flung locations in the coming editions! It has also meant that school visits are back on the agenda and we can all play a role in enhancing our future recruitment by engaging with schools wherever possible.

Thank you also to our tireless teaching team who continue to go above and beyond to deliver an excellent student experience in an increasingly challenging time. Your hard work is very much appreciated. Special thanks also to the apprenticeship teams, lead by Dr Tom Swift and Kara Thornton, who navigated the University’s first experience with Ofsted. You can read about those experiences on page 13.

Please do keep in touch with all your good news stories – we are particularly keen on increasing the input from students!

Download the full Newsletter here!

Study of human endothelial cell genetic and functional responses in health and inflammatory disease (atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer). These cells lining the blood vessels play a key role in acute inflammation in health and chronic inflammation in disease. Low grade chronic inflammation at the blood vessel wall results in lesion formation and narrowing of the vessels (atherosclerotic plaques). Therefore cardiovascular disease and diabetes are key disorders where endothelial cells are dysfunctional.  Skin disease such as psoriasis also have a vascular component. Endothelial cells also have the ability to sprout and develop new blood vessels (angiogenesis), which is physiologically important but can stimulate metastasis in cancer. Intra-cellular signalling pathways important in endothelial cell proliferation, migration and apoptosis are currently under study in the Graham laboratory.

Orcid: 0000-0002-1810-3927

Twitter: @doctoranneg

My research primarily focuses on the molecular simulation of interfacial (e.g. membranes, interfacial interactions) and soft matter systems (e.g. biomolecules, liquid crystals) to help improve our understanding of the physical and chemical behaviour of these systems. The bulk of my research makes use of classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations at the atomistic level, but I have used a wide range of computational chemistry techniques in my research, including coarse-grained MD, Monte Carlo simulations, density functional theory calculations, ab initio MD.

Dr Sobia Kauser is an assistant professor in Biomedical Sciences and holds a BSc and PhD from the University of Bradford. Sobia's current research focuses on the biology of skin with particular interest in the hair follicle. The hair follicle provides an excellent opportunity to investigate a highly accessible and interactive system of neuro-ectodermal and mesenchymal cells (keratinocytes, melanocytes and fibroblasts) and their diverse sub-populations in the skin. Sobia's research has focused on the role of pomc peptides in the skin and hair follicle pigmentation and in melanocyte ageing.

My current research interests lie in keratoacanthoma a spontaneously regressing skin tumour and using the hair follicle as a model system to study this. Other areas of interest include characterisation of the dermal melanocyte sub-population and there potential role in melanoma development.

My teaching and departmental responsibilities; Deputy Programme Leader for Biomedical Science, LSP champion for the school, Year 2 Tutor. I am also module leader for Developing Professional Skills 2 and Pathology.

Name: Dr. Maria Katsikogianni

Research Interests:

Design of bio-inspired multifunctional materials with non-fouling/antimicrobial properties for a number of applications; medical, environmental

Characterisation Expertise:

Material physicochemical and mechanical characterisation; contact angle measurements and surface energy evaluation, Scanning Electron Microscopy and Atomic Force Microscopy, roughness measurements, thermal analysis, drug release profiles

Orcid iD.: 0000-0002-1560-3993

Name: Dr. Nadeem Javid

Research Interests:

Supramolecular Chemistry, Bio-nanotechnology, Peptidic Hydrogel Scaffolds for Tissue Regeneration, Catalysis, Green Routes for Nano particle Synthesis, Drug Delivery and Crystallization of Pharmaceutical Ingredients in nano-scaffolds.

Characterisation Expertise:

Small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS), Small angle neutron scattering (SANs), Static and Dynamic Light scattering (SLS/DLS), Fourier-transform Infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy and Raman Spectroscopy.

Orcid iD.: 0000-0002-6413-5014

The skin microbiome is our largest, most exposed and is highly diverse organ with a primary barrier function in immune response. My research interests work to understand how the microbiome of the skin engages and changes in disease and environmental settings resulting in changes to the skin morphology. Specific examples include the burden and phenotypic changes of Staphylococcus aureus during eczema or Atopic dermatitis flares and how the skin undergoes dysbiosis during episodes of contact dermatitis. 

Sanjit Nayak studied MSc (2005) in Chemistry at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India. He received his PhD (2008) from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, supervised by Prof. Annie Powell. Following PhD he worked as a postdoc at Leiden University (with Prof. Jan Reedijk) and Marburg University (with Prof. Stefanie Dehnen) followed by a Marie Curie Fellowship to work at University of Liverpool (with Prof. Matthew Rosseinsky, FRS) before moving to National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2013. After lecturing 1.5 years in NUS he joined University of Bradford in 2014 as a lecturer.