Award winners for 2010 were as follows:
The Postgraduate Researcher of the Year 2010
1st Danielle Miles ( Centre for Molecular Nanoscience School of Chemistry) ‘Can a new protein-like gel be used to cure back pain?’
2nd Jasjit Singh (Department of Theology and Religious Studies) ‘Keeping the Faith: the transmission of ‘Sikhism’ amount young British Sikhs.’
3rd (prize shared) Anja Schmidt (School of Earth and Environment) ‘The danger in our backyard: Icelandic Volcanic Eruptions’.
Michael Guess (School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering) ‘ Microwave heating of greenhouse crops – improving energy efficiency of greenhouse agriculture’.
Postgraduate Researcher Presentations 2010 Competition
1st Jo Humphrey (Biological Sciences) ‘Alzheimer’s Disease: does a brain bodyguard backstab the brain?’
2nd Thomas Forth (Biological Sciences) ‘Seeing inside malaria’
3rd Lukas Stadler (Medicine and Health) ‘Towards a novel way of diagnosing cancer’
Postgraduate Research Image of the Year 2010 Competition
1st Rosemary Morgan (Medicine and Health)
Image caption: Sub-Saharan Africa is the most heavily affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Due to its magnitude and impact, many organizations have become involved in response efforts. Faith-based organizations (FBOs) in particular have become increasingly involved in these efforts. My research is exploring the role of religion in the HIV/AIDS response of three local Tanzanian FBOs of different faiths. During my fieldwork I left Tanzania briefly to discuss my research with colleagues in South Africa, and came across this depiction of Jesus wearing an HIV/AIDS pin in a church on the outskirts of Cape Town. I believe this image exemplifies my PhD research, which I hope will contribute to a greater understanding of how FBOs respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and its affect on overall response efforts.
2nd Majdi Sawalha (Engineering)
Image caption: This is a Wordle visualisation of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. Moslems believe the Quran was recited to Mohammed in Arabic, so only the original Classical Arabic gives a true understanding of the Quran. A word-by-word English translation can help non-Arabic speakers, and this image is extracted from Arabic and English morphosyntactically annotated and aligned text. I am developing a morphological analyser for Arabic, and testing it on words in the Quran. The Worldle image helps to visualise two computational challenges. Quranic Arabic is morphologically complex compared to English: one Arabic word can include affixes and clitics, equivalent to two or three English words. The Wordle image depicts Arabic words alongside directly-equivalent English words or phrases, illustrating this morphological complexity. Another challenge of Arabic is that it must be processed right-to-left; the English translations are depicted right-to-left to portray this additional complication.
3rd Emily Morris (PVAC) View image
Image caption: When we consider our relationship to the inhuman we rigorously maintain the human/inhuman divide by assigning to ourselves attributes that we cannot prove to be strictly human and maintaining that the inhuman is that which is outside of ourselves. This research looks at a series of encounters with the inhuman, such as the figure of the cat, which highlight the fact that there is something inhuman at the centre of our existence that is fundamental to being human. This calls for the inhuman to be rethought of as the in/human ? both outside and within.