Faculty of Health and Life Sciences research student profiles

The UK.

I became familiar with Oxford Brookes because in my previous career I had colleagues who worked for the University.

I was attracted here to conduct my research because I already knew some of the academics in my department from my previous career.

Before I started my degree, I was a Senior Fellow at the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham, where I had worked for over 12 years in applied health policy and services research as a qualitative researcher.

I didn’t feel like a complete fish out of water, given my previous career, but it was quite difficult to start a Research Degree during Covid, with limited access to the campus and to facilities and resources for much of the first year.

I’ve picked a lot of things up as I’ve gone along – who to contact for different things like room bookings and how to get things done like bulk printing and setting up a dedicated answerphone extension for my study. So I think you have to be prepared to be quite self-reliant, which is how it should be really as a post-graduate research student.

Enhancing the quality of life for people with inoperable pancreatic cancer and their family carers, through high quality supportive care, is of prime importance, yet evidence shows that there are gaps in care and sub-optimal support in some cases.

Pancreatic cancer is the tenth most common cancer in the UK with approximately 9,000 people diagnosed each year but survival rates are low, only 1 in 4 (25.4%) people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in England survive their disease for one year or more. Surgery is the only curative treatment for pancreatic cancer, but at present, less than 1 in 10 (10%) of patients are deemed eligible for surgery at diagnosis.

If the cancer is inoperable, treatment then consists of ‘best supportive care’ or ‘palliative care’ to manage symptoms and maintain optimal quality of life. Such care might address physical symptoms such as pain, digestive discomfort, and fatigue, or psychological symptoms such as depression or anxiety.

This study takes a qualitative approach with a longitudinal element, to explore the experiences of people affected by cancer alongside the healthcare professionals who provide care and support to this cohort of patients and their family carers. Semi-structured interviews will take place with patients, family carers and healthcare professionals across a number of NHS and non-NHS sites. Data from the interviews will be analysed using the Framework Approach or Method.

The findings will be shared and discussed with NHS sites and through national networks of people affected by cancer, and healthcare professionals, in order to consider feasible recommendations for service improvements and policy changes.

I enjoy the opportunity being a research student offers of exploring ideas, concepts and literature that I wouldn’t have the time to do in a work environment. I also enjoy the autonomy it brings, though the flipside of this is that it is sometimes quite a lonely endeavour. I was very used to working in small teams in all my previous careers so this feels quite different. I try to make sure that I keep in regular touch with friends and ex-work colleagues to stay connected and engaged with everything else that’s happening in the world, as it’s very easy to become quite insular.

Some of the doctoral training sessions have been really interesting and enjoyable – some of the topics were familiar to me but it was nice to have a refresh and a different perspective and it’s always nice to come into contact with people studying such a broad range of subjects at this level. 

You can’t rely on the research training to answer all your questions though, or solve all your problems, so you have to be prepared to take the initiative and do plenty of your own study whether that’s reading the literature around your subject, or exploring particular theories in depth or learning about new methodologies.

I would like to hope that I can continue to work within the field of pancreatic cancer in some capacity but my plans are quite unformed at the moment.

Oxford.

While researching Psychology Master’s courses that did not require an undergraduate degree in Psychology – so the MSc in Psychology at Oxford Brookes suited me perfectly. I had always known about Oxford Brookes having grown up in Oxfordshire, and my first impressions on visiting were really positive – the facilities are wonderful and everybody is so friendly and helpful.

I thoroughly enjoyed working with Dr Kate Wilmut as my supervisor for my MSc dissertation project, and when she flagged up that there may be an opportunity to build on this work for a PhD, I jumped at the chance to apply for the studentship! I am really proud to be working as part of the Perception and Motion Analysis (PuMA) Research Group.

Before starting my MSc in 2018, I was a Secondary School Modern languages Teacher, teaching Spanish and French in an Oxfordshire school. I was originally trained as a linguist before doing a PGCE, though Psychology and the world of research have always fascinated me and I decided to make the move after several years of teaching.

I think the atmosphere and resources on offer at Oxford Brookes and in my department have made it quite easy for me to settle into the research environment. It was also great already feeling established within the university from doing my MSc here previously. It’s an environment that I absolutely love and appreciate being in, and the people around me including my supervisory team, other PhD students both in Psychology and across the faculty, as well as everyone in the wider department have made it a really supportive and positive experience.

My research is investigating the role of anxiety, self-efficacy and movement variability (one’s ability to move consistently) in how adults with and without Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) think they will behave (their perceptual judgement) and how they actually behave (their executed action). I am investigating this using questionnaires and lab-based work using motion capture software within the Perception and Motion Analysis Laboratory at Oxford Brookes, using a task based around navigating obstacles in the everyday environment. 

DCD (sometimes known as Dyspraxia) is a condition affecting around 5% of the population where motor coordination does not align with the expected level for an individual’s age. It manifests in fine (e.g., writing by hand or doing up buttons) and gross motor difficulties (e.g., walking down a narrow street without bumping into obstacles) in both childhood and adulthood, which can impact negatively on everyday life (Kirby, Edwards, Sugden & Rosenblum, 2010).

My PhD is building on findings from my MSc research showing that emotional state, and specifically anxiety, influences what typically developing (TD) individuals think they will do (i.e., perceptual judgement of potential action), but not what they actually do (i.e. the physically executed action) (Harris & Wilmut, 2020). This suggests that different factors, including anxiety, constrain perception of potential action compared to perception during the execution of action.

I am first using an online questionnaire to investigate how different psychological factors are related to people’s movement ability. This considers elements of self-efficacy (how well you perceive you can do something), self-concept (ways in which you see yourself), resilience and anxiety among adults with and without DCD. To date very little is known about self-efficacy, self-concept, resilience and anxiety within the DCD population, and how these differ to their typically developing counterparts. This phase will therefore aim to provide valuable insights into the lived experience of adults with DCD, a group among which an urgent need for further research has been identified (Blank et al., 2019). Findings from this will also help create an appropriate task-specific self-efficacy and anxiety scale for subsequent use. This is necessary because a self-efficacy scale focusing specifically on navigating the environment does not yet exist.

Subsequent phases will aim to establish and develop understanding of how different types of anxiety, self-efficacy and movement variability may constrain the ways in which adults with and without DCD perceive their action capabilities and subsequently actually act. Its objective will be to determine the point at which behaviour changes for both perceptual only and action tasks (judging the space you need to walk through a door without bumping into the sides, and then actually walking through) and the way in which this point relates to body size, movement consistency, anxiety and self-efficacy levels in these populations.

This research aims to contribute new, in-depth understanding of the roles of anxiety, self-efficacy and movement variability in the relationship between how adults with DCD perceive their intentions and abilities to act in the world, and how they realise those actions in comparison with adults without DCD. This will be useful in informing interventions, particularly regarding perceived self-efficacy in confidently and safely navigating one’s environment, which aim to improve the quality of functional and emotional life for individuals with DCD.

I very much enjoy being able to plan my own time and also the variety of different skills and areas of focus that form part of the research cycle. I am also really enjoying being able to see the skills that I will need for my future career developing before my eyes through the work I am doing and under the supportive guidance of my supervisors (Dr Kate Wilmut and Dr Clare Rathbone) – it’s a great feeling!

There are challenges however, and I think for me the flexibility of managing your own time effectively and healthily is one of these. I have found that treating my PhD as much as possible like a ‘nine to five’ job - with some exceptions when necessary of course - helps me stay on the right track in terms of productivity, efficiency and establishing a healthy work-life balance.

The research training offered at Brookes is brilliant because it is so multi-faceted and every session runs at multiple times of the academic year. This means that we are able to adapt our training to align with the stage of our own research.

So far, I feel that the training I have attended has helped me both develop new skills, consolidate previous knowledge and build my confidence across various areas including teaching and applying for ethical approval to name just a couple.

I plan to pursue an international career in research and am excited to see what kinds of opportunities may arise from doing my PhD in this field of study. I am keeping a very open mind about this to see where my research could take me in the future.

After studying for a master’s degree at Oxford Brookes University, I worked as a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, and found both experiences enjoyable.

Through working here, I was already part of the Prevention Science Group, and knew both my supervisors - Dr Emma Davies and Professor David Foxcroft.  These were important factors in my decision to apply to study for a PhD here.  I’d also heard about the Nigel Groome studentships, and feel fortunate to be one of the students benefiting from this source of funding.

In 2017, I started working as a post-graduate Research Assistant in the Faculty of Health & Life Sciences, which has given me great experience working on prevention and supportive cancer care research projects.  Before that I worked as a market research and customer insight manager in the voluntary and corporate sectors. Whilst working for a national disability charity, I realised that I wanted to develop new skills that could be applied in health research, and this led to me undertaking the MSc in Psychology.

I’ve found the research culture here to be open, welcoming and enabling. People are willing to share what they have learned from their own research experiences, or suggest other sources of advice and support. Recently, the psychology department moved into refurbished offices, giving researchers access to new facilities and equipment. I can see how these will support the different research activities in my PhD project.

Around two thirds of alcohol-related deaths in the UK occur in people who are in their midlife years i.e. aged between 45 and 64 years of age. Even though some people are drinking less than they did 10 years ago, patterns of alcohol consumption for people aged 45+ years are largely unchanged. Currently there is a limited amount of research focused on midlife drinking behaviour, and very few initiatives aiming to reduce alcohol consumption in this age range have been developed and tested.        

Although most adults in the UK know about government guidance suggesting that low risk drinking means consuming no more than 14 units of alcohol each week, there is evidence to suggest that advice such as this has little effect on behaviour. The limitations of using information to drive behaviour change are explained by dual-process models of health behaviour, in which decision making can follow two paths. Cues such as information are considered via a conscious or reflective pathway whilst a second pathway, representing non-conscious or less deliberate decision making, explains responses based on automatic associations, habits and impulses. Results from several research studies show that automatic processes are particularly good at explaining and predicting drinking behaviour. The purpose of my PhD project is to research, develop and test an intervention that aims to help midlife adults reduce the amount they drink, by targeting these automatic processes.        

Organisations such as the Medical Research Council (MRC) want health interventions to be informed by evidence and theory, and to be developed using systematic processes. My project will be using the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW), which provides a clear eight-step process, to guide the development of a new intervention to reduce the amount people drink.  In line with MRC recommendations, the first four steps of the BCW focus on understanding the problem, resulting in a detailed analysis of issues around midlife drinking.  It is only at this point that decisions about the features of the intervention will be assessed and decided, in steps five to eight of the BCW. Once the intervention has been fully developed, it will be tested in a pilot study, and evaluated. Positive results from the pilot and evaluation studies may indicate that this type of intervention has potential for practical application, following further research and development. 

It’s a privilege to be able to spend time learning and develop new skills, and to be working with people that you respect and with whom you share interests.  Life as a research student means taking on responsibilities, but you’re also given autonomy and flexibility in the way you approach and manage your work. There are bound to be challenges along the way, and learning how to deal with these, and where to go for advice and support, is all part of the experience.

There are plenty of training opportunities at Oxford Brookes University, and students are encouraged to get involved with different development activities that are available at a department, faculty and university level. My development program to date has been excellent, and I feel well supported and thoroughly prepared to undertake my first research study.

Like many other countries, the UK is facing some considerable challenges in responding to changing healthcare needs. We need good quality research, and skilful researchers to help us understand and address those needs. I’d like to be a part of that, and continue to build experience and expertise in developing health interventions.

Watchfield, England

I live in Oxfordshire, so I was always aware of Oxford Brookes University, but I began seriously considering completing a PhD at Oxford Brookes after a friend of mine began her Law degree here and was full of praise for her course. At this time, I had just completed my master's degree in psychology, so I was looking at potential PhD courses, and Brookes seemed like a great campus full of friendly faces. In particular, I was impressed by the psychology department, which has excellent facilities and impactful and interesting research output.

I found a studentship advertised on the Oxford Brookes website about conducting a project based on music engagement across the lifespan and decided to apply. The opportunity to be funded and research a topic I have always been interested in under the supervision of leading researchers encouraged me to apply. The excellent facilities and accessible campus were also bonuses.

Before I started my PhD course, I had just finished an MSc in Clinical Psychology at the University of Bath. My dissertation investigated the relationship between attention and recognition memory for the early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease. I also worked part-time as a rehabilitation worker for people with brain injuries at Headway UK. Although both were valuable experiences, I was looking to progress into academia rather than clinical, and the studentship at Brookes seemed the perfect opportunity to make this transition and investigate music and brain injury rehabilitation, both of which are my research interests.

Due to my previous experience as a research assistant, I found it fairly easy to settle into the research environment. However, this process was made easier through the college induction programme and the support of my supervisors and postgraduate tutor. I think excellent support and resources are available to research students within the department and college. There is a good training programme and any resources needed for your research can be met.

Listening to music is an important aspect of daily life that helps to shape identity, manage mood, and relieve boredom. However, as adults age, their engagement with music and reasons for listening to music change. In particular, enjoyment of intense contemporary music such as rock and rap decreases, as does the tendency to listen to music while completing other tasks and exploration of new music. This may be due to changing priorities and goals associated with the challenges of life roles such as student or parent. Furthermore, our ever-evolving sense of identity and increasing emotional intelligence may also reduce the need for music to manage our moods or express ourselves. Music has been found to improve the well-being of young adults, but we live in an ageing society, so it is important to understand how music can affect the well-being of older people. However, research concerning music engagement across the lifespan is relatively scarce, and findings are inconsistent and inconclusive. Therefore, my research aims to re-examine whether identity, emotional intelligence, and life roles can affect music engagement across the lifespan. I am currently investigating this using a questionnaire study where I will compare results across age groups from 16-80.

In the older population, the prevalence of brain injuries is rising. Listening to music whilst completing rehabilitation tasks can improve recovery in memory and attention for brain injury patients. Specifically, listening to music produced when patients were 10-30 years old may lead to significant improvements in cognitive function. These improvements may be due to the reminiscence bump, where events from these ages are more likely to be remembered than events from other ages. However, interestingly, these improvements are more notable among individuals with brain injuries than healthy controls. This illustrates the potential to use music from the reminiscence bump to improve rehabilitation outcomes. However, no studies have investigated the effect of music from the reminiscence bump on cognition in individuals with brain injuries. Therefore, my project also aims to explore music engagement in individuals with brain injuries and critically evaluate whether music can affect cognitive performance in individuals with brain injuries. I will investigate this through a combination of interviews and experimental studies.

The best thing about being a research student is the opportunity to conduct and publish your own research. I enjoy discussing research ideas and hearing about others' research, and the PhD community is so supportive and helpful. The biggest challenge so far has been juggling many different tasks and deadlines, but I find keeping an organised calendar and setting myself tasks to complete each day helps me stay on track.

The research training offered at Oxford Brookes is extensive and covers many aspects of completing a research degree from initial registration through to submission and publishing. This has been a helpful resource for answering questions, understanding expectations, and de-mystifying the process.

My future plans are to stay within academia, eventually becoming a lecturer and having the opportunity to develop studies from my thesis, such as creating a music-based intervention for brain injury rehabilitation.

India

I heard about OBU from the PhD advertisement at EURAXESS website.

I was attracted to both research group and scholarship. I am a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Actions fellow. My research group at OBU, i.e., Cell Systems Modelling group is focussed on modelling metabolic networks of cell systems, for a holistic understanding of metabolism, which forms a part of broader field of systems biology.

I have done my undergrad and masters in Microbiology with Honours from Univerity of Delhi and Kurukshetra University, India, respectively.

I did my first research job as a Research Fellow (Research fellow is position in India which is equivalent to Post Grad Research Assistant in the UK) in Department of Medical Microbiology at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India. The project was to identify the role of anaerobic bacteria present in gut as a reservoir for Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR).

After that, I was working as a Research Fellow in Molecular Imaging and Diagnostics Lab at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The project was jointly funded by UK ESRC and Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. The aim of the project was to develop user driven, innovative diagnostics to curb AMR. My role was to develop in-house buffers to extract bacterial DNA from urine samples, to be used in a microfluidic chip which was being developed as a diagnostic tool.

I found it really comfortable to settle into the research environment because of all the support and resources provided by the university. My supervisor has been really supportive throughout my journey. Since I transitioned from a “wet lab” to a “dry lab”, it was a big change at first, but I really enjoyed learning new techniques and the importance of computational aspects in biological research.

I taught a Masters course on Object-oriented programming as a part of my training which was really helpful in my PhD. As a part of my PhD project, I got the opportunity to travel to different countries in Europe and attend training courses for experimental techniques such as proteomics, transposon sequencing, drug screening, etc. I also did a secondment of 11 weeks as a part of my PhD at University of Copenhagen last year.

My research project is a part of INNOTARGETS-ITN. It is a EU Horizon 2020 MSCA-ITN consortium of academic and industrial partners, the main objective of which is to apply innovative approaches for identifying metabolic drug targets in resistant pathogenic bacteria. The aim of this project is to use genome scale metabolic modelling and to integrate experimental data generated by the collaborators into the model, for exploring metabolic response of resistant bacteria when it is grown in the presence of antibiotics.

Metabolic modelling establishes a mathematical representation of the reactions present in the metabolic system under study including the inputs in the form of components of growth media and outputs in the form of biomass components. Models are typically constructed from online databases and can be analysed by a number of established techniques, including:

1. Identifying the groups of reactions working together in a metabolic network (Enzyme subsets).
2. Identifying the groups of reactions which form minimal independent pathways in a metabolic network (Elementary modes).
3. Identifying the sets of reactions that fulfil a given function (Linear Programming).

In this project, a genome scale metabolic model (GSM) of E.coli MG1655 has been constructed using an available genomic database (EcoCyc) which contains genes and reactions present in the organism. The model was then curated by checking for energy conservation and biomass formation by applying LP to GSM. In addition to model construction and curation, the techniques to integrate experimental data into the GSM have been developed and the model has been analysed to identify changes in metabolic pathways required for growth under antibiotic challenges.

Integration of different kinds of experimental data into modelling analysis will help in developing new techniques for exploring how bacterial metabolism is involved with AMR and potentially in identifying novel drug targets.

I enjoy learning new things every day which is the beauty of research. Being a PhD student gives you freedom to explore your research topic as much as you can, but sometimes pressure to finish in time and failures can be major challenges. I try to balance my work and life and treat my PhD as any 9 to 5 job. My supervisor always suggests taking breaks and weekends seriously so that you can come back to the problems with a fresh perspective.

Although there are never-ending deadlines in a PhD, I like to have a deadline because it keeps you in check and you become aware of your time and manage it accordingly. Annual progress reports really help in the process of writing as they are short documents which help in giving a kickstart to thesis writing.

Graduate college trainings offered at OBU are really helpful as they are designed to help develop transferable skills required for research irrespective of the field of expertise. I would also like to highlight the importance of library services as the inter-library loans services for research papers which are not open and accessible have been really helpful during my PhD.

I have benefitted from them a lot, because they not only prepare you for finishing your PhD, but also prepare you for the job market after your PhD in the form of courses related to networking in conferences etc. I have presented my research in a lot of International conferences and symposiums organised in my research group during my PhD. I have also assisted my supervisor in conducting Metabolic modelling workshops and Python teaching courses.

I feel that doing PhD at OBU has given me a wide range of skill sets including not only research, but also transferable skills which will help me in my future endeavours.

My future plans are to get a research based job in the field of computational biology in academia or industry, preferably related to drug discovery and AMR.

Oxfordshire

Living locally to Oxford Brookes University meant I heard lots of good reviews from friends. Whilst completing a Biomedical Science undergraduate degree at Brookes the lecturers were very supportive and invited me to join their weekly lab meetings, from there I applied to complete an MSc by Research.

The friendly research students and PI’s really do make research at the university an enjoyable environment to be in, plus having access to the fantastic bioimaging unit.

I completed A-Levels in Biology, Politics and Drama before opting to continue down a biology route.

The research environment was a big change compared with undergraduate study but the supervisors and other post graduate students are all very supportive as well as the university offering inclusive introductory sessions.

The metastatic spread of cancer is found to be the cause of over 90% cancer patient death. With this in mind it is important we understand metastatic cancer, pathways that drive this and promote cancer movement. My project looks specifically at cancer cells that have reached the blood and how these become sticky and hijack the body’s natural immune mechanism to then allow the cancer cells back into local tissue which can form a new tumour. This project aims to investigate the spatial expression of actin in breast cancer cells and their role in binding to endothelial cells. Techniques to establish this include a wide range of microscopes, Immunocytofluorescence, flow cytometry and cell culture.

I really love all the additional learning that is encouraged, with the goal of 70 hours to help develop personal, professional and career skills. With additional work, comes some difficulties with time management, but with help from supervisors it is easier to prioritise and manage your time more effectively achieving a good balance.

The research training is a great opportunity to begin presenting your results, get to know other research students and find courses that can shape the way you tackle your research.

I will be staying at Oxford Brookes to begin a PhD as part of the Groome Studentship in September continuing my current project.