Pre-eclampsia and fetal growth restriction (babies born smaller than they should be) are complications that affect up to 1 in 10 pregnancies and are responsible for grave illness in affected mothers and babies. Each year in the UK, up to 5 women and 600 babies die because of pre-eclampsia; 1 in 4 stillbirths are caused by fetal growth restriction and this is responsible for 1 in 6 sudden infant deaths. Babies who survive these complications are at greater risk of cerebral palsy and, later on in life as children and adults, they are at higher risk of suffering heart disease, diabetes, bone disease and mental health problems. Babies born of pregnancies complicated by pre-eclampsia and fetal growth restriction place a heavy burden on the NHS, with 20% of all intensive care baby cots being occupied by babies from pre-eclampsia pregnancies and around #420m being spent each year on intensive care of growth restricted babies. In addition, looking after children with illnesses related to pre-eclampsia and fetal growth restriction places a heavy burden on families, the NHS and social services. Unfortunately, there are no cures for either pre-eclampsia or fetal growth restriction and women suffering from severe problems have to undergo premature delivery of their baby, which also carries great risks of chronic illness and death. Although there have been no drugs specially designed to treat these illnesses, there are a number of possible treatments that are used to treat other illnesses and that have already been shown to be safe in people who are not pregnant. These treatments cannot be tested on pregnant women without first establishing whether they are effective and safe in treating symptoms of pre-eclampsia and fetal growth restriction in animals. We would like to test a number of existing drugs to see if they are useful at treating the symptoms of these diseases in a number of specially-bred mouse strains that display signs of pre-eclampsia and fetal growth restriction when pregnant. Once we have found which treatments have the greatest potential for treatment in mice, we will use them on blood vessels taken from human placentas and women (with informed written consent) after they have given birth to test whether they might be effective in human pregnancy. Such experiments will provide information on how to design clinical trials for the development of these treatments in pregnant women suffering from pre-eclampsia or fetal growth restriction.

This project (CHARMA) is a study of the political importance of the concept of personal character in Victorian England. CHARMA will be developed through a 24-month European Fellowship with the University of Manchester. The overarching goal of this project is understanding the relationship between the cultivation of individual character and the plans for building a peaceful society, at a time when Britain was experiencing rapid socio-economic and political change. To achieve this overarching goal, I divided my project into two sub-goals. My first sub-goal is understanding the Victorian discourse of character and its political importance through texts of early and mid-Victorian political thought. This study will be pursued by textual analysis. My second sub-goal is demonstrating that this concept influenced actual plans for educational and social reform. To do so, I will focus on a case-study: I will analyse the reform practices and institutions of a highly influential group of Dissenters, the Unitarians, in Victorian Manchester. This study will be pursued through archival research, using the vast collections in the University of Manchester Archive. I will also used social network analysis to trace the connections of Unitarians with different social groups and represent them graphically. This project will contribute to the fields of intellectual history, history of political thought and political philosophy. CHARMA's methodology is interdisciplinary, as it combines different fields, different kind of sources and a practice-based, bottom-up approach with a contextualist study of published texts. CHARMA also uses a mixed-methods approach and provides methodological innovation by introducing a new method, social network analysis, into the field of intellectual history.

The palate (the roof of the mouth) develops from two halves that fuse together during embryonic development. Currently, we do not completely understand what controls these events, but we do know that the common and distressing birth defect cleft palate results when fusion of the two halves of the palate fails to occur. Patients with cleft palate experience difficulties with eating and speaking, which can be improved to some degree by long-term surgery, dental treatment, and speech therapy; it is therefore essential that we have more information on how genes work together during normal development and how these are affected in cleft palate. The Sonic Hedgehog protein is a key molecule in ensuring that the palate develops normally; however, only a small fraction of proteins acting in response to Sonic Hedgehog has been identified. Recently, methods have been developed that will allow us to identify the complete set of proteins controlled by Sonic Hedgehog. We will use these techniques to dissect the role of Sonic Hedgehog signalling in ensuring that the palate develops correctly thereby preventing cleft palate. To ensure that this research is completed ethically, we will perform these experiments in mice, in which the palate develops in exactly the same way as in humans. In the short-term, this research will help us to understand the processes that underlie normal development of the palate and how these are disrupted in cleft palate. In the longer term, this information will help us to provide improved diagnosis, genetic counselling and treatment to patients and their families who are affected by this distressing condition.

This proposed research explores the adaptation and reconceptualisation of Shakespeare in contemporary Iranian theatre between 2000 and 2020. Overall, Iranian Shakespearean reworkings pursue three main approaches: (1) the plays that challenge important political issues such as the establishment of dictatorship in modern history of Iran, the Hamlet and Macbeth adaptations in particular; (2) the plays that engage in reflecting on Iran's sociocultural problems such as gender inequality and theatre censorship; and (3) the reworkings that spark philosophical-aesthetic discussions aiming at practicing an experimental stage against perception and meaning in the mainstream theatre. By using cultural materialist dissident reading and adaptation studies, as well as sociopolitical criticism, this proposed research analyzes adaptation politics, the scope of dissidence, and the way Iranian adapters have utilised Shakespeare in productive and engaging ways to reflect on sociocultural, political and philosophical issues in present-day Iran. Contemporary Iranian historical events such as civil uprisings since 2000s are deciding factors in the emergence of social, political and alternative interpretations and adaptations of Shakespeare in playwriting practice and theatre production in Iran. Significantly, this project seeks to introduce and examine Iranian political playwriting and the prominent yet little-known Iranian playwrights to global academic audiences. Although there is a body of scholarship on Shakespeare and the Arab world (e.g. Al-Shetawi, Hennessey and Litvin), there is minimal scholarship on Shakespearean adaptations in Iran, especially since the 2000s. To this end, my proposed project aims to make a significant contribution to Global Shakespeare Studies by investigating and evaluating the reception, influence, and political use of Shakespeare in the context of contemporary Iran. It also advances adaptation theory by extending its theorization and application to the mutual interplay between the Western canon and literatures of so-called Third World countries, including Iran. Working with this theoretical framework, my proposed doctoral thesis will raise and attempt to answer the following research questions: 1. What possibilities has Shakespearean adaptation offered for political intervention in the Iranian context? 2. In what way has the post-Revolutionary context inspired Iranian playwrights to engage in adaptation and appropriation playwriting? 3. What possibilities have rewritings of Shakespeare by Iranian playwrights offered for contemporary spectacle? 4. What are the impacts of theatre censorship on Iranian drama? In what way have Iranian adaptations addressed this issue through adaptations?

There is increasing demand for woundcare materials due to the UK's aging population. Driven by the treatment of chronic wounds in the elderly, UK woundcare resources are predicted to cost ca. £2.4 billion in 2019; of this, wound dressings etc are predicted to cost approx. £460 million in 2019. There is a clear need for improved outcome and cost-savings on woundcare materials, and new processes for manufacturing advanced wound care materials could cut the high cost of associated nursing and hospital resources. This project aims to develop a range of chemical synthesis methods that allow the high-throughput functionalisation of the biomaterials used in cell culture scaffolds and wound dressings. This project is placed at the intersection between advanced functional materials and biotechnology, and will produce an enabling technology that will add value to commercially important polysaccharide materials. The manufacture of these advanced functional materials will use the application of "one-pot" non-toxic yet highly specific chemistry to link bioactive molecules and cells to biomaterials. This methodology will be used to build a library of functionalised polysaccharide materials, with a focus on hydrogels for healing problematic and chronic wounds. After modification by these new high-throughput chemical synthesis methods, the modified biomaterials will be characterised by using a number of spectroscopic techniques, such as Raman, solid state NMR and fluorescence spectroscopies, then screened for their ability to accelerate the healing of chronic wounds. At the end of the project, they will fabricated into manufactured products in conjunction with the industrial partner, ConvaTec UK.