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Our understanding of Holocene climatic complexity is compounded by the interactions between humans and environment, and a lack of high-resolution chronologies for proxy records of landscape response and human activity. Improvements in dating are sought to facilitate the integration of responses in proxy records to stressors. Lake sediments constitute valuable records of landscape sensitivity, documenting the complex interplay between climate change, human activity, and landscape evolution. The site of Diss Mere (Norfolk, UK), offers a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of Holocene Britain owing to the high chronological resolution of its annually-laminated sediments and high sedimentation rates. This PhD is built around two key approaches. Firstly, cryptotephra analyses of the highly resolved Diss Mere record, which act as precise, stratigraphic isochrones, tying the sediments to calendar time. The well-dated, Diss record, thus, provides an ideal testing ground for palaeoclimatic, palaeoenvironmental, and archaeological studies. To achieve this, the second key approach uses high-resolution palynological data, combined with existing proxy data. This is applied to key time slices, along a gradient of human activity, from the Mesolithic to the Roman period, coinciding with rapid climatic transitions: the 8.2ka BP event, the 2.8 ka BP event, and the Roman warm period.

The aim of the proposed research project would be to write a novel provisionally entitled The Climate of London. The novel would attempt to represent London in terms of issues of race and class, touching on questions of Empire and post-colonial migration, security and terrorism, and the environment. I am intending to use weather and climate as a way of organising and arching over these various issues. I have written three previous novels, including The Last King of Scotland (about Idi Amin), Ladysmith (the Anglo-Boer War) and Zanzibar (al-Qaida in Africa), which are outlined in more detail in my CV, and which all to a greater or lesser extent deal with issues of post-colonialism. I am currently completing a novel, entitled Turbulence, about a pacifist weather forecaster who is called on to do a forecast for D-day.\n\nI would now like to focus my attention on post-colonial issues in London fiction, as seen through climate and terrorism. Conrad and James have given fictional accounts of 1880's anarchism in the city, from which I believe there is much to be learned for writers hoping to do the same with religious-based terrorism in our own time. I would like to link these researches to the ethnicity-aware accounts of London that have already been given by Selvon, Smith and Levy. The novel resulting from these researches would, I hope, be an example of a type of writing that avoided the fixed point of view and corresponding impasse often associated with identity politics. This is where the climate and weather issues come in: I had the notion, which still needs further unpacking, of a novel that primarily saw London as a climate, or a microclimate, to which all its inhabitants were equally subject. This is the main factor I would hope to add to Conrad and James, Levy and Smith.\n\nOne reason I want to write the novel now is that what is loosely termed eco-criticism - literacy criticism that locates the value in a work in environmental terms could be one definition - is beginning to take hold in the academy and on the books pages of newspapers. The time is right for a novel that really exploited the new work being done by critics and writers such as Jonathon Bate and Robert McFarlane. There is knowledge and understanding in the critical apparatus, and to a lesser extent in poetry and non-fiction, but in fiction at least, there is little new material; it is a situation I would hope to change in writing and publishing The Climate of London.\n\nReaders would gain from the novel an insight into conditions in London at the start of the Twenty-first century as well as an understanding of the historical and literacy background to the current situation in London. I do not have a contract for such a novel but fully expect as heretofore that the work will be published by Faber and Faber. It may be that it also becomes a feature film, as with my first novel The Last King of Scotland, which is due out in summer 2006.

Experimental particle physics addresses some of the fundamental questions about the structure and behaviour of the Universe at the level of the smallest particles of matter, the quarks and the leptons, and the forces acting between them. In this project we are contributing to the preparation of the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that will begin taking data in 2009. We have constructed and commissioned electronic systems and the software that drives them. From 2009 onwards we will be analysing the data as it becomes available. In particular we will be searching the data for evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, one of the key missing elements of the Standard Model of particle physics at present, and for supersymmetric particles and other exotic phenomena, that are expected to exist. We are also planning to understand better the properties of the top quark and the structure of the proton.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.