In light of what has happened in Manchester the faith communities of Lincoln are coming together tomorrow (Friday 26^thMay) at 1.20 pm, meeting at the Grandstand on Carholme Road after Muslim Friday (Jumu’ah) prayers.

It will be a time for all faiths and none to come together and remember those who have lost their lives in Manchester, pray for those who are in hospital, remember their families, be thankful for the emergency services and community and pray and hope for peace.

The University of Lincoln’s Multi Faith Chaplaincy is supporting this vigil. The University chaplain, Subash Chellaiah, and volunteer chaplains/faith advisors will attend. If staff or students wish to attend, please assemble at the Grandstand at 1.20 pm. Friday prayers will conclude at about 1.30pm.

The vigil will begin once everyone has vacated the hall and will last approximately 15-20 minutes, so the event should conclude by around 2pm. The Multi-Faith Chaplaincy supports this and continues to build good relations across communities in the city of Lincoln.

The University Chaplain is walking to the Grandstand, leaving campus at 12.45 pm from outside the Minerva building main entrance, next to the Student Support centre. Students and staff are welcome to join on the walk or meet at the Grandstand.

You can contact the Chaplain by email: schellaiah@lincoln.ac.uk

The way people with Parkinson’s use their eyes to complete simple tasks in both the real world and working at computers is being investigated by neuroscientists – and the findings could help early diagnosis and improve their quality of life.

Neuroscientists at the University of Lincoln have been investigating markers specific to Parkinson’s, including jerky movements of the eyes – termed “multi-stepping”.

Using specialist software to monitor tiny but significant eye movements when sat at a computer, they found that people with Parkinson’s are more easily distracted, and do not organise their eye movements as efficiently as people without the condition during problem solving and memory tasks.

Researchers are now also using portable eye trackers to examine natural eye movements in real world tasks to improve understanding of how the condition affects day-to-day life.

The ongoing research is being highlighted as part of Parkinson’s Awareness Week (10th – 16th April 2017), which aims to shine a light on the progressive neurological condition. One person in every 500 has Parkinson’s – or around 127,000 people in the UK.

Parkinson’s has no known cause and currently there is no cure. Symptoms are controlled using a combination of drugs, therapies and occasionally surgery. What is known is that people with Parkinson’s do not produce enough of the chemical dopamine because nerve cells in their brain have died; without dopamine, movements become slower, and the loss of nerve cells in the brain causes the symptoms of Parkinson’s to appear.

Lead researcher, Professor Tim Hodgson, who has just been appointed Branch President for the Lincoln and District Branch of Parkinson’s UK for 2017-18, said the findings have the potential to help in the early diagnosis of Parkinson’s and the assessment of cognitive impairments. Such diagnosis tools could also help those with the condition understand the subtle ways symptoms might affect them.

Professor Hodgson, Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln has led the research over the past four years with help from the Lincoln and District branch of the charity Parkinson’s UK.

“Many everyday tasks require us to make links between what we see and where we look with our eyes, so that we are able to switch between different tasks, such as making a cup of tea, reading the newspaper and then answering the telephone,” said Professor Hodgson.

“We also have to use these visual skills to learn new things, such as preparing a new recipe or learning a new game. Because of the changes to the way the brain works in someone with Parkinson’s, they may have problems learning new visuo-spatial tasks over and above the obvious difficulties – for example shaking – the condition causes with movement.

“This has been a long standing research interest off and on since my days as a post-doctoral research fellow at Charing Cross Hospital in London.”

Participants with and without Parkinson’s were asked to perform a computerised eye movement task where they were given a series of rules such as looking to the left when a black dot appeared on the screen, or centralising their gaze when presented with a red stimulus. The eye tracker equipment then monitored how closely they were able to follow the rules, and how much their eyes moved.

The study showed that people with Parkinson’s were slower to learn a new instructions compared with participants without the disease, suggesting that the brain circuits and chemicals affected in people with Parkinson’s play a role in this ability. The study is now also using portable devises to monitor how the eyes work in the real world.

To find out more about Parkinson’s UK or to access support, visit www.parkinsons.org.uk

The University of Lincoln has been named in the UK’s top ten for student satisfaction by postgraduate and international students in the Whatuni Student Choice Awards 2017.

The rankings recognise institutions for excellence in a wide variety of academic and social areas, and Lincoln has been ranked third place nationally for postgraduate student satisfaction and ninth for international student satisfaction.

These latest top ten accolades build on Lincoln’s success in the last National Student Survey and The Times and Sunday Times University Guide 2017, which placed Lincoln in the top ten in the UK for student satisfaction, teaching quality, and student experience. The University of Lincoln has more than 100 nationalities represented on campus, and most postgraduate programmes offer the opportunity for students to undertake placement opportunities.

Elly Sample, Director of Communications, Development and Marketing, at the University of Lincoln, said: “We are delighted to receive such a resounding vote of approval from our students.

“The opinions of our students are very important to us. Indeed, students are engaged at all levels at the University of Lincoln. They sit on the key decision making committees, they help to shape courses, sit on interview panels and have the opportunity to work with leading researchers in the creation of knowledge.”

The Whatuni rankings take into consideration more than 27,000 reviews collected from up to 130 UK universities on a variety of topics. Students at institutions across the UK were asked to rate their overall university experience so far, selecting 1 being ‘not so good’, 5 being ‘awesome’.

Each category in the Whatuni Student Choice Awards is based on the aggregate review score submitted by students at that university, and the number of institutions in each category varies depending on the responses received.

Feedback in the survey of postgraduate students placed Lincoln in third position out of 36 institutions in the UK. International students’ views placed the University in ninth place of 49 institutions.

A psychology professor whose research on childhood development has helped to teach children safe behaviour with dogs has been recognised for her work with a Suffrage Women in Science Award.

Professor Kerstin Meints from the University of Lincoln’s School of Psychology specialises in the study of infant and child development and human-animal interaction. Her interdisciplinary work has seen the creation of language assessment tools as well as educational tools. The latter are designed to help children and parents behave safely with dogs and to recognise when a dog might be distressed, which can in turn lead to a reduction in dog bite incidents.

She has now been presented with the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (MRC LMS) Suffrage Women in Science Award which celebrates women in science for their scientific achievement, their ability to inspire others, and for encouraging women to enter scientific subjects and to stay in those fields.

The award itself is represented through a piece of specially-designed jewellery, a brooch which symbolises the Suffrage movement. The brooch comes in a box with ribbons depicting the three colours of the suffrage movement: green, white and purple. In the UK, those colours were worn by the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst.

Professor Meints, who is the director of the Lincoln Infant and Child Development Lab, will keep the jewellery for the next two years before choosing her own nominee to pass it on to. The aim is to create a network of connected female scientists around the world who help to inspire others to enter science, and to stay.

Professor Meints said: “I feel very honoured to receive this award. I will do my very best to inspire, encourage and mentor women in science and to help them to speak up, be visible and reach their goals.

“For the next two years, and beyond, I will dedicate time to supporting colleagues and students through mentoring. I believe that encouragement and a belief that they can achieve what they aim for is vital to succeed.

“Handing on the Suffrage Science jewellery is a vote of confidence by one female scientist for another, and I look forward to nominating the next awardee in two years’ time.”

Professor Meints was one of twelve scientists to receive an award. They were presented on International Women’s Day 2017, to recognise their scientific achievements and ability to inspire others.

She was nominated by previous winner Professor Susan Condor, a social psychologist at Loughborough University whose work addresses identity and prejudice in England. Professor Condor said: “Professor Kerstin Meints’ BabyLab at Lincoln is pioneering innovative work which brings together research on infant and toddler communicative development with knowledge of animal behaviour. Her research on how young children misinterpret dogs’ facial expressions has led to the development of successful educational tools for dog bite prevention.”

The ceremony was hosted by science communicator Dr Kat Arney and took place at the Royal Society in London. It included a discussion which explored boundaries in science, be those by gender, by nationality or by scientific discipline, with three panellists.

World-first research into a rare family of insects will help scientists understand how the common bush-crickets we are familiar with today developed their highly specialised acoustic functions.

Findings of the new study by sensory and evolutionary biologists at the University of Lincoln, UK, in collaboration with teams in Canada and France, have been published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the new multidisciplinary research sheds light on the very early evolutionary stages of the sound generating organs in ‘orthopterans’ (bush-crickets and their related species) – the largest group of acoustically active insects on the planet.

The study takes a detailed look at a small and rare group of orthopterans, called ‘grigs’, which are the sole remaining living family of an ancient super-family of crickets called ‘haglids’. Until now, most of our scientific knowledge about haglids has been derived from fossilised remains, which are known to date back to the Jurassic period at least.

This new research reveals that grigs, and the way they create sounds using their wings, are of major importance in helping us to understand the early evolutionary stages in the centuries-old lineages of modern field and bush-crickets.

Dr Fernando Montealegre-Z, a Leverhulme grant holder and leading entomologist from the University of Lincoln’s School of Life Sciences, explained: “There are less than 10 species of grigs alive today, nearly 100 species extinct, so our research into these rare animals is very significant as it tells us a great deal about how orthopterans have evolved.

“Our work focuses on the relationship between form and function in the sound-generating organs of the different cricket groups. Both common field crickets and bush-crickets are categorised by the males of the groups producing female-attracting calls by rubbing together specialised regions of their forewings.

Such sound generation is made possible by specially evolved forewing morphologies. By contrast, the forewings of grigs lack most of the specialised features seen in their relatives. In other words, they are more reminiscent of the forms we see in the fossilised remains of now extinct species.”

Previous studies have concluded that grigs are more closely related to bush-crickets than to common field crickets. However, grigs and common crickets both use two symmetrical forewings for creating sound, while bush-crickets have a strong asymmetry between their forewings and use different wing areas for sound production.

By using state-of-the-art laser measurement techniques, the research team found that the sound-producing areas on the wings of grigs are in fact the same as in bush-crickets.
Benedict Chivers, a PhD student funded by the Leverhulme grant at the University of Lincoln, said:

“Our findings suggest that the sound generators in grigs represent an early evolutionary stage in the bush-cricket lineage. Grigs are therefore highly important for our investigations into the early evolutionary stages of a tremendous group diversity.

“We identified vibrating areas on seemingly unspecialised wings and found that these can function as highly tuned resonators – this is particularly interesting because there are multiple examples of similarly ‘unspecialised’ wings within the fossil record, and until now our understanding of how these worked was relatively poor. We now believe that both the morphology and function of grigs’ wings represent a transitional stage between the unspecialised wings of their fossilised ancestors, and the adapted form of modern bush-crickets.

“Thanks to this new research, scientific efforts to discover the vibrational and sound-producing properties of fossilised wings will be significantly improved, so that we can better understand the acoustic world in which now extinct species once lived.”

The researchers also found that there is a ‘mirror area’ on the wings of grigs which is shared by both bush-crickets and field crickets. They believe this finding points to a single ancestral pattern, from which the field and bush-cricket lineages went on to diverge. Following this initial study, more work can now be done to examine the early stages of species development.

One of the UK’s top financial experts has shared details of her career and varied experiences in the latest instalment of the Great Minds guest lecture series at the University of Lincoln.

Charlotte Hogg, who became the first Chief Operating Officer at the Bank of England in 2013, talked about the importance of managing your own career, developing a style of leadership early on and building a strong support group.

The guest lecture was entitled Serendipity or Design?, and took place on 6^th March 2017 at the University’s main Brayford Pool campus. The talk was followed by a Q&A with  a panel of five talented students.

Ms Hogg started her career at the Bank of England, and held posts at Santander UK, McKinsey & Company, Morgan Stanley, Goldfish Bank, and Experian UK & Ireland before moving back to the Bank of England, the central bank of the UK.

“Lincoln is my home town and I care very much about our education here in the East Midlands and its contribution to growth and employment. The University of Lincoln has played a transformational role here, and it is a great pleasure to be part of the Great Minds lecture series,” said Ms Hogg, who has a BA in Economics and History from Oxford, and is one of 10 to 15 Kennedy Memorial Trust Scholars from Harvard University chosen each year from the UK.

Ms Hogg is a member of the Finance, Audit and Remuneration Committees of Oxford University Press and is a trustee and former chair of First Story Ltd. She was also a former Director of BBC Worldwide, and a former board member of Partnership with Children in New York, USA.

The University of Lincoln’s Great Minds guest lecture series aims to provide inspirational insights into different aspects of society – from the entertainment world to elite sport – for school and college students in Years 11, 12 and 13. A limited number of places are also available to the public, as well as staff and students.  Admission is free but booking is essential.

The aim is to inspire and encourage thoughtful conversation about careers, industries and disciplines alongside showcasing some of the diverse research and activities that take place within the University.

Recent Great Minds speakers have included BBC Trustee Suzanna Taverne, rugby sporting great Rory Underwood, Lord Victor Adebowale CBE, Chancellor of the University of Lincoln and a cross bench member of the House of Lords, and BBC Autumnwatch presenter Chris Packham.

To book a place at the Great Minds guest lecture visit www.lincoln.ac.uk/events, email events@lincoln.ac.uk or phone 01522 837100. Priority booking will be given to groups from UK schools and colleges.