Research Roundup

Dr Robin Bunce, Bye-Fellow and Director of Studies in Politics, coauthored the authorised biography of Diane Abbott MP, published by Biteback Publishing in September 2020. The book was named as a Waterstones Best Politics Book of the Year.

Robin also worked as historical consultant on Mangrove, a film made by Steve McQueen exploring the arrest of the Mangrove Nine, which was screened on the BBC to widespread acclaim in November.

Professor Karen Coats, Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, has published the following papers and chapters this year:

• Cadden, M., Coats, K. and Trites, R. S., Eds.

“Teaching Young Adult Literature” MLA Options for Teaching Series

• “From ‘Death be not Proud’ to Death Be

Not Permanent: Shifting attitudes toward death in contemporary young adult literature”

International Journal of Young Adult Literature, Vol. 1, Issue 1.

• “The Self in Twentieth Century American

Children’s Literature: A Tale of Two Schemas”

Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century

Childhoods Edited by Rachel Conrad and L.

Brown Kennedy, Palgrave, pp. 31-49

• “Genre and Gentrification in theYoung Adult

Novel” Examining Images of Urban Life Edited by Laura M. Nicosia and James F. Nicosia, Myers

Education Press. • “Line Breaks, Page Turns, and Gutters: Formal

Moments of Silence in Children’s Texts”

International Research in Children’s Literature,

Volume 13 Issue Supplement, pp. 127-140.

• Coats, K. (2020) “Diverse Identity in

Anxious Times: Young Adult Literature and

Contemporary Culture.” Transforming Young

Adult Services, 2nd edition. Edited by Anthony

Bernier, ALA Neal-Schuman, pp. 17-26.

Professor Tim Eisen, Professor of Medical Oncology, was Chief Investigator in a large-scale trial of the drug sorafenib which confirmed that the drug should not be used as a treatment straight after surgery for kidney cancer. The results, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in October 2020, confirm that active surveillance, where patients are closely monitored for signs of the disease coming back or getting worse, remains the standard of care for patients at intermediate or high risk of recurrence after surgical removal of their primary cancer.

Director of Studies and Fellow in Education Dr Karen Forbes has published Cross-Linguistic Transfer of Writing Strategies: Interactions between Foreign Language and First Language Classrooms (Published October 2020 by Multilingual Matters).

Aimed at both researchers and practitioners, the book draws on research evidence to explore the ways in which skills and strategies developed in a foreign language classroom in schools can positively influence learning in students’ other languages, including in their first language. It seeks to encourage more joined-up, cross-curricular thinking related to language in schools and includes a step-by-step guide for developing and

implementing a cross-linguistic programme of language learning strategy instruction.

Karen is also a co-author of Language Development and Social Integration of Students with English as an Additional Language (Cambridge University Press, July 2020).

“Given the current context of the experience of migration on schools in England and Europe, and the competing policies and approaches to social integration in schools, there is a need to understand the connection between language development and social integration as a basis for promoting appropriate policies and practices,” Karen explains. “This volume explores the complex relationship between language, education and the social integration of newcomer migrant children in England, through an in-depth analysis of case studies from schools in the East of England.”

Professor Ravi Gupta led the world’s first published validation and implementation study of a rapid point of care nucleic acid test for Covid-19, now used by over 100 NHS Trusts and more than 20 schools. Having started out as a device for monitoring HIV viral load in sub-Saharan Africa, the test is now enabling rapid testing and safe hospital triage during the UK’s second wave of Covid-19.

In a follow-up paper, Ravi’s team demonstrated that point of care nucleic acid testing combined with point of care antibody testing by lateral flow significantly increases diagnostic sensitivity in hospitalised patients.

Ravi has also been continuing his work on HIV, identifying a new way in which the virus has developed resistance to a powerful class of drugs called protease inhibitors.

“Most of our drug resistance work has been in clinic attendees, and I have wanted to know how drug resistance impacts hospitalised patients. I had the opportunity to work with colleagues at the Malawi-Wellcome unit, and we undertook NGS in patients hospitalised for conditions such as TB. We found not only that a significant proportion had unsuppressed HIV in blood, but that there was a strong association between multi-drug resistance and 28 day mortality. The implications of this work are that hospitalisation offers an opportunity to test for viral failure, resistance and intervene.”

Ravi’s role in the treatment of the London Patient, the second person ever to be ‘cured’ of HIV, saw him named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year in September 2020.

Dr Shery Huang, Director of Studies in Physics, published a paper in Science Advances on inflight fibre printing (iFP), a one-step process that integrates conducting fibre production and fibre-tocircuit connection. “Sensors made from small conducting fibres are especially useful for volumetric sensing of fluid and gas in 3D, compared to conventional thin-film techniques, but so far, it has been challenging to print and incorporate them into devices, and to manufacture them at scale,” she explained. “Our fibre sensors are lightweight, cheap, small and easy to use, so they could potentially be turned into home-test devices to allow the general public to perform self-administered tests to get information about their environments.”

Dr Louise Joy, Vice-Principal and Director of Studies in English, has published a new book, Eighteenth-Century Literary Affections. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, the book assesses the mediating role played by ‘affections’ in eighteenth-century contestations about reason and passion, questioning their availability and desirability outside textual form.

Graduate Tutor and Director of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Dr Melanie Keene’s research into ‘Noah’s Ark-aeology and nineteenthcentury children’ was published in September

2020 as part of Rachel Bryant Davies and Barbara Gribling’s Pasts at Play: Childhood encounters with history in British culture, 1750–1914 (Manchester University Press). In Melanie’s chapter she explores how Noah’s Ark could be used as a means of playing, both figuratively and literally, with presents and pasts. Boys, girls, and family groups, she reveals, not only used this particular sacred story as a means of learning scriptural and natural history, but also of safely navigating moral values, social interactions, imaginative conjecture, and even nascent consumerism. She is now working on a new research project about the history of juvenile gardening.

In September, Dr Ros McLellan, Fellow in Education, was appointed Chair of the British Educational Research Association’s Publications Committee. Ros is also a Council member and Trustee of the organisation, the largest learned society for education researchers in the UK. BERA publishes four journals and a range of other publications including the widely deployed BERA Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research.

Ros has published the following this year:

• Jenson, H., Kvalsvig, J. D., Taylor, M., Sibisi, S.,

Whitebread, D. & McLellan, R. (2020) “What counts as learning in play? Uncovering patterns in perceptions of South African early educators”

International Journal of Early Years Education

• Yu, J., & McLellan, R. (2020) “Same mindset, different goals and motivational frameworks:

Profiles of mindset-based meaning systems”.

Contemporary Educational Psychology

• Yu, J., McLellan, R., & Winter, L. (2020) “Which boys and which girls are falling behind? Linking adolescents’ gender role profiles to motivation, engagement and achievement” Journal of Youth & Adolescence

• Li, J., McLellan, R., & Forbes, K. (2020).”

Investigating EFL teachers’ gender stereotypical beliefs about learners: A mixed methods study” Cambridge Journal of Education,

• Winter, L., Hernandez-Torrano, D., McLellan, R.,

Almukhambetova, A., & Brown Hajdukova, E. (2020) “A contextually adapted model of school engagement in Kazakhstan” Current Psychology

Dr Kamal Munir, Fellow and Director of Studies in Management Studies co-wrote a paper with John Amis and Johanna Mair on “The organizational reproduction of inequality” (Academy of Management Annals) which was cited by Forbes magazine as one of five must-read articles on racism. The paper was one of the most-read articles ever in the Academy of Management Annals, the leading management journal.

Kamal also contributed a paper on “Challenging institutional theory’s critical credentials” to Organization Theory, and co-wrote “Holier than thou? Identity buffers and adoption of controversial practices in the Islamic banking category”, published in the Academy of Management Journal.

Director of Homerton Changemakers, Dr Alison Wood, has taken a practical approach to pandemic isolation, co-creating ‘Connections Through Covid’, a reading and discussion group for the Cambridge community, curated with Dr Tyler Shores, Simon Hall and Sheila McDerment. https://www. connectionsthroughcovid.co.uk

She has also developed PAUSE, a virtual Salon for the Homerton community on the big questions made more visible by pandemic conditions, co-curated with Dr Robin Bunce. https://www.changemakers.homerton.cam.ac.uk/ homertonpause

Alison has also contributed to The Hawkwood Circle: Future Ready Education? A high-level seminar series and conference co-hosted by Homerton Changemakers, the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, SusEd, and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership n