RESEARCH ROUNDUP

r Stephen Burgess is group leader at the MRC Biostatistics Unit and senior scientist in the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit. He was recently granted a Career Development Award by the Wellcome Trust.

The award will enable the continuation of Stephen’s work on methodological development and applied analyses in Mendelian randomization, the use of genetic variation to untangle questions of cause and effect.

Stephen’s proposal is to extend and apply methods for Mendelian randomization beyond answering questions about the validity of risk factors as targets for disease reduction, and towards translational questions about the nature of causal pathways. The aim is to provide focused evidence that can inform policymakers and drug developers to identify the best targets for intervention, the best time to intervene, and who would most benefit from intervention. The work will integrate high-dimensional data from crosssectional studies, as well as longitudinal data on traits that vary over time.

Stephen said: “Healthcare research is intrinsically collaborative in nature, as it straddles natural sciences and social sciences. We rely on insight from both domains: to understand the biological mechanisms to which our findings relate, and how the findings can be applied to improve public health or clinical practice. I am truly thankful to the Wellcome Trust for funding our work, which will provide insights to guide the drug development process. Genetic data have already provided many clues as to why some people are more susceptible to certain diseases than others.

DOur work exploits these findings to highlight risk factors and biological mechanisms that can be altered to reduce disease risk.”

Dr Mesele Araya is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge –Research for Equitable Access and Learning –REAL CENTER. He has a PhD in Human Capital Development from the University of Bergamo (Italy) and an MSc in Economics from Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia). He carries out research in education and learning with the application of mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative methods) in the Global South. He has also been teaching at Addis Ababa University since 2015. He has published widely on education and learning, poverty and inequality reduction, labour market and skill development. Some of his publications are available at Google Scholar Citations.

Mesele outlines his current research project, Understanding Learning Losses during the Pandemic in Ethiopia: Insights from Cohort Comparison.

This research aims to quantify the learning losses due to school closure from COVID-19 by comparing the learning level differences of two cohorts of grade 4 students who took math test exams before and after the pandemic using data from the RISE Ethiopia Project.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the education sector in unprecedented ways and forced over 1.6 billion students to be out of school within a short period of its occurrence (UNESCO, 2021). Like any other country worldwide, Ethiopia closed schools following the first case in mid-March 2020. The national school closure forced more than 26 million learners to stay home for almost 31 weeks (UNESCO, 2021), accounting for more than two-thirds of an academic year’s loss. For a significant proportion of Ethiopian pupils, learning during school closures was almost nonexistent despite the government’s efforts to create educational programs via national television and radio stations during the school closures (Kim et al., 2021a). School closures and lack of access to supporting education during this time meant potential learning losses for many pupils, particularly those with limited access to remote education materials. Such school closures are also expected to exacerbate the pre-existing inequalities and capacity deficits to remote learning materials (Angrist et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2021b). Several studies have indicated that COVID-19 has already resulted in learning losses in many countries, especially among the poorest and most disadvantaged groups, due to limited access to educational materials at home. A study in Indonesia indicates that pupils have already lost 11 points on the PISA reading scale due to the four-month school closure period from March to July 2020 (Yarrow, Masood & Afkar, 2020). Grade 4 pupils in South Africa also experienced losses of between 62 and 81 per cent of a year of Learning (Ardington et al., 2021), while pupils in the UK lost a third of their expected learning during the COVID-19 school closures (Major, Eyles & Machin, 2021). Similar to these countries, it is expected that the school closure in Ethiopia might result in learning losses and challenges for pupils to catch up, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, when schools reopened in October 2020. Besides staying out of school for 31 weeks, pupils were also allowed to promote automatically to the next grade level with only 45 days of catch-up classes (MoE, 2020). For example, those attending Grade 3 before the pandemic were automatically promoted to Grade 4 after school reopened in October 2020. Yet, there are limited studies presenting results for gains in learning and progress over the school year after schools reopened in Ethiopia.

Dr Amelia Drew, Junior Research Fellow in Theoretical Physics and Director of Studies in Natural Sciences, published papers on cosmic strings and numerical relativity in Physical Review D and Classical Quantum Gravity. She delivered research seminars at, and visited, the University of Helsinki, the Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie, l’Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and the University of Oxford (remote), and attended conferences in Jena, Paris and Braga. She received an honourable mention for the GWIC-Bracchini Thesis Prize. She organised and chaired the event, ‘Diversity in DAMTP,’ showcasing research from women and non-binary researchers in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and produced a video on `Mathematics – Evolution of Computing: “The Future of Computers”’ for British Science Week 2022. She also hosted a meeting of the GRChombo coding collaboration in Cambridge.

Homerton and THIS Institute Junior Research Fellow

Dr Peter Hartley works as a Clinical Academic Physiotherapist in stroke rehabilitation at Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

His clinical research focuses on improving rehabilitation outcomes for older adults, and adults who have had a stroke, and on understanding and changing physical activity behaviour of patients in hospital.

In 2022 Peter received an NIHR Development and Skills Enhancement Award hosted by THIS Institute, which he will use to study the development, evaluation and adoption of complex health interventions.

As a visiting researcher at Trinity College Dublin, his other research is concerned with understanding the longitudinal trajectories and determinants of physical health in older adults.

Homerton Research

Associate Dr Dmitrii Sergeev, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie

Individual European Fellow at the Faculty of Education, has completed the first stage of his two-year project on ‘Evolving Attitude Toward Single Motherhood in the UK and Russia’. The findings of this stage were discussed at “White Ink, Red Flag” SEEMS (Slavic and Eastern European Maternal Studies) Symposium at the University of Exeter and online “Fostering Dialogue, Teaching Children’s Literature at University” Conference at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Linked to this, Dmitrii published an article on cultural code of single motherhood in post-war Russia in the November issue of Slavonica Journal. He also gave a series of talks and presentations at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature and Knowledge, Power, and Politics research group at the Faculty of Education.

Dr Priscilla Day-Walsh is a Next Generation Fellow at the Centre for Trophoblast Research working in the Departments of Obstetrics & Gynaecology.

Dr Day-Walsh’s key research interests are in understanding how the human gut microbiome can be utilised as a novel tool for predicting, preventing and treating pregnancy complications and their associated morbidities and mortalities. In particular Dr Day-Walsh’s research aims to provide a mechanistic understanding of how the maternal gut microbiota affect maternalplacental-fetal physiology and the impact this has on pregnancy outcomes and health across the life-span.

Dr Day-Walsh believes that understanding the microbiome is key to overcoming some of global medical challenges such as antibiotic resistance, communicable and non-communicable diseases. To this end she has been instrumental in developing methodological approaches for investigating and analysing microbial metabolites in biological samples.

Her PhD at the University of Southampton which was funded by The Gerald Kerkut Charitable Trust provided mechanisms of nutrient transport and metabolism across the human placenta and the impact of maternal factors such as body composition and smoking on placental nutrient transport and metabolism.

Dr Day-Walsh is a Visiting Research Scientist at the Quadram Institute where she also co-founded the Quadram Institute’s Postdoctoral Society (QIPs) and the Norwich Research Park African Initiative. Dr Day-Walsh is also a member of the Cambridge Reproduction Society, Physiological Society, Cambridge Metabolic Networking and the European Atherosclerosis Society n

Paintings for These Times

Philip Stephenson, Emeritus Fellow in Education

The Moravian Connection Continues

This academic year I have had the pleasure of continuing the College’s relationship with the Department of Art Education in Palacky University, Olomouc. This beautiful baroque institution in the east of the Czech Republic has been a regular port of call for academic and social engagement since my first visit back in the Spring of 2014.

This year I have had two visits. The first in August saw me working with art education undergraduates in the gallery spaces of the Olomouc Museum of Modern Art. Modelling engagement strategies aimed at developing young learners’ visual literacy, the photograph shows me discussing a work by Czech post-modernist painter Jap Stam with a group of students.

In December, I returned to present a paper at the Culture, Art and Education conference to an international audience of delegates. Based on some recent work on how we can develop children’s understanding of women’s place in Georgian England through interrogating the portraits of Thomas Gainsborough, the paper considered the wider issue of explicit and implicit misogyny in the Western art canon. Exploring how working with paintings can lead young learners towards a clearer understanding of women’s place in society through their representation in visual art throughout the last eight hundred years. Many of the paintings in the Fitzwilliam Museum collection provide compelling evidence of the patriarchal presentation of women, from the obvious male gaze nudes of Titian to the more subtle but equally damaging representation of women in family portraits and other domestic scenarios.

The second symposium was in the Flemish city of Ghent. The two-day conference focused on the newly restored Lam Gods (the Ghent Altarpiece) by the Van Eyck brothers. It is a remarkable multipaneled polyptych that now restored is a vison to behold. The central panel depicts the moment in the book of Revelation 21–22 when all the great and the good enter the New Jerusalem which represents the most complete explanation available to Christians of what heaven will be like.

From all four corners of the central panel come humanity: groups of martyrs – both male and female, saints, Old Testament patriarchs, pious pagans, apostles and popes. They all process towards the Eucharistic Lamb, who stands on the altar at the centre of the image. Everything is depicted in meticulous detail and thanks to the restoration process this is a great enhancement on what it looked like before.

Meanwhile, I have continued with my work in the galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum back here in Cambridge. Weekly sessions in the study room perusing the archive folders of the paintings in the gallery inform the expanding selection of works I can draw upon for my art-historical tours. I should add that I am always happy to guide any Fellows, Staff, Retired Members and Alumni who happen to be interested and they simply need to make contact with me at ps233@cam.ac.uk n