Insigneo Newsletter - February 2024

Welcome to our monthly Insigneo newsletter!  

Our monthly e-newsletter keeps you up to date with events, funding, success stories and information. We hope you will find it useful! 

Insigneo Showcase 2024: registrations are open!

Exciting fundamental science and beyond: from innovative research to translation and commercialisation.

This full day event is an opportunity for our members, funding agencies, regulatory agencies, industrial colleagues, and other academic groups in the UK to meet and see first-hand the innovative research produced by our Institute.

The day will feature:

• Sessions from our five research themes:  Biomaterials / Biomechanics / Cell engineering; Computational modelling in medicine; Imaging life; Smart devices and sensors; and Healthcare data / AI;
• Early Career Researcher presentations – hear about emerging research with perspectives from the next generation of researchers;
• Poster exhibition - We are pleased to offer a prize for the best poster for each research theme and a best student poster prize sponsored by the Society of Chemical Industry. 
• Networking opportunities with industry, funders, academics and clinicians.

Abstract submission:
The deadline for abstract submissions for the poster display is 8 April 2024. To submit an abstract you will need to register for the Insigneo Showcase. You will be asked if you wish to submit an abstract as part of this process.

South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub unveils Google investment to tackle health inequalities and drive economic growth

On the 1 February, the South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub unveiled investment in health tech research and training by Google, to help tackle inequalities in the region and drive economic growth.

Led by the University of Sheffield, in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University and alongside the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, the £4 million Digital Health Hub will use the investment to fund research, digital skills training scholarships and apprenticeships for local students and businesses.

As part of this, the South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub will work with Google on a series of pioneering research opportunities. The first of these - the PUMAS study - aims to understand whether Pixel smartphone sensors that detect light, radar, and electrical signals from the heart could aid the detection of common conditions such as hypertension, high cholesterol and chronic kidney disease. Early detection of these conditions could help people to make informed lifestyle choices which could slow down and even in some cases prevent their progression. 

The first study of its kind, looking at how digital technologies could transform the way that people interact with their health, has the potential to save lives, improve health outcomes and free up valuable NHS resources.

South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub innovation pipeline webinar

On 25 January, our South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub held a webinar to provide information about its innovation pipeline funding.  Insigneo research theme director for healthcare data and AI, Professor Tim Chico, joined the panel to listen to ideas and answer questions.

The innovation pipeline will provide in-depth tailored training to Digital Innovators working on “real” problems. This pipeline will guide the innovators from ideation through to pilot funding.  

The hub will hold regular ‘Call for problems’, where applicant Innovators will receive support clarifying and defining the problems they identify could be solved with Digital Health Data.  They will support project teams and train them in Digital Health, providing the most promising ideas with initial project funding to help take these towards potential commercialisation.

Following the webinar, the next stage will be to help innovators form multidisciplinary teams through an in-person ideas-development invitational sandpit hosted at the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) in Sheffield.

Tackling health inequalities with digital technologies to help people live longer, healthier lives

Opinion piece by Professor Ashley Blom, Vice-President and Head of the Faculty of Health at the University of Sheffield 

Originally published in the Yorkshire Post

South Yorkshire has some of the worst health outcomes in the country. Life expectancy lags behind the national averages, and people are not only living shorter lives – they are living those lives in poorer health.  Cancer outcomes are the third worse in England, and our region faces challenges in access to care and poor health infrastructure. Without urgent action, health inequality gaps will only widen. 

Of course, the factors that lead to these inequalities are complex, and there is no silver bullet. That is why it is so important that universities, GPs, hospitals and businesses come together to share their expertise and new innovations that can help people live healthier lives for longer.

One of the things we’re looking at in South Yorkshire is how we can use cutting-edge data analytics, AI and mobile health monitoring to diagnose diseases quicker and make treatments more targeted and effective.

Blog: AI Measures Kidney Size six times faster than humans

Artificial intelligence (AI) once felt like it had a home only in science fiction stories, but there’s no doubt it’s now becoming an integral part of our world. The potential threats and opportunities of AI to our future made multiple headlines in 2023. Yet this powerful technology can provide us with many benefits, from improved healthcare, to safer cars and workplaces, to better products and services.

In this blog, we hear from Insigneo members Dr Jonathan Taylor and Professor Albert Ong about an AI program they have developed to accurately measure kidney size.

Local school pupils participate in hands-on activities that show how science benefits patients

Insigneo members from the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the Sano Centre for Computational Medicine gave students an introduction to magnetic resonance imaging with a collaborative virtual reality (VR) experience at a medical physics outreach event at Firth Court.

One of the VR demonstrators was Kuba Chrobocinski, a PhD student both at Sano (under the supervision of Dr Przemysław Korzeniowski) and Sheffield University (supervisor Dr John Fenner). Dr Fenner highly appreciated the active part Kuba played in the event, especially in the process of testing collaborative VR.

ECR development opportunity: take part in the Advanced Biomaterials Seminars

Our Biomaterials Biomechanics and Cell Biology research theme would like to invite you to the Advanced Biomaterials Seminars (ABS) in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

ABS is a friendly environment where students and academics can practice speaking, listening and presenting skills, so all types of presentations are acceptable! We have also had various guest talks from academics from different universities, from industry and from people who decided to take a different career path from their engineering background!

Presentations are usually 10 minutes each, followed by 5 minutes of questions. Currently, most presentations have focused on biomaterials and their applications, however we would love to expand and take talks fitting into the Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Cell Biology theme.

We meet once a week, on alternate Thursdays and Fridays and afterwards we welcome attendees to a pub/event, where people can sit down and discuss presentations in a more relaxed environment. We would love to work with Insigneo members as we believe this would allow us to provide:

• More career support and opportunities to students
• A wider audience, so people can practice speaking in front of more people and so we have more talks with a larger scope!

The next seminar will take place at 9 Mappin Street, Seminar Room G14 (48), at our usual time of 4-5pm. There is also the option to watch online via the google calendar invite, if you can't make it in person. Please contact Elliot Amadi for access: enamadi1@sheffield.ac.uk

Speakers: 

• Vanessa Singleton 'The working mind of a technician', 
• Mahendra Raut: 'From Curiosity to Discovery: My Research Odyssey', 
• Spencer Moore: 'IntegraBrain: Towards a Multimodal Neural Interface for Seizure Detection and Suppression'

To join the ABS mailing list and hear about upcoming talks or to apply to give a talk complete this form: ABSeminars - Google Forms

VPH2024: call for abstracts now open

The next VPH conference will take place in Stuttgart (Germany) on 4-6 September 2024 and will focus on: "Data-driven Simulation Technologies for Clinical Decision Making".  Submission deadline: 29 February 2024

NIHR Sheffield BRC and CRF Showcase - Abstract Submissions Open

Do you want to present at the upcoming NIHR Sheffield BRC and CRF Showcase?

 The NIHR Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and Clinical Research Facility (CRF) are proud to present their joint showcase event, highlighting the latest in medical research and clinical trials happening across Sheffield.

We are keen to showcase the breadth of work taking place across our Sheffield infrastructures and have multiple opportunities for our researchers, delivery teams and support staff to present their work.

We now welcome abstract submissions for the following:

• Posters (up to 20 spaces available)
• Presentations (timings tbc, likely 20-30 minutes)
• Flash Talks (60 seconds, 1 slide)

Click here to submit your abstract

Deadline: Monday 4 March 2024

Yorkshire Cancer Research Sheffield Pioneers Fund grant success

Dr Dawn Walker (Department of Computer Science) in collaboration with Professor Zi-Qiang Lang (Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering), Professor Craig Murdoch (Division of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health) and Professor Helen Colley (Division of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health) have been successful in securing a Yorkshire Cancer Research Sheffield Pioneers Fund grant (£496,656) to develop electric impedance spectroscopy for early diagnosis of oral cancer’. 

This study aims to use simulation and machine-learning techniques, alongside tissue-engineered constructs of oral tissues, to inform an automated diagnosis system for early-stage oral cancer based on electric impedance spectroscopy measurements.

Dr Dawn Walker stated that, “receiving these funds will help us develop the scientific knowledge underpinning cutting edge Artificial Intelligence approaches that will allow non-invasive diagnosis and screening of oral cancers and oral lesions that have the potential to turn cancerous. Oral cancer is an increasing problem in our region and so improved early diagnosis and screening would make a significant impact to the people of Yorkshire."

Promotions

Congratulations to the following Insigneo members who have recently been promoted:

• Dr Jen Lewis - Division of Population Health, School of Medicine and Population Health
• Professor Helen Colley - Division of Clinical Dentistry, School of Medicine and Population Health
• Professor Enrico Dall'Ara - Division of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health
• Professor Alex Rothman - Division of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health
• Professor Chris Toseland - Division of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health
  Professor Andy Swift - Division of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health
• Professor Jenny Walsh - Division of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health

• Dr Dana Damian - Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

If we have missed any promotions and you would like to be included in a future edition please let us know!

Unleash Your Data and Software 2024 funding awards

Congratulations also to Insigneo members, Dr Laura Wiggins from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Dr Rodrigo Siqueira de Souza from the AMRC and Department of Psychology, who are recipients of funding from Unleash Your Data and Software 2024, a funding competition for research students and staff at the University of Sheffield to apply for an award of up to £5000 for a project to make their research data or software more visible and reusable.

The funding competition was open to all researchers at the University of Sheffield, including postgraduate research students and those in research-related roles.

• Laura Wiggins - Development of a TopoStats training program for improved user accessibility
• Rodrigo Siqueira de Souza - Walking again: improving on sensory feedback platforms aimed at neuroprosthetics

We would like to introduce some of our new members who have joined the Insigneo Institute recently.

Find out more about Insigneo membership and our members here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/membership 

Before my PhD I completed an MSc at Loughborough University where I completed a major project on assessing trabecular adaptation over space through deep learning. I then went on to work at a medical device startup that was working to help patients have an accessible way to monitor asthma.

In particular, I am interested in how the evolution of host defences and their coevolution with parasite infectivity feedback to, and are driven by, the underlying population dynamics. My research interests include modelling pathogen-cell interactions and pharmacokinetics.

After gaining a BSc in Maths & Philosophy (Durham) and an MRes in Mathematical Biology (York), I studied for my PhD in the Animal & Plant Sciences department at Sheffield under the supervision of Prof. Mike Boots. Postdocs in Sheffield (Animal & Plant Sciences) and Exeter (Biosciences) followed. In 2013 I returned to Sheffield but across the road in the School of Mathematics & Statistics as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. In September 2016 I was appointed a lecturer.

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I am a first year PhD student belonging to the Integrated Musculoskeletal Biomechanics (IMSB) group, supervised by Dr. Lingzhong Guo and Prof. Enrico Dall'Ara. My research interest is to develop deep learning-based surrogate models for spine reduced-order finite element models to improve the computational efficiency of traditional finite element calculations. 

Dr Chen specializes in the interdisciplinary field of medical image and signal analysis using machine learning, with a focus on enhancing healthcare through advanced AI tools. These tools are designed for high-precision early disease diagnosis, risk prediction, and treatment planning.

Her previous work includes the development of data-efficient, robust AI algorithms for medical image segmentation, aimed at improving the adaptability of AI in various unseen scenarios without the need for manual labeling and model retraining. Her doctoral thesis, entitled "Improving the domain generalization and robustness of neural networks for medical imaging," was featured in ComputerVisionNews magazine in 2022.

Recently, Dr. Chen has concentrated on developing robust, adaptive, and explainable machine learning strategies for healthcare, particularly in multi-modality learning (e.g., image, signal, text report, knowledge graph analysis).

Prior to joining Sheffield, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the BioMedIA research group at Imperial College London and The Oxford BioMedIA group at the University of Oxford, in 2022 and 2023, respectively. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Advanced Computing from Imperial College London in 2022. During her time at Imperial, she worked closely with Prof. Daniel Rueckert and Dr. Wenjia Bai, on numerous projects with cardiac imaging. Chen has also accumulated valuable industrial experience on AI for healthcare. She held positions as a research scientist at Infervision Inc in Beijing in 2017 and later as a part-time research scientist at HeartFlow, UK in 2022.  

Her research spans a variety of projects applying AI to cardiac, brain, and prostate imaging.  She is the winner of the Multi-sequence Cardiac MR Segmentation Challenge (2019) and the Fetal Brain Tissue Annotation and Segmentation Challenge (FeTA) in 2022. She has also organized several workshops and challenges in the field, such as the workshop on Data Augmentation, Labeling, and Imperfections (DALI) at MICCAI 2023, and the CMRxMotion challenge at STACOM 2022. She has been awarded as a MICCAI outstanding reviewer in 2023 and a Gold-level distinguished reviewer by IEEE TMI (2020-2022). So far, Dr. Chen has published over 30 papers in top-tier conferences and journals. Her work in deep learning for medical image analysis has garnered more than 2,000 citations, earning her an h-index of 20.

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We are working to develop a model of the cardiovascular system, with particular emphasis on the coronary arteries, for predictive and diagnostic benefit in coronary artery disease. My research is mostly theoretically based, although we will also be looking at this patient group in the exercise state.

Presently, he is working with Professor Damien Lacroix and Professor Enrico Dall’Ara on the METASTRA project that aims to transform fracture risk assessment in cancer patients with vertebral metastasis.

Dr Ghosh completed his bachelors with a major in mechanical engineering from the National Institute of Technology  Agartala, India (2011-2015) and a PhD (2017-2023) in bone biomechanics and computational mechanobiology from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. During his PhD with Professor Debabrata Chakraborty and Dr Souptick Chanda, he investigated the influence of implant textures on osseointegration followed by development of a neural network-genetic algorithm based pipeline towards design optimization of those textures for better secondary stability of the implant.

Thereafter, he joined Orthopaedic Biomechanics and Implant Design (OBID) group as a Postdoc (2022-2023) at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India with Dr Kaushik Mukherjee where he worked in a consortium project “add-Bite” towards design and development of lattice-structured temporomandibular joint (TMJ) implants for Indian patients suffering from TMJ ankylosis.

His future research interests are primarily translational and interdisciplinary in nature focussing towards the areas at the intersection of machine learning, biomechanics and healthcare.

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Prior to this, I worked as a software engineer for 11 years, working for healthcare clients such as The Cochrane Collaboration and Bipolar UK.

My research is focused on meta-learning, multimodality in AI systems, evidence-based medicine, and child and family health! Ultimately, I'm looking to build interpretable and safe AI models in healthcare.

During that time, I was awarded with two postdoctoral fellowships: i) American Heart Association and ii) UCLA Iris Cantor/Women’s Health Center Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Later on, I worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey between 2018 and 2020 and then joined the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Northumbria University, Newcastle in 2020 August as an Assistant Professor.  

I joined the Information School at the University of Sheffield in November 2023.

My current research interests include bioinformatics, computational biology, statistics, image processing, and machine learning. More specifically, for example, I employ machine learning and statistical methods to predict molecular subtypes in a cancer cohort (e.g. PAM50 subtypes in breast cancer) using multimodal data including functional genomics and histopathological tissue images.

I also have experience and interest in studying cardiovascular disorders (e.g. coronary artery diseases, Type-II diabetes, fatty liver disease) via integrating different omics types (e.g. GWAS, transcriptomics).

Methodologically/computationally my recent interest is use of explainable AI, attention mechanism, and deep learning models in my research.

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 I am interested in the role of glia in neurodegeneration. 

Outside the lab, I am an active volunteer in outreach, public engagement, and fundraising events.

Prior to that I completed my PhD in Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology here at the University of Sheffield. This was funded by the EPSRC. My thesis was entitled 'Biologically plausible models of sequential action selection', and focused on understanding the brain systems and mechanisms involved in human routine action.

In my adopted field of medical statistics and health research, I try to draw on my background in computational neuroscience and its methods to support my research. I am particularly interested in methodologies for making effective use of large routine health datasets to improve healthcare provision, most notably in the field of urgent and emergency care.  I have a particular interest in this approach for supporting research in situations where standard clinical trials may not be possible or feasible.

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Towards the end of my time there, I completed a part-time MSc in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering at UCL, which led to me leaving Great Ormond Street Hospital to undertake a PhD at UCL. My PhD examined alterations to the fluid dynamics of blood flow in the aortic root as a result of aortic heart valve pathologies or replacement of the native aortic valve with various types of surgical or transcatheter prosthetic valves, primarily using a laser imaging technique called ‘Particle Image Velocimetry’ (PIV).

I continued my research at UCL after graduation, working as a Research Associate for 4 years, initially investigating new materials for prosthetic heart valve leaflets, and later adding the study of the effect of portable air cleaners upon aerosol migration in hospitals to my responsibilities.

My work at the University of Sheffield involves setting up a PIV lab in order to study blood flow in brain aneurysms, and continues an area of research that I have been involved with for many years – the consilience of different research approaches, in this case in vitro and in silico work, in order to strengthen and extend the findings from each technique.

My master's dissertation focused on spatially modelling the cell's response to hypoxia using agent-based modelling. My research continues this theme by using agent-based modelling to simulate the regulation of mitochondrial dynamics in response to energy stress. I will also explore deep learning instance segmentation to identify mitochondria and their properties within images used for agent-based model training.

I am interested in the use of biological digital twins for research and personalised medicine. As such, through my research project I aim to produce a new tool for investigating the mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases.

I maintain an interest in CFD blood flow and hope to make my first publication, based on my dissertation, within the coming months.

I am a first year PhD student, part of the Integrated Musculoskeletal Biomechanics (IMSB) group and supervised by Professor Claire Brockett and Professor Enrico Dall’Ara. My project is focused on repairing the ankle syndesmosis. Currently, there are no treatment algorithms for syndesmosis sprains or fractures. I will be using both experimental and computational methods with the intention of developing the best treatment procedures for these injuries.

I am also beginning an engineering podcast series where I hope to speak to as many Insigneo members as possible, to promote and learn about the exciting work they are doing! If you are interested in getting involved please email me at: kjrobson1@sheffield.ac.uk

During the master programme, I was also a research intern working on acoustic scene analysis (classification of environmental sounds) in the Machine Intelligence for Natural Interfaces Group mentored by Asif and Thomas. 

At present, my research is centred around the application of mobile sensing techniques, leveraging microphones and other cheap sensors (accelerometer), to monitor and diagnose sleep disorders, with a particular emphasis on sleep-related breathing disorders such as sleep apnea and arousal. In this pursuit, I employ signal processing and machine learning methodologies to optimise and elevate the diagnostic capabilities of these techniques.

Her current research focuses on haemodynamics and multi-scale modelling for personalised cardiovascular healthcare. Together with academic and clinical collaborators, she recently developed a three-dimensional multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model capable of simulating many vesicles in a single framework, comparing favourably with the community’s common practice of simulating vesicles and the bulk flow using multiple techniques. She is also keen in advancing techniques for digital cardiovascular twins to improve diagnosis and treatment plans, through lumped parameter models, uncertainty quantification and the identification of personalisable parameters.

Xu obtained a BEng degree in Automation from Xidian University, China, and then an MSc in Control Systems Engineering (with Distinction) and a PhD in Nonlinear Systems and Cellular Maps, both in the University of Sheffield (TUoS). She worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at TUoS and the University of Southampton, on mathematical and computational modelling of complex systems and processes, followed by the positions of Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and Interim Deputy Head of Department for the Department of Engineering and Maths at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), before returning to TUoS as a Senior Lecturer in Oct 2023.

She has extensive academic leadership experience and served as the Interim Deputy Head of a large department, a SHU Early Career Researcher Representative, an MSc Course Leader and a Postgraduate Research Tutor for engineering MPhil/PhD programs, achieving outstanding PRES overall student satisfactions which were ranked 1^st in the engineering sector, in both 2020-2021 and 2021-2022.

She has supervised six PhD students to completion and has won eight Sheffield Hallam University or College awards for inspirational teaching, inspirational research supervising and outstanding academic advising.

Research Interests:

•  Multi-scale and multi-component lattice Boltzmann simulations of blood flow
• Compartmental cardiovascular model for personalised healthcare
• Uncertainty quantification and parameter identification
• Nonlinear dynamics, control and state estimation
• Cellular automata and swarm robotics 

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Demet is a research associate and works on EPSRC-funded project SATURN (Supporting Active Travel Using Road-lighting at Night).

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Cass Zhixue Zhao is a lecturer in Natural Language Processing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.  

Her research is centered around responsible, trustworthy, and sustainable AI, with a specific focus on fine-grained aspects such as interpretability, reasoning, hallucination, and compression modeling. 

Before that, she was a postdoc researcher, working on feature attribution methods to provide faithful model explanations. In an earlier role as a research assistant within the same department, she worked on an NIHR-funded NLP projects for systematic reviews of public health research. Her P.h.D studied transfer learning for hate speech detection. 

Cass looks forward to engaging in interdisciplinary research and applying NLP techniques to various domains. Currently, she is on the lookout for highly motivated PhD students. If you are interested, please reach out to her directly.

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Do you have news to share with us?

If you would like us to include information and/or events to this newsletter please email: info@insigneo.org (the newsletter will be issued during the 2nd week of the month, excluding January and August). 

Insigneo members - please let us know when your students are graduating so that we can celebrate their success!

Please ensure that you submit items for inclusion with a minimum of one week's notice.

Guest Lectures, Conferences & Seminars

We will share a link to our Online Training Opportunities document here each month.

Insigneo events

20  February
Insigneo seminar: Can animal learning inspire better machine learning?

26 February
Joint Insigneo Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Cell Engineering theme/Mechanobiology seminar
Speaker: Katelyn Spillane, King's College London
Host: Helen Matthews
Location: Alfred Denny conference room (A floor)
Time: 11:00

27 February 
Insigneo digital twin workshop
This workshop will explore the opportunities and challenges of implementing digital twins.

19 March
Insigneo healthcare data - HPC roadmap workshop

8 April
Insigneo medical device research roadmap workshop

19 April
Joint Insigneo Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Cell Engineering theme/Mechanobiology seminar
Speaker: Guillaume Jacquemet, Abo Akademi University
Host: Chris Toseland
Location: Alfred Denny conference room (A floor)
Time: 11:00

1 July
Joint Insigneo Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Cell Engineering theme Mechanobiology Summer event - Save the date!
Speaker: Guillaume Charras, UCL
Further details to follow

A selection of Insigneo seminar recordings are available to view on our YouTube channel.

Other events

New online training courses for academics promoting research

The Conversation has launched some new online training courses for academics. The courses are a great way for researchers to find out more about how to communicate their research, something that ultimately helps raise the profile of themselves and the University, can lead to important impacts and also can have a positive knock-on effect with league table rankings via increased peer to peer recognition.

12 February
Sano Seminar 122. BioDynaMo: Rapid Medical Insights through Agent-Based Simulations

13, 15, 20, and 22 February
FAIR research faculty-specific seminars - open to University of Sheffield staff and postgraduate studetns.  Making your data and other outputs findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) can greatly enhance the impact of your research. Join the Library for this introduction to FAIR and the improved FAIR guidance, and find out how you can contribute to a FAIR future for research.

Join a faculty-specific FAIR research seminar

21 - 22 February
7th Annual IEEE UK and Ireland Robotics and Automation Society Chapter Conference, Sheffield

28 February, 13:00 - 17:00
Sheffield Bioinformatics Core: Statistical Analysis of Biological Data in R

1 March
N8 CIR: Machine Learning Community Day, Newcastle University

5 March 
Science Media Centre -  Introduction to the News Media, Sheffield 
These free events are designed specifically for scientists with little or no media experience. They are fascinating in themselves, but the greatest benefit will be for scientists who work on issues likely to be in the news but who are either media shy, feel negatively about engaging with journalists or are downright scared that they will get it wrong. We welcome scientists, engineers and medics in academia or industry from any institution (postdoctoral level or professional equivalent and above; senior scientists are particularly welcome).

11 March
N8 CIR: Machine Learning Community Day, Lancaster University

11 March
N8 CIR: Introduction to Tree Models in Python, University of York

15 March
Annual Mellanby Centre Research Day - Deadline for registration 8 March

18 - 22 March
N8 CIR: Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) Retreat 2024, Manchester

19 March
Sheffield Cancer Research Away Day 2024 (open to University of Sheffield staff, honorory members of staff, or PhD students with an interest in cancer research at the university)

25 March
NorthernBUG 11, Sheffield

10 May
NIHR Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Showcase - abstract deadline 4 March

10 -12 July
BRS Annual Meeting 2024, Sheffield - abstract submission is open!

4 - 9 September
VPH2024 - call for abstracts now open!

9 - 10 September
BORS Conference 2024, Sheffield - save the date!

For a full list of upcoming events visit: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/overview/events

Vacancies

PhD Opportunity: Developing virtual reality for paediatric neurorehabilitation (closing date 12/02/24)

PhD Opportunity: Improving oxygen monitoring technology for young children and infants (closing date 12/02/24)

Publications

Mobilise-D insights to estimate real-world walking speed in multiple conditions with a wearable device (Scientific Reports) C. Kirk, A. Küderle, M. E. Micó-Amigo, T. Bonci, A. Paraschiv-Ionescu, M. Ullrich, A. Soltani, E. Gazit, F. Salis, L. Alcock, K. Aminian, C. Becker, S. Bertuletti, P. Brown, E. Buckley, A. Cantu, A.-E. Carsin, M. Caruso, B. Caulfield, A. Cereatti, L. Chiari, I. D’Ascanio, J. Garcia-Aymerich, C. Hansen, J. M. Hausdorff, H. Hiden, E. Hume, A. Keogh, F. Kluge, S. Koch, W. Maetzler, D. Megaritis, A. Mueller, M. Niessen, L. Palmerini, L. Schwickert, K. Scott, B. Sharrack, H. Sillén, D. Singleton, B. Vereijken, I. Vogiatzis, A. J. Yarnall, L.Rochester, C. Mazzà, B. M. Eskofier, S. Del Din & Mobilise-D consortium

Role of the osteocyte in bone metastasis – The importance of networking (Journal of Bone Oncology) S. W. Verbruggen

Mechanical characteristics of diabetic and non-diabetic plantar skin (Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials) S. R. Crossland, F. Sairally, J. Edwards, P. Culmer, C. L. Brockett

A Novel Primary Cilium-Mediated Mechanism Through which Osteocytes Regulate Metastatic Behavior of Both Breast and Prostate Cancer Cells (Advanced Science) S. W. Verbruggen, J. Nolan, M. P. Duffy, O. M. T. Pearce, C. R. Jacobs, M. M. Knight

Injectable hydrogel induces regeneration of naturally degenerate human intervertebral discs in a loaded organ culture model (Acta Biomaterialia) H. Cherif, L. Li , J. Snuggs, X. Li, C. Sammon, J. Li , L. Beckman , L. Haglund, C. L.  Le Maitre

A systematic literature review of fMRI and EEG resting-state functional connectivity in Dementia with Lewy Bodies: Underlying mechanisms, clinical manifestation, and methodological considerations (Ageing Research Reviews) L. Kucikova, H. Kalabizadeh, K. G. Motsi, S. Rashid, J. T. O’Brien, J.-P. Taylor, L. Su 

Unsupervised machine learning to investigate trajectory patterns of COVID-19 symptoms and physical activity measured via the MyHeart Counts App and smart devices (npj Digital Medicine) V. Gupta, S. Kariotis, M. D. Rajab, N. Errington, E. Alhathli, E. Jammeh, M. Brook, N. Meardon, P. Collini, J. Cole, J. M. Wild, S. Hershman, A. Javed, A. A. R. Thompson, T. de Silva, E. A. Ashley, D. Wang, A. Lawrie

Fabrication and characterisation of random and aligned electrospun scaffolds to investigate hypothalamic stem/progenitor cell behaviour (Engineered Regeneration) S. Beal, I. Stewart, P. Hatton, M. Placzek, I. Ortega