Three of our scholars have been selected for the prestigious Wellcome Award, offering a combined £1,660,000 to work toward improving wellbeing through scientific research.
If you open the Weather app on your phone, you may have noticed that the information it includes has evolved over time. Air quality measures are now built in, along with pressure metrics. Warnings about UV exposure are included; you may even get weather-related alerts via text messages.
As the climate continues to change and extreme weather patterns become more commonplace, how will this information change? Who should be informed of various risks, like, for example, a heat wave? And how do meteorologists and government officials communicate with the public about them?
A new Durham scholar will study the history, science, and policy around weather and health with the help of Wellcome Early Career Award funding.
As part of a new medical humanities research project, Dr Maximilian Gregor Hepach of the Department of Geography will conduct archival work, interview experts and develop data to help determine how decisions are currently made about weather-health alerts.
Maximilian will explore which cultural histories and scientific knowledge they draw on, and how they will evolve as extreme weather patterns become more and more commonplace.
The research could go a long way toward helping us stay safer and healthier in uncertain times.
The other awardees are:
Exploring the contribution of social inequality to the evolution of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex across five millennia.
Kelly will be using the fellowship to combine ancient DNA and palaeopathology to uncover the extinct genomic architecture of the wider Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.
This will address a fundamental question in evolutionary medicine and biology: how do obligate pathogens evolve in response to human behaviour?
Neurodiversifying the Academy.
Dr Louise Creechan, from our Institute for Medical Humanities and Department of English Studies, will use the award to ‘neurodiversify’ the academy.
Louise’s five-year project will explore how Victorian assumptions about intelligence have shaped contemporary research practices and neuro-normative ideals of academic excellence.
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