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There is limited evidence of iron in ancient Egypt in early times as most of this iron appears to have fallen from the sky as meteorites, so we have little understanding of the role iron played in ancient Egyptian civilization. What the ancient Egyptians thought of it is not understood. However they were fashioning meteorite iron fragments into jewelry from as early as pre-historic times around 5500 years ago. These were discovered in the graves of 2 important people and some later examples are known of iron objects from Royal tombs including that of king Tutankhamen, which indicates the importance of iron. If they did know it originated from the sky which was the place of the gods they would have valued it greatly. Our project will explore how iron was used across Egypt at different times by examining museum collections to see the different types of objects Egyptians used iron to produce. Evidence of what they thought iron to be will be derived from many sources including museum artefacts and ancient texts. The earliest references to iron in Egyptian texts are frequently as iron bones of gods, we are yet to fully understand what these mean. We know that dark dense heavy mammal fossils which have a very similar visual appearance to weathered iron were sometimes placed within burial shafts and tombs some even being wrapped in their own linen shrouds. As the ancient Egyptians frequently considered animals to represent gods these type of fossils may be the inspiration for the early ideas of iron bones, this in turn could have had a significant influence on the early use of iron and the ancient Egyptian attitude to it. Our study will scientifically explore the origins of these fossils, identifying which mammals are present considering their cultural role and association with representations of gods in ancient Egypt.

A number of genes have been found associated with certain clinical outcome of interest from multiple studies. Identification of shared causal genes from these studies is crucial to understand the aetiology of certain diseases and the underlying causal pathways. To date, several statistical methods have been developed in the research field. However, there is a lack of comprehensive review of these approaches in the literature to guide researchers in health data science. In this project, we will be investigating state-of-the-art methods by using summary statistics from large-scale association studies, e.g. UK Biobank, The Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits (GIANT). In particular, we will examine the performance of statistical colocalizaiton and fine-mapping. Despite the different underlying assumptions between fine-mapping and colocalization, we see similarities of the two approaches. Since each of the methods has their own strengths and limitations, we aim to develop a Bayesian approach, taking forward strengths of both, to address shared genetic signals. Examination and validation of our method will be carried out via a number of simulations. We will also develop statistical software for applications of our method in the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and make it publicly accessible.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

I have shown an ability to convey current acoustics research to diverse, non-specialist audiences in an engaging way, either face-to-face or through the media. To take two examples, I was a finalist at Famelab and I have lectured at the Royal Institution to school pupils. Sound is a common theme within all forms of media, whether that be reviews of the latest IPod technology in newspapers, or discussions of how to deal with noisy anti-social behaviour on TV news. Sound also features on the school curriculum at all key stages. So, sound is an ideal theme for this fellowship, because it can enrich the general public's understanding of the connections between their everyday experiences, and engineering and science. It is also an ideal subject for inspiring the next generation of engineers. While my main interest is sound, I have an interest in conveying more general engineering and science to a wider audience. So far, my media work has been mostly reactive, with a couple of examples of successful proactive activities. The fellowship proposal is for a series of proactive activities targeted at local and national media, to give me the opportunity of explaining engineering and science to a larger audience.