Schizophrenia is a common, severe and disabling disorder that in a majority of instances requires long-term medical and social care. It not only results in considerable personal suffering but also has major economic and social impact. In spite of many years of research we still have very little understanding of what causes the disorder. Perhaps the best clue comes from the fact that that we know that genes appear play an important role in influencing who develops schizophrenia from studies of families, twins, and people who have been adopted. However at present, of the 30 000 or so genes each person carries, we do not know which contribute to the disease. Broadly speaking, the main aim of study is to use modern molecular genetic methods to identify some of the specific genes involved in schizophrenia. Identification of these genes should, through further studies, enable researchers to understand what brings schizophrenia about and then to develop more effective treatments.

We are trying to improve the way general practitioners and primary care nurses deal with coughs, colds and other common infections in children. Research evidence has shown that antibiotics help very little for most of these infections, yet they continue to be widely used, and their overuse is fueling a concerning rise in antibiotic resistance. Parents find these illnesses worrying and many complain that their concerns are not adequately addressed when they constult. We aim to address this problem through the development of a booklet for use in primary care consultations. The booklet, developed with help from parents and clinicians, will act as an information resource for the parent and a prompt to improve communication within the consultation. Clinicians will receive training in how to use it effectively. We will evaluate use of this booklet in a randomised trial. Some clinicians will be asked to use the booklet when seeing children with a respiratory tract infection, and others will continue their usual practice. Parents will then be contacted by telephone to identify whether or not the child has re-attended or received antibiotics, and to assess other outcomes. This will allow us to determine whether use of the booklet is effective and safe.

The principal objective of ‘The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather’ is to reveal and relate past experiences, both historical and more recent, as ways of understanding and coping with phenomena increasingly regarded as markers of climate change. It will explore ways that these events are remembered and mythologised, and interpret what is ultimately learned from them as both warning and opportunity. The project builds on the work developed by the AHRC “Historic Weather” Network, by continuing to scope and assess arts and humanities documentary and narrative primary source materials and demonstrate their value for research of historic weather and climate. It draws into collaboration the Network Co-I Prof Lorna Hughes (now University of Wales) and Prof Mike Pearson (Aberystwyth University) as award holder in the ‘Landscape and Environment’ programme. The project will focus on archival collections in the National Library of Wales (NLW), a legal deposit library. The project’s aims are: • To research accounts of extreme weather events, specifically regional and national experiences of harsh winters, as they are recorded in journals, dairies and literary and art works including narratives, poetry, novels, paintings and other visualisations, especially accounts related to extreme events, for example the 1703 “Great Storm”; and as they are described from living memory, via interviews and web input. It focuses upon experiences in relation to particular sets of historical, social, cultural and environmental circumstance and tradition: of rural communities in Wales and their records – from medieval Welsh poetry to contemporary regional broadcast news. • To research, devise and encourage creative approaches to the exposition of such data from a variety of sources to provide an historical context and understanding of ways that communities have experienced, responded to and survived extreme events through resilience and adaptability. Through this it will draw upon and inform perceptions and discourse, and may inform policy decisions with regard to resilience and adaptability in face of extreme weather in rural contexts. The project involves two strands of enquiry: • scholarly research to identify and prepare potential material for exposition: from library and other archival sources, in collaboration with the NLW, climate scientists from the International ACRE (Atmospheric Reconstructions of the Earth) project at the Met Office, and historic weather researchers. Archival reserach will explore the ways in which extreme winters have been represented and depicted in a wide range of cultural texts and media. This will be augmented by web-based community fieldwork including interviews with local people, historians, geographers and meteorologists, to gather experiences, memories and emotions. • practice-led research to devise appropriate modes of public exposition to engage audiences: as live performance and through on-line platforms. We will use digital arts and humanities methods and approaches for selection and digital representation of material collected by the project. The ordering and exposition of material will also follow principles of dramaturgical organization of content, highlighting ‘performative’ aspects of the content. This will also demonstrate the impact of “thinking digitally” on performance development and narrative. It will result in: • the creation of a live performance to be presented locally and nationally, with a premiere in the National Library of Wales in early 2013. This will evoke past events and immediate responses to them: of both trauma and resilience. • the creation of a sustainable website: with a record of research materials; as the further creative exposition of assembled materials; as an interactive facility for the deposit of experiences of extreme weather, encouraging public engagement • a summative workshop and other academic outputs to ensure the dissemination of academic and public benefits

Psychiatric disorders are common in the UK and throughout the world. They not only result in considerable personal suffering but also have major economic and social impact. We know that genes play an important role in influencing the risk that an individual may develop such disorders from studies of families, twins, and people who have been adopted. However at present, we do not know exactly what the genes are out of the many tens of thousands of genes each person carries. Broadly speaking then, a central aim of our Co-operative Group is to use modern genetic methods to locate and identify the specific genes involved in contributing to the development of major psychiatric disorders. By identifying the actual genes, we will then be able to determine the function of the proteins they encode, and, consequently, the nature of the dysfunction that leads to disease. This should lead to a better understanding of the causes, genetic and environmental, of serious mental disorders, and a more secure foundation for better diagnosis and ultimately to the development of more effective treatments. Other aims of our group to begin to use animal models to help us to understand how genetic factors lead to disease and to develop novel methods for treating brain diseases with an initial focus on Huntington?s disease. The PIs and field workers in all projects regularly give presentations to healthcare workers, NHS managers, service planners and policy makers, teachers, carers and users as part of our dialogue with the public. In addition we produce Newsletters aimed at users/carers, and a number of television and newspaper pieces involving our group aimed at the public have been broadcast and published. The PIs have also given public lectures on various aspects of Psychiatric Genetics. Examples of all these activities are given in our Five Year Progress Report. In addition, our Co-op will play a major role in the Wales Gene Park, one of the partners in which is Techniquest, Cardiff?s public centre for science discovery. Public and professional education in relation to genetics, including psychiatric genetics, is a major part of the Gene Park?s mission and funding for a non-clinical lecturer in the Public Understanding of Genetics has been obtained.

The Curious Travellers Project will collect, present and analyse a significant body of material relating to the phenomenon of the Welsh and Scottish Tour as it developed in the years c.1760-1815. It will open a window onto the vivid and often entertaining accounts of scores of 'curious travellers' who headed for the peripheries of Britain in search of the primitive, the picturesque and the sublime - and often found the foreign, and the unsettling, surprisingly close to home. Our starting point is the work of naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant of Downing (1726-1798), whose pioneering tours in Scotland and Wales (1771-1781) were widely read, directly inspiring the Highland journey of Johnson and Boswell and hundreds of others. His 'omnivorous' style, drawing on information from an imposing network of correspondents, weaves together natural history, antiquarianism, literature, history, aesthetics and politics. Often cited as an authority or an influence, Pennant's work has received little attention in its own right: the archive is scattered and difficult to use. The first aim of the project is to catalogue the many hundreds of letters to and from Pennant, and present them in a searchable data-base. This tool will improve our knowledge of the antiquarian, scientific and literary networks of the period, and allow us to trace both Pennant's careful preparation and information gathering, and the complex development of the composite and much-revised texts of the Tours themselves. The 'transperipheral' nature of Pennant's Tours (as a Welshman, albeit with unionist sympathies, exploring Scotland and his native Wales), along with their importance to later writers and travellers, make them an ideal point from which to investigate travel-writing from Wales and Scotland after 1760, when an improved transport infrastructure and a new sense of British identity inspired an increasingly affluent middle class to explore their national peripheries. Hundreds of published and manuscript accounts of tourist experiences form a still largely untapped resource for the study of history, material culture, literature and language. The second aim of the project is to make a generous selection of unpublished Tours of Wales and Scotland available online, each with a short contextualizing introduction and linked to a series of maps and pictures. In the light of recent work on global exploration in this period (Cook's Pacific voyages; the travels of Joseph Banks) the parallel 'exploration' of Britain needs critical reassessment. The domestic tour was an extraordinarily successful genre, second only to novels and romances, but has been relatively little studied. Yet it arguably played an important role in the construction of national histories, both at a 'four nations' level, and in a larger British context. Travel-writing uncovered the past in the landscape, through sites (cromlechs, churches, castles) popular culture (language, costume, song, and 'national character'), objects and images (antiquities, landscapes). Because landscape-writing and antiquarianism are often seen as conservative forms, the politics of the tour as a genre in this period is rarely considered. How far, during a period of revolution and war, did native histories, and the Celtic languages, disrupt that larger narrative of Britishness and of national 'improvement'? Pennant's Tours, for example, despite his unionist stance, were readily absorbed into nationalist discourses in both Wales and Scotland. In considering how the tour genre helped to 'create' versions of British history, the project will examine travellers' engagement with vernacular Celtic cultures (poetry and song), and ask how far their perceptions were influenced by contemporary ideas from science and art. Besides producing two new electronic resources, we will explore these issues through an informative dynamic website, 2 monographs, articles, a volume of essays, conferences, events and exhibitions.