Climate change is one of the most critical issues of our modern world, requiring a shift from fossil fuels to green-energy. Understanding the intricate natural cycling of greenhouse gases is crucial for predicting the impact of current emissions and future changes. The cycling of key greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and methane, involves microorganisms that fix CO2 and release methane, whose roles are poorly understood. Some microorganisms also utilize intermediates like CO and H2 in their metabolism, connecting the cycles of CO2, methane, CO, and H2. Among life's domains, archaea remain enigmatic due to limited genomic information and challenges in culturing them. Anaerobic haloarchaea, which thrive in high-salt, anoxic environments - mostly deep-sea hypersaline anoxic basins, are particularly intriguing. Their metabolic strategies, potentially involving specialized enzyme complexes, hold the key to understanding gas production and consumption, impacting our grasp of biogeochemical cycles, global warming, and climate change. Additionally, anaerobic archaea offer biotechnological promise in waste biomass anaerobic digestion for biofuel production as well as discovery of new enzymes and metabolic pathways.

The climate change is now one of the biggest threats faced by our natural world and leads to many extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires and heatwaves. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are the promising technologies for the emergency response applications (ERAs) to provide more efficient and faster services to save lives and reduce economic loss. This project aims to develop an innovative cooperative, connected and intelligent UAVs (CIUs) for ERAs, where sensing and computing resources, and flying information from individual UAV could be shared and exploited through effective communications and control of the CIUs. Specifically, context-aware and service-oriented UAV-to-everything (U2X) networks; robust cooperative UAV sensing and computing (CSC) schemes and intelligent cooperative UAV control strategies for ERAs will be investigated. An international inter-sector and inter-disciplinary consortium consisting of world leading academic institutions and prominent industrial partners is created to collaborate on developing novel CIU technologies in ERAs. Cutting-edge communications networks, edge computing, cooperative sensing, intelligent control, and machine learning related technologies will be investigated to tackle the associated challenges. With competent and complementary expertise of the partners and their extensive international research collaboration experience, this project will promote research innovation, foster knowledge sharing, enhance the potentials of participating researchers, and contribute to the European leadership in the UAVs, cooperative sensing and computing, multi-agent control, information and communications technology (ICT), and emergency response sectors. The developed CIU technologies and applications are not only applicable in various ERAs, like flooding, wildfires, and earthquake; but can also be readily extended to other applications, such as smart cities, public safety, agriculture, and the wider scientific community.

By developing a reader-response framework, an approach to a text that focuses on the reader's understanding of the content as opposed to the author's viewpoint or the text's structure, this project will explore the extent to which neuroscientific discussions regarding the effects of schizophrenia on the brain influence representations and understandings of the condition within the schizophrenic memoir. Memoirs authored by those with a schizophrenic spectrum condition are a growing literary sub-genre that remains largely unexplored. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to draw attention to the mind and the brain of the non-schizophrenic reader of the schizophrenic memoir will demonstrate how multidisciplinary perspectives of a condition can challenge conventional understandings of the notions of health and well-being. In turn, this will make treatment and support for schizophrenia more socially accessible as well as providing a humanistic insight for scientific, medical and psychoanalytical practitioners, meaning ultimately that social policy will also be changed over time. This project will be separated into three sections: Section 1: Contextualisation (2018-9) This section will initially focus on the development of the memoir genre. Once key features of the broader memoir genre have been established I will explore the emerging subgenres, focusing on the neuro-memoir. I will then outline how the schizophrenic neuro-memoir has become a subgenre with its own distinct multidisciplinary tropes that demand attention under the neuro-critical lens. During this year I will establish working relationships with interviewees, support and reading groups. Section 2: Areas of complexity (2019-20) Focus here will be on additional areas of complexity that arise within the schizophrenic memoir. These will be: - The ethical concerns surrounding the responsibility an author has in their representation of schizophrenia. - How perceptions of reality are challenged within the schizophrenic neuro-memoir not only through forms of hallucinations but through prescribed psychoactive drugs. - Exploring these ethical concerns and challenges as an emulation of the struggle for control an individual has over their own identity due to the condition and their treatment experiences. Section 3: Defining a Neurodiverse Reading Approach (2020-21) With the distinctness of the schizophrenic neuro-memoir highlighted and the ethical concerns outlined, the relationship between the neuro-memoir and the reader can be used to outline a neurodiverse reading approach. Two distinct areas will be highlighted; - The advantages and disadvantages of utilising neuroscientific dialogues surrounding cognitive deficits to understand schizophrenia as presented in the neuro-memoir and the effect it has on a reader's understanding of the literary narrative and mental well-being. - The influences upon the non-schizophrenic reader that impact the reading process and thus the potential social impact of the schizophrenic neuro-memoir.

This project explores the history of Theatre Underground (1979-96), University of Essex campus theatre, and the relationships it forged between 'town and gown'. New writing for the stage brought to life significant events in local history and new drama in translation brought world theatre to Essex. Research will focus on the Theatre Underground archive at the University of Essex. At the Mercury Theatre Colchester, interpretations of the production materials will be explored with theatre practitioners; and public engagement workshops, led by the student, will seek interviews with alumni and audience members of Theatre Underground. Applicants with backgrounds in literature, drama, theatre history, modern languages (especially German), experience of interviewing and/or archival research (although training will be provided) will be especially suited to this research. This studentship will focus on the ways in which Theatre Underground was involved in: the collaboration between 'town and gown', the university's mission for outreach, the university and theatre, how it worked, the challenges and outcome, inclusivity and representation, and legacy; writers in residence, new writing for the stage in translation and/or in English, students and/as theatre practitioners, tensions arising from constraints of funding; place-making through local and regional histories and writing for the stage and how this engaged in an inclusive way with under-represented groups in the university campus and local and regional communities. Three specific plays were produced at Mercury Theatre. The first play, by Roger Howard, predated Theatre Underground. Roger Howard, The Great Tide (1976) about the floods of 1953 Roger Howard, The Siege (1981) about the English Civil war and the siege of Colchester Michele Roberts, The Journeywoman: A Play for Colchester (1988 ) Theatre Underground's new drama included plays produced in translation and brought insights into world drama, often with a focus on revolutionary politics (in USSR, People's Republic of China, and German Democratic Republic). The works of East German dramatist, Heine Muller, in particular, could be a potential focus of research for this studentship. The student will have space and resources available to support the research project at both the University of Essex, Dept of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, and at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester. Supportive networks of researchers are available at the University of Essex through the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Literary Studies and the Centre for Theatre Research. Cross-university networks of researchers include clusters on digital humanities, medical humanities, law and literature, which may be relevant at some points in the project. Proficio training resources and funds for postgraduate research students at the University of Essex will be available. The dept research seminar series and the postgraduate conference events are regular features of research discussions in the department across its five disciplines (literature, film, theatre, creative writing, and journalism). This breadth of humanities research available in the department provides a unique environment for the student. In addition, the University of Essex is well-placed to provide support and guidance on interviewing, data handling (as home to the UKData Service), and the relationship between the arts and humanities and the political domain. The CHASE consortium networking will intersect with these embedded research infrastructures alongside the wealth of research support from the Mercury Theatre, where the student will have unique support and guidance in interpreting the archival production documents as well as testing the interpretations and analysis of the playscripts in a performance context.

Despite the ubiquity of forgetting in human life, scholarly research has said relatively little about it. My proposed research aims to begin to remedy this neglect by offering a phenomenological analysis of the pivotal role that forgetting plays in the constitution of personal identity. This analysis will investigate how my experience of who I am is impacted by i) what I forget about myself, ii) what particular significant others forget about me, and iii) what my culture forgets too. In other words, I will consider the central question from the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. By foregrounding the experiential impact of forgetting, this phenomenological approach will move beyond the reductive view of forgetting as a mere failure to 'encode an input,' or an absence of a 'neural trace', and it will allow me to illuminate the crucial role forgetting plays in our experience of who we are. Moreover, this project will not only offer a sophisticated phenomenological account of forgetting; it will also provide a felicitous point of departure for addressing applied issues of forgetting in the digital and medical humanities. Schedule Year 1 - Literature review. Thesis 1: Phenomenological analysis of the first-person impact of forgetting for personal identity. Compare findings to psychological case studies of dementia and amnesia with a view to providing a paper as outlined above. Year 2 - Thesis 2: Analyse the second-person dimension of forgetting. Draw on this research to highlight the ethical 'right to be forgotten online' for second paper as above. Year 3 - Thesis 3: Analyse the third-person dimension. Relate this research to cultural amnesia and findings from the CLHLWR for a third paper as above. Revision of thesis.