A Fight for Sight campaign is to launch this weekend, to raise awareness of eye health and the need for vital eye research. Former House of Commons Speaker the Rt Hon Baroness Boothroyd will kick off the campaign with an interview on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday (5 August). Sight loss affects more than two million people in the UK, a figure that is set to double by 2050. Despite this, eye disease is a desperately under-funded area of research in the UK. Professor Anna Horwood, in the Department of Psychology and Clinical Language Studies, explains how Reading research aims to tackle these issues.
Sight loss is an under-funded area of health research
Research into sight loss is a neglected area of research funding, but imagine what it is like to lose your sight? What would you be able to do? Read? Drive? Watch TV?
We are all familiar with research into diseases like cancer and dementia, but funding for sight loss is a fraction of that set aside for those conditions. With an ageing population, more and more people are having their lives affected by not being able to see. What might be an active old age can be devastated by not being able to do things most people take for granted.
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Living with Your Body in Health and Disorder
Listen to your body when it whispers, and you won’t have to hear it scream. These talks will explore how food and nutrients can help lower blood pressure while integrated pain assessment and spinal services can help cope with pain. Turn up to learn a few tips to help you tune in with your body!
Dr Alister McNeish is covering why “fish oils” are reported to be so good for your cardiovascular health and looking at how they can improve your – and society’s – health, while Dr Deepak Ravindran, consultant in anaesthesia, pain and musculoskeletal medicine at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, is conducting a talk titled: “What if Lady Gaga Needed Surgery in Reading? Improving the Lives of our Fibromyalgia Patients”
To see the full details of the event or to book tickets, click here.
School of Pharmacy Research & Scholarship Seminar
Thursday 16th November, 1pm – 2pm, Hopkins 101
Mildred Foster and Alison Provins, The Oxford Academic Health Science Network (Oxford AHSN)
“Patient and Public Involvement – Why do it?”
We will explore this often asked question and seek to demonstrate why the need to consider Patient and Public Involvement when educating our future healthcare providers is gaining momentum.
The Oxford Academic Health Science Network (Oxford AHSN) is a partnership of NHS providers and commissioners, universities and life science companies working to improve health outcomes and prosperity in the Thames Valley region through the widespread adoption of clinical innovations.
The Patient and Public Involvement, Engagement and Experience theme underpins everything the Oxford AHSN does. It ensures that working with the public, patients and carers is integral to the work of the AHSN. Sustainable healthcare depends on people being actively engaged in maintaining their health, managing long term conditions and being involved in designing healthcare systems.
To achieve this we need a well-informed population, professionals working with patients and carers and person-centred healthcare that responds to what patients and the public need and say. We are building a network that will create change in individual care, organisational culture and systems of care. We are working with our partners across the Oxford AHSN region to make this happen.
Mildred Foster has a background in biomedical research and experience in clinical research and science funding working for Oxford University and The Wellcome Trust. She joined the Oxford AHSN Patient and Public Involvement, Engagement and Experience team in August 2015. She is project manager of the ‘Leading Together Programme’.
Alison Provins has a background in financial services and now runs her own small business helping other organisations to improve their customer service. She has worked as a lay representative for Health Education England for several years. Alison actively seeks to increase the use softer skills within the NHS as a way to improve quality of care. She is part of Reading University Executive Stakeholder Group for the School of Pharmacy advocating for skills like empathy and communication to be included in medical student training. In 2016 she completed the ‘Leading Together Programme’.
Pizza and refreshments will be available from 12.50pm, or bring your own lunch along. The talk will start promptly at 1pm
ALL WELCOME
We are delighted to welcome gyuest speaker Professor Matthew Cobb, Professor of Zoology at University of Manchester to deliver this year’s Cole Lecture
Where do we come from? For thousands of years we really had no clue. In the mid-seventeenth century, human eggs and sperm were discovered but their role wasn’t understood for another 180 years. Professor Matthew Cobb will describe how these amazing discoveries were made, and how rivalry spilled over into enmity.
Academia/industry Careers event
6th September 2017
Programme includes:
- Research careers panel: find out what it’s really like from researchers in different roles in Industry, Academia and government research
- Alternative careers panel: what else is out there? Hear about science communications, policy, clinical trials management and more
- Becoming a group leader: what’s it like in different environments?
- Keynote from Simon Lovestone: hear about his career journey, and how best to work with people from every sphere to push dementia research forward
- Posters & Networking: Discover local research from academia and industry
Contact:
Francesca Nicholls
francesca.nicholls@psych.ox.ac.uk
Mark Dallas
M.Dallas@reading.ac.uk
This free event organised by the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) will bring together researchers and practitioners from France, the UK, and the USA who work with bilingual children with language impairment. The workshop will address the challenge of identifying language impairment in bilingual children. It will illustrate assessment material for bilingual children, explore the use of parent and teacher interviews, standardized tests, and narrative language sampling to support clinical decision making regarding diagnosis and intervention processes. Attendees will interpret standardized test data and use assessment protocols for making decisions based on language sampling that can be employed in everyday practice with bilingual children.
Maximum number of attendees: 40
This free event will look into contemporary suggestions about the neuroprotective effects of bi-/multilingualism against brain decline in healthy and patient populations. It will bring together early career and established researchers in the fields of second language acquisition and cognitive/clinical neuroscience, and will comprise a state-of-the-art snapshot in the field, as well as discuss potential future directions for research.
Linking Formal Instruction with Second Language Processing:
A Meta-analysis of Processing Instruction Research (1993-2016)
By
Michael J. Leeser, Florida State University (USA)
Almost 25 years ago, VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) argued that most language instruction was product oriented and did not take into account the underlying processes involved in second language acquisition. Since the publication of that seminal paper, nearly 80 published studies have appeared investigating the effects of processing instruction (PI), which is a type of instructional intervention that seeks to alter or to improve second language learners’ non-optimal input processing strategies so that learners are more likely to make correct form-meaning connections during comprehension. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of PI, discuss the ways in which PI differs from other types of form-focused instruction, and present the findings of a research synthesis and meta-analysis of the almost 80 quantitative PI studies that have been conducted between 1993 and 2016. In addition to evaluating the overall effectiveness of PI, the meta-analysis considers the ways in which processing problems associated with morpho-syntactic structures (and other variables) may mediate the effectiveness of PI. Finally, I explore avenues of future research for relating formal instruction to processing issues in second language acquisition.
‘Fine-grained patterns of language use contribute to variance in bilingual language processing.’
Joanna John, University of Reading
3-4.15pm
‘Effect of socio-economic status on cognitive control in non-literate bilingual speakers.’
Dr Vishnu Kaleeckal Krishnankutty Nair, Flinders University, Australia
4.15 – 5.30pm
