We propose to carry out a large field trial in The Gambia, West Africa, to find out whether there is any additional benefit of spraying homes with DDT in addition to the normal practice of getting everyone to sleep under bednets impregnated with long-lasting insecticides. The study will have two groups of villages: one with only treated nets and the other with both treated nets and DDT spraying. We will measure how effective the interventions are by sampling mosquitoes in the houses and measuring malaria in study children in both sets of villages. Importantly we will determine whether the vectors are likely to become resistant to the insecticides used and we will be able to determine how much it will cost to prevent cases of malaria using the DDT. This study is important since many Afircan countries, including The Gambia, are either spraying houses with DDT at present or intend to do so in the near future.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

Native chemical ligation (NCL) is a chemical reaction which is critical in the synthesis of proteins. It has enabled chemists to prepare highly potent peptide-based pharmaceuticals for a range of diseases. Despite its ubiquity, aspects of the reaction's mechanism are still debated, so brute-force reaction screening is commonly employed, which is an expensive and time-consuming process. We will use a quantitative, combined synthetic-kinetic approach to elucidate the mechanism for NCL across a range of amino acids. Using this insight, we aim to understand current limitations and drawbacks of NCL in order to deliver better and more efficient synthetic procedures.

Cultural evolutionary theory is quickly gaining traction as a unifying framework for the social sciences. However, research into culture acquisition paints a picture of children as vessels for inheriting evolved culture from adults, rather than cultural producers in their own right. ChACE aims to overturn this long-established orthodoxy by taking child and adolescent peer cultures as a focal point. Neglected by cultural evolutionary theorists, peer cultures are incredibly well conserved across generations despite threats to social transmission inexistent in adult cultures, challenging our understanding of how cultures are maintained and changed across generations. By intensively studying children’s peer cultures, ChACE thus stands to discover novel causal mechanisms for cultural evolution. ChACE specifically advances two ground-breaking hypotheses built upon firm theoretical and empirical foundations in folklore, cultural evolution, human life history, and cognitive development: (1) Peer cultures evidence distinct cultural evolutionary mechanisms from adult cultures; (2) Knowledge produced as part of peer cultures helps communities adapt to social and ecological change. ChACE will develop a robust and transferable methodology to jumpstart the study of peer cultures. Reflecting best-practice workflows for causal analysis, ChACE will first build ethnographically informed agent-based models to derive testable and falsifiable predictions. These will be empirically evaluated via experiments, observations, surveys, and interviews with children and adolescents aged 4-16 years, and their caregivers, at four globally representative field sites undergoing rapid culture change: the Likouala (Republic of the Congo), the Omo Valley (Ethiopia), Toledo (Belize), and County Durham (U.K.). In doing so, ChACE will initiate a disciplinary course correction by driving forward an explicit and holistic account of children’s adaptive contributions to culture change.