In recent years there has been growing concern about the impact of diffuse source pollution on river, estuarine and coastal water quality and particularly with regard to non-compliance of bathing waters. Climate change, and particularly more intense storms in the bathing season, has led to increased compliance failure of bathing waters, e.g. last summer saw widely publicised beach failure occurrences at Amroth and Rhyl. Hydro-environmental impact assessment modelling studies, regularly undertaken by specialist consulting environmental companies, are generally regarded as having two fundamental shortcomings in model simulations, which can lead to erromneous environmental impact assessment outcomes. These shortcomings will be addressed in this project and include: (i) improving the computational linking of catchment, river and estuarine-coastal models to ensure momentum and mass conservation across the link boundary, and (ii) improving the kinetic decay process representation in deterministic models, to include the impact of salinity, irradiance, turbidity and suspended sediment levels. The main aim of this research project will therefore be to develop and validate linked hydro-environmental deterministic models to predict improved fluxes and concentration levels of faecal bacterial from catchment to coast, using dynamic decay rates related to a range of primary variables. This main objective will be achieved by: (i) setting up linked catchment, river and estuary-coastal models to predict flow and solute transport processes from Cloud to Coast; (ii) linking these models through an Open MI system and refining the link to include momentum conservation; (iii) extending the Cardiff Research Centre's Severn and Ribble river basin models to include catchments, (iv) developing and testing the Severn model against scaled laboratory model data for conservative tracer measurements, obtained using an idealised catchment-river-estuary physical model at Cardiff University, (v) undertaking a detailed analysis of earlier field studies (undertaken by the main supervisor and Professor David Kay, Aberystwyth) on the impact of turbidity and sediment adsorption on bacterial levels in the Severn estuary, with the aim of developing new formulations linking bacterial concentration levels with: salinity, irradiance, turbidity and suspended sediment), (vi) including the new formulations for bacterial decay (in the form of T90 values) in the linked models for river and estuary-coastal systems and to investigate the sensitivity of the receiving water concentration levels to these parameters, and (vii) studying briefly the effects of various renewable energy structures in the Severn estuary (including the Severn Barrage) on the receiving water faecal bacterial levels, particularly in terms of establishing the impact of the new linking methodology and the dynamic decay rates on the predicted concentration levels. The outcomes from this study will be published in journal and conference papers and presented in talks and lectures on the Centre's activities relating to marine renewable energy and particularly for the Severn estuary.

This project aims to explore secondary data created from recent UK legislation which requires organisations to publish their Gender Pay Gap (GPG) to understand the determinants of the UK GPG among companies. It will build on international literature relating to the GPG and apply well-established econometric methods for panel data.

Cell cycle control systems change the way in which cells behave by: checking for the completion of vital tasks, choosing different routes through the cell cycle, determining how daughter cells inherit features, fixing the lifespan of a cell, or allowing a cell to react to its neighbours and the micro-environment. For a mathematical model of the cell cycle to hold credibility and usefulness within the science community, it has be of sufficient complexity to incorporate a minimum number of processes known to be involved in cell-cycle regulation, including growth and division, growth restriction, survival, programmed cell death, DNA checkpoint control and cellular damage response. Mathematical models capable of predicting such behaviour could contribute massively to research, reducing cost and time, reducing animal experimentation, and supporting clinical trials. We understand the wider scale of this endeavour and the need for biologists and theoreticians to work closely together to deliver both a specific and ambitious objective. This PDRA mobility award provides a discipline hopping opportunity to place a young talented engineer/physicist into a 'biology' laboratory where he can understand the extent and limitations of obtaining readouts from cells and thus how to apply advanced numerical solutions for interpreting these data, while at the same time ensuring the biologist has the means for independent validation and experimental testing.

IAAs are institutional funding to unlock the impact of the research base. They support a breadth of impact activities that allow funding to be used in flexible, responsive, and creative ways. IAAs provide research organisations with agility to make decisions about how to invest in ways that best suit institutional strategies and opportunities. The awards add value to existing funding and take advantage of new or unforeseen opportunities to facilitate the realisation of impact.

The initial data transmitted from the James Webb Space Telescope have recently dramatically reminded the world that scientific understanding can be transformed by the improvement of image spatial resolution. Since the invention of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 1973, similar breakthroughs in its spatial and temporal resolution have been key to its use in discovery science. Until we have access to the fine details of any process, we have no idea of the level of granularity that will be required in its modelling to provide satisfactory explanations and testable predictions. It has recently been recognized that the human brain's axons continue to become myelinated after birth and into adulthood; that this myelination is largely driven in a bootstrapping process by each neuron's experience; that the pattern of myelination in each cortical area defines the most important microcircuits in that area, where horizontal myelinated fibres are likely to carry inhibitory signals; and that brain MRI contrast is conveniently almost entirely dependent on the amount of myelin within each image voxel. In consequence, the generation of in-vivo MR brain images with a spatial resolution sufficient to distinguish and quantify myeloarchitecture has become a uniquely important goal in the study of human brain function. General population-wide trends in myelogenesis during development, and individual differences, may become key explanatory observations for cognitive psychology and the basis of empirical biomarkers in psychiatric disorders. At the same time, we have started to understand that the mechanisms of brain energy supply and consumption vary with age, and they may be closely related with changes in synaptogenesis and myelination across the lifespan. The attainable resolution in MRI depends on three main factors: the strength of the applied magnetic field, the efficiency of the radiofrequency receiver coil and its electronics, and the ingenuity of the sequences of RF and gradient field pulses employed in capturing the magnetic resonance signal. Currently the highest MRI field strength for which the engineering requirements are tractable is 7 Tesla, introduced for human-size scanners in about 2000, and the number of such scanners installed globally is approaching 100. Like many other medical technologies, MRI continues to undergo rapid development driven by Moore's Law, optoelectronics, maturing hardware design techniques, and strong market competition. Thus the first generation of 7T scanners, including the pioneering Siemens Magnetom scanner installed at CUBRIC in 2015, is now technologically far behind more recently marketed systems, such as the Siemens Terra scanner and the new GE 7T Signa. While the CUBRIC 7T scanner continues to outperform comparable 3T scanners in many respects, its ancillary hardware, computer equipment, and software environment leave it unable to deliver the feasible goal of acquiring isotropic 0.5 mm resolution images of brain quantitative microstructure and functional activity. This makes it unsuitable for cutting-edge studies (for example) of cortical changes in adult subjects learning new skills, of myeloarchitectural abnormalities in the brains of schoolchildren with behavioural problems, and of the sequence of cortical area maturation in the development of new visual skills, and to relate all of these changes to the changes in brain metabolism and the maintenance of healthy perfusion with age. The proposed upgrade will enable CUBRIC to investigate how the brain develops and maintains healthy function across the lifespan, a crucial research question as the world population live longer than ever.