The dwarf galaxy Sextans A was observed by James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in April 2023. It is an extremely metal-poor, gas-rich, star-forming galaxy which star-forming disc will be effectively mapped using NIRSpec and MIRI from 0.9-25.5 microns, allowing for an unprecedented view of star formation in a primitive environment. The observations include the ideal combination of broad- and narrow-band filters that allow for the separation of the young stellar objects (YSOs) and evolved star populations. Collaborators at STScI are currently preparing and calibrating the photometric catalogues. Dr. Joana Oliveira is an expert on star formation in Local Group galaxies and she is leading the analysis of the YSO population in Sextans A. Following from their pioneering work in NGC6822 and M33, Dr. Oliveira and the PhD candidate will deploy supervised machine learning techniques, like a probabilistic random forest, to identify and characterise YSOs down to a few solar masses. The successful candidate will investigate how best the available features (in particular the narrow-band filters that constrain molecular and dust features) should be used to select the young sources. The student's research will identify and quantify the true extent of star forming regions and probe the interplay with the gas and dust in an extreme metal-poor environment. The student will work as part of a team of international experts, with expertise from interstellar medium to evolved young stars, on state-of-the-art datasets, providing a unique training environment. This project is ideally suited for a student with interest in star formation and Big Data techniques.

3D (magento-)hydrodynamic simulations of massive stars.

Diseases and injuries in the brain, spinal cord or associated nervous system cells have some of the most severe implications for patients. Coupled with this, there is a significant cost to healthcare systems in treating these disorders. There are currently no cures, meaning this is a critical clinical goal for research. Research into these diseases is often based on isolated cultures of cells. These cultures are where cells are extracted from the target organ and grown in a lab in a dish. This allows scientists to mimic injury and disease processes in simpler systems than found in the body. Specific injury processes can be easily observed and any positive impact of therapy also measured. Currently, assessment of the models is largely achieved using microscopy and visualisation of cell behaviour. Whilst this is a powerful technique, some cells (for example those found in the brain and spinal cord) carry out their functions by electrical communication. This electrical communication is often disturbed or lost in disease and injuries so careful monitoring of it can provide important information relating to the disease/injury. The funding we are requesting will allow us to grow cells in a dish as normal, but by using a new system - a multielectrode array - we will also be able to measure the electrical communication in the cell cultures. This will be key when studying diseases of electrically active cells and researching whether new therapies can restore the electrical communication required for function.

The role of women as producers and distributors in the provincial print market is an underexplored subject. Doing justice to the range of women's activity in the long eighteenth century, my project will take an interdisciplinary approach, making significant contributions to book history, trade history and gender history, using original archive research to establish how women operated in the English regional print trade. My project will survey women working in the print trade across the broad Midlands area, encompassing the wide and often interchanging roles undertaken by print trade workers including papermaking, printing, bookbinding, publishing and as booksellers, hawkers, stationers, and library owners. The numbers of women working in the trade have been underestimated, making the project timely and urgent. According to existing scholarship, approximately 50 women operated outside of London between 1550 and 1700 (Bell, 1996), and 437 in the entire English trade in the following century (Barker, 1996). However, preliminary interrogation of the British Book Trade Index (BBTI) gives over 1,000 records for women working outside of London between 1700 and 1830, 350 of which were based in the wider Midlands region alone. My project will establish valuable new case studies of working women, restoring the names of women producers in the region. It will explore the route into trade for female booksellers, particularly as widows taking over an existing family business; establish what women sold and produced; and present women as trusted partners and active agents in their trade, particularly in examples where women have taken over businesses previously run by other women. Where evidence allows, the thesis will also establish the extent to which women operated within new and established networks, who their customers were, and assess their standing in their communities. As a centre of industrial development with a landscape encompassing large trade centres, key coaching towns and rural communities, the Midlands region offers examples of a range of women's experiences. Aims: 1. To present original research and new case studies of women in the provincial print trade, 1700- 1830. 2. To identify the ways in which women accessed trade, operated their businesses, and formed professional partnerships. 3. To identify and assess the material published, printed and/or distributed by women.

The method of compound asymptotic expansions will be used to formulate mathematically correct initial value problems for lower dimensional long wave models, both high and low frequency, in thin elastic plates. The methodology is based upon superposition of high and low frequency approximations of the full three-dimensional theory. In the leading order, the low frequency anti-symmetric and symmetric problems coincide with the classical theories of plate bending and extension. The high frequency approximation has no static counterpart and describes long wave motion in the vicinity of the cut-off frequencies, coinciding with the thickness resonance frequencies. The work will enable clarification of well-known anomalies in plate dynamics. Specific examples of these are [1] the non-coincidence of the number of initial conditions in the low frequency plate bending approximation with the full three-dimensional theory, and [2] the choice of initial conditions utilised for any higher order plate models, characterised by the occurrence of high order time derivatives. After first establishing results in respect of a linear isotropic elastic plate and homogeneous initial data, the effects of pre-stress, viscosity and non-homogeneous initial data will be investigated. Although application of the theory will be carried out in respect of thin plates, the methodology will have wider applications within other areas involving thin domains.