Honduras is one of the poorest and most violent countries in Central America. In this context, education should offer an escape; a path to a better future. However, the quality of Honduran schooling is abysmal, and few youth are able to study in secondary schools.. Despite these challenges, in our previous research we have discovered what one Honduran educational authority described as a "light in the path," a way for rural youth from disadvantaged communities to have access to high quality education. This "light" is the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial program (Tutorial Learning System or SAT). In the proposed research we will build upon the positive findings of our recently completed impact evaluation (see McEwan et al., 2014) to examine a number of remaining questions regarding the elements that support effective teaching in poor, rural, geographically isolated communities. Furthermore, by collecting follow-up data collection with a cohort of youth from 94 villages that we began tracking in 2008, we will be able to examine whether learning gains fade over time as well as whether there are linkages between improved quality education and successful transition to adulthood (e.g. enrollment in tertiary education, labor market outcomes, delayed marriage and pregnancy). In doing so, this research will also provide a unique opportunity to develop improved measures of educational quality and adolescent girls' empowerment in low-income countries. Informed by our earlier research and a review of the literature, we conceptualize effective teaching to be supported by three features of the SAT system of education: 1) Teacher recruitment and preparation; 2) The provision of resources for teaching effectiveness; 3) A system of professional support, accountability, incentives and rewards. With this framework in mind, we have designed a research project that examines the following core research questions through a mixed-methods case study: 1) What system-wide supports make a critical contribution to "effective teaching" in rural Honduran secondary schools? 2) Which elements of effective teaching contribute to sustained learning gains that are relevant and useful for youth as they transition to adulthood? For the purposes of this proposal, we define "effective teaching" as teaching that leads to both immediate and sustained gains in learning across a range of competencies relevant to successful adulthood. We will employ case study methodology, examining two "nested" cases of secondary schooling in rural Honduras, the SAT program and more traditional Centros de Educación Básicos (CEB). Results of our earlier research comparing SAT and CEB suggest that learning outcomes for SAT are considerably higher than CEBs (.2 standard deviations; stated differently residing in a SAT village increased the rate of learning by 45 percent). Despite these striking learning improvements, we estimate the cost of SAT to be 18 percent lower than CEBs. This comparison (SAT/CEB) allows us to gain valuable insights regarding the elements that support effective teaching and improved learning outcomes. A follow-up round of data collection with our cohort of youth will also address the question of whether learning gains fade over time and allow us to better understand the ways in which quality education influences the transition to adulthood. Our research methods will include the application of quantitative instruments (surveys and assessments) as well as qualitative in-depth interviews, extensive classroom observation, and the observation of teacher professional development sessions. Beyond the qualitative and quantitative datasets that this study will generate, the outputs of this research include measures of educational quality (assessments and scales) that can inform future research in other developing country contexts. We will disseminate our findings via traditional (e.g. academic journals, conferences) and new (e.g. Prezi, YouTube) venues.

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The Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (Tutorial Learning System or SAT) model for lower and upper secondary school (gradesyear 7-12) provides a rare example of a cost-effective system of effective teaching and learning, particularly for rural areas. Results from a quasi-experimental impact evaluation found that students in SAT had 45% higher rates of learning than their counterparts in traditional rural secondary schools in Honduras (McEwan, et. al, 2015). SAT has operated in Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Ecuador for over three decades, and functions as a public-private partnership between the government and local NGOs. In 2018, SAT was identified as a solution for the major challenges facing youth globally by "Generation Unlimited," which aims to ensure that every young person is in education, learning or employment by 2030. For the past three years, our research on SAT has focused on identifying the system-wide features that make a critical contribution to effective teaching in rural Honduran secondary schools. We have conducted in-depth interviews with teachers (called "tutors" in the SAT program), observed tutor professional development/training sessions, and observed a small number of SAT classrooms, with a particular focus on teaching and learning in science (Shareff and Murphy-Graham, in preparation). However, our research has been significantly constrained because we have not conducted systematic classroom observation using a standardized observation tool. This was not only due to lack of financial resources, but also the the lack of an appropriate observation tool to capture elements of effective teaching in SAT. At our first RLO meeting in London, our research team learned of the work of Seidman and colleagues, and their development of the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS; Seidman, Raza, Kim, & McCoy, 2013; Seidman, et al., 2018), which is a tremendous contribution to the field of education research in developing country contexts. The current proposal for follow-on funds allows us to augment our research on SAT by applying TIPPS in SAT classrooms, as well as simultaneously enhancing impact and building capacity in Honduras. In the future, a cross-grant synthesis will allow our two research teams to co-produce outputs to reach a wide range of stakeholders and to co-author publications. Our research findings from the previous RLO grant, augmented by this opportunity to extend this work, will allow us to understand what makes SAT an effective system of secondary schools in rural Honduras, particularly in terms of the recruitment, professional development and ongoing support of teachers. Through our research on SAT, we will generate key insights that can inform interventions to improve teaching and learning outcomes in developing countries (Murphy-Graham, 2018). This is a key area of interest for policy-makers and others in the international education community, who in support of Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, seek models of high quality secondary education that can inform the design, delivery and expansion of grades 7-12. SAT responds to a number of key challenges identified that prevent quality teaching, including that there are two few teachers in rural areas, and that they lack knowledge and skills to teach effectively (DFID, 2018). The supplemental funds we are applying for will allow us to extend our work in Honduras to enhance research impact and build capacity among key researchers and education stakeholders.

In order to achieve the next generation potential nanomedicine has to offer, next generation nanomaterials must be developed. Inorganic/organic nanocomposite particles are composed of polymeric, organic nanoscale structures (50-200 nm) in which smaller metallic nanoparticles (2-20 nm) are encapsulated. Both the organic and inorganic components can be varied, giving rise to a platform technology with great composition potential. The use of inorganic/organic nanocomposites is in its infancy, but they offer a range of potential healthcare applications, from enhancement of radiotherapy for cancer treatment to providing more sensitive, specific and quantitative diagnostic analysis than current established techniques, with real-time monitoring and quantification in biological systems potential. Such materials may aid cardiovascular imaging, oncology and cell tracking but extension to infectious disease diagnostics and advanced radiotherapy would be world-leading. Inorganic/organic nanocomposite particles will offer new direction for nanomedicine research, providing the foundation for new research fields to emerge through the creation of a novel platform technology. Investigation into nanocomposites will open significant avenues for research innovation in terms of both nanocomposite material development and device development. Uniquely, the highly novel platform could be further adopted to incorporate responsive functionality, amplified disease targeting as well as the incorporation of multiple component types, thus creating multifunctional composite materials for combinational diagnostics and therapy. The platform technology, therefore, is highly adaptable allowing for a range of applications in both diagnostic and therapeutic areas, each with significant avenues to innovative material design and device development. The specific aim of this fellowship is to enable the creation of world-leading expertise within the UK, able to pioneer new science and establish impact from its application towards real-world healthcare needs. Next generation nanomaterials will give rise to new technologies which would offer considerable benefits for healthcare diagnosis and for treatment. The nanomaterial development strategy is truly multidisciplinary and thus, through this fellowship, multidisciplinary team development will be established to provide collaborative approaches aimed at the translation of research findings to clinical use. Through this strategy, novel areas of healthcare research will be established in the UK with truly global importance. In the long-term, the impact of establishing a platform technology will provide a springboard from which the applicant will develop commercial and policy influence, enabling him to become a significant global leader of innovative multidisciplinary research. The fellowship applicant, Dr Marco Giardiello, has experience of inorganic and organic nanomedicine research in both diagnostic and therapeutic areas, having established several research collaborations in both academia and industry. He has been a key lead in the identification and manufacturing processes towards clinical trial development of nanomedicines, as well as being integral in developing platform technologies through to commercial outputs having co-founded a start-up company. The research is to be carried out at the University of Liverpool's Department of Chemistry with critical cross-faculty, cross-sector and multi-disciplinary collaboration. The fellowship proposal's key aims are: 1. Novel inorganic/organic nanocomposite particle development 2. Multidisciplinary research team building 3. Novel nanomedicine applications creating new IP and industrial regulatory engagement 4. The application of new technologies towards multiple global healthcare needs

The Bacterial Flagellar Motor is one of nature's rare rotary molecular machines. It enables bacterial swimming and is a key part of the bacterial chemotactic network that enables bacteria to direct their movement given the chemical environment. This network is one of the best-studied chemical signalling networks in biology, sensing down to nanomolar concentrations of specific chemicals on the time scale of seconds. The motor's rotational speed is linearly proportional to the bacterial electrochemical gradients, most notably of proton or sodium ions, while its direction is regulated by the chemotactic network. Recently, it has been discovered that the motor is also a mechanosensor. Given these properties, the motor has the potential to serve as a multimodal biosensor with unprecedented speed and sensitivity, and thus a tool for characterizing and studying the external environment, but also bacterial physiology itself. However, at the resolution needed, motor speed and rotational direction are currently detected optically, one motor at a time. A step-change in harnessing the unprecedented potential of this rotary molecular machine would be to detect each motor's rotation electrically and with high throughput. Here I propose to achieve this by specifically attaching individual bacteria to a precise location on the surface and testing two electrical means of detecting the motor's rotation: an integrated circuit and a graphene surface. The detection method will also be employed to fully characterize the three different sensing modalities offered by the flagellar motor: that of cells own physiology, of mechanical forces and of a given set of chemicals. The success of the project we will enable portable biosensor-on-a-chip configuration of the motor speed and rotational direction detection, which can be a game-changer in the biosensing field.