By developing a reader-response framework, an approach to a text that focuses on the reader's understanding of the content as opposed to the author's viewpoint or the text's structure, this project will explore the extent to which neuroscientific discussions regarding the effects of schizophrenia on the brain influence representations and understandings of the condition within the schizophrenic memoir. Memoirs authored by those with a schizophrenic spectrum condition are a growing literary sub-genre that remains largely unexplored. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to draw attention to the mind and the brain of the non-schizophrenic reader of the schizophrenic memoir will demonstrate how multidisciplinary perspectives of a condition can challenge conventional understandings of the notions of health and well-being. In turn, this will make treatment and support for schizophrenia more socially accessible as well as providing a humanistic insight for scientific, medical and psychoanalytical practitioners, meaning ultimately that social policy will also be changed over time. This project will be separated into three sections: Section 1: Contextualisation (2018-9) This section will initially focus on the development of the memoir genre. Once key features of the broader memoir genre have been established I will explore the emerging subgenres, focusing on the neuro-memoir. I will then outline how the schizophrenic neuro-memoir has become a subgenre with its own distinct multidisciplinary tropes that demand attention under the neuro-critical lens. During this year I will establish working relationships with interviewees, support and reading groups. Section 2: Areas of complexity (2019-20) Focus here will be on additional areas of complexity that arise within the schizophrenic memoir. These will be: - The ethical concerns surrounding the responsibility an author has in their representation of schizophrenia. - How perceptions of reality are challenged within the schizophrenic neuro-memoir not only through forms of hallucinations but through prescribed psychoactive drugs. - Exploring these ethical concerns and challenges as an emulation of the struggle for control an individual has over their own identity due to the condition and their treatment experiences. Section 3: Defining a Neurodiverse Reading Approach (2020-21) With the distinctness of the schizophrenic neuro-memoir highlighted and the ethical concerns outlined, the relationship between the neuro-memoir and the reader can be used to outline a neurodiverse reading approach. Two distinct areas will be highlighted; - The advantages and disadvantages of utilising neuroscientific dialogues surrounding cognitive deficits to understand schizophrenia as presented in the neuro-memoir and the effect it has on a reader's understanding of the literary narrative and mental well-being. - The influences upon the non-schizophrenic reader that impact the reading process and thus the potential social impact of the schizophrenic neuro-memoir.

Climate change is one of the most critical issues of our modern world, requiring a shift from fossil fuels to green-energy. Understanding the intricate natural cycling of greenhouse gases is crucial for predicting the impact of current emissions and future changes. The cycling of key greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and methane, involves microorganisms that fix CO2 and release methane, whose roles are poorly understood. Some microorganisms also utilize intermediates like CO and H2 in their metabolism, connecting the cycles of CO2, methane, CO, and H2. Among life's domains, archaea remain enigmatic due to limited genomic information and challenges in culturing them. Anaerobic haloarchaea, which thrive in high-salt, anoxic environments - mostly deep-sea hypersaline anoxic basins, are particularly intriguing. Their metabolic strategies, potentially involving specialized enzyme complexes, hold the key to understanding gas production and consumption, impacting our grasp of biogeochemical cycles, global warming, and climate change. Additionally, anaerobic archaea offer biotechnological promise in waste biomass anaerobic digestion for biofuel production as well as discovery of new enzymes and metabolic pathways.

The climate change is now one of the biggest threats faced by our natural world and leads to many extreme weather events, flooding, wildfires and heatwaves. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are the promising technologies for the emergency response applications (ERAs) to provide more efficient and faster services to save lives and reduce economic loss. This project aims to develop an innovative cooperative, connected and intelligent UAVs (CIUs) for ERAs, where sensing and computing resources, and flying information from individual UAV could be shared and exploited through effective communications and control of the CIUs. Specifically, context-aware and service-oriented UAV-to-everything (U2X) networks; robust cooperative UAV sensing and computing (CSC) schemes and intelligent cooperative UAV control strategies for ERAs will be investigated. An international inter-sector and inter-disciplinary consortium consisting of world leading academic institutions and prominent industrial partners is created to collaborate on developing novel CIU technologies in ERAs. Cutting-edge communications networks, edge computing, cooperative sensing, intelligent control, and machine learning related technologies will be investigated to tackle the associated challenges. With competent and complementary expertise of the partners and their extensive international research collaboration experience, this project will promote research innovation, foster knowledge sharing, enhance the potentials of participating researchers, and contribute to the European leadership in the UAVs, cooperative sensing and computing, multi-agent control, information and communications technology (ICT), and emergency response sectors. The developed CIU technologies and applications are not only applicable in various ERAs, like flooding, wildfires, and earthquake; but can also be readily extended to other applications, such as smart cities, public safety, agriculture, and the wider scientific community.

Despite the ubiquity of forgetting in human life, scholarly research has said relatively little about it. My proposed research aims to begin to remedy this neglect by offering a phenomenological analysis of the pivotal role that forgetting plays in the constitution of personal identity. This analysis will investigate how my experience of who I am is impacted by i) what I forget about myself, ii) what particular significant others forget about me, and iii) what my culture forgets too. In other words, I will consider the central question from the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. By foregrounding the experiential impact of forgetting, this phenomenological approach will move beyond the reductive view of forgetting as a mere failure to 'encode an input,' or an absence of a 'neural trace', and it will allow me to illuminate the crucial role forgetting plays in our experience of who we are. Moreover, this project will not only offer a sophisticated phenomenological account of forgetting; it will also provide a felicitous point of departure for addressing applied issues of forgetting in the digital and medical humanities. Schedule Year 1 - Literature review. Thesis 1: Phenomenological analysis of the first-person impact of forgetting for personal identity. Compare findings to psychological case studies of dementia and amnesia with a view to providing a paper as outlined above. Year 2 - Thesis 2: Analyse the second-person dimension of forgetting. Draw on this research to highlight the ethical 'right to be forgotten online' for second paper as above. Year 3 - Thesis 3: Analyse the third-person dimension. Relate this research to cultural amnesia and findings from the CLHLWR for a third paper as above. Revision of thesis.

Global Environmental Change (GEC) is having profound effects on our natural environment, with declining biodiversity as a result of warming, acidification, and extreme climatic events such as heatwaves and droughts. Every species is part of a network of interactions that is integral to how ecosystems function and the loss of even one species can alter the population size of its consumers and resources, causing effects to ripple through the entire food web. The surviving species may also adapt by switching or expanding their diet in order to survive, resulting in complex reassembly of interactions. Thus, a deeper understanding of ecological network patterns will greatly enhance our ability to gauge how ecosystems will respond to GEC and help guide conservation efforts. Existing ecological assessment of GEC primarily focuses on the population-level response of a few key species, or coarse network-level metrics such as connectance, but little is known about network organisation at finer scales. For example, sub-network structures can include a cohesive 'core' of closely interacting nodes and a loosely connected 'periphery'. These sub-structures have been observed in many different types of artificial network (e.g. telecommunications and social networks), and their significance for governing dynamics and stability is widely acknowledged. In ecology, sub-network structures have revealed important fine scale changes in food webs exposed to drought, but this line of research is largely unexplored. Hence, there is an urgent need for scientific advances to facilitate the coupling between network theory and ecosystem ecology, allowing us to better understand how our natural systems withstand and adapt to the effects of external stressors. The overall aim of this project is to gauge and forecast the impact of GEC on ecological networks, and develop a more integrated modelling approach that can ultimately be expanded and adapted to cover all ecosystems. We will identify sub-network structures that provide resilience against GEC by profiling a database of 600 high-quality ecological networks from a wide range of climatic conditions across the globe, and conducting controlled experiments in semi-natural environments. Understanding how the sub-structural patterns have been altered in these networks will provide a new avenue for categorising the type and magnitude of ecosystem responses to GEC. In addition, we are typically limited to information about the state of an ecosystem before and after a climatic disturbance, with little known about the intermediate stages. The order of biodiversity loss can affect the way in which the surviving species adjust their diet, due to the availability of resource species at different stages. Thus, we will use computational models to simulate realistic orders of biodiversity loss, validated and refined using our manipulative experiments, helping us to identify the rules and mechanisms that underpin ecosystem responses to GEC. These findings will provide vital information for protecting our natural resources and enable scientists to predict the future health of ecosystems more accurately.