Grant winners – 24 November 2016

National Institute for Health Research

Research Grants

• Award winner: Rod Taylor
• Institution: University of Exeter
• Value: £169,783

Exercise-based rehabilitation for chronic heart failure: an individual participant data meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials

• Award winner: Kristian Pollock
• Institution: University of Nottingham
• Value: £456,499

Managing medicines at the end of life for patients being cared for and dying at home

• Award winner: Stuart Taylor
• Institution: University College London
• Value: £358,183

MRI enterography as a predictor of disabling disease in newly diagnosed Crohn’s disease

• Award winner: Maria Lohan
• Institution: Queen’s-University Belfast
• Value: £1,734,948

The Jack Trial: a multi-site cluster randomised trial of an interactive film-based intervention to reduce teenage pregnancy and promote positive sexual health

Medical Research Council

Research Grants

• Award winner: Jan Herman Kuiper
• Institution: Keele University
• Value: £285,981

How do cartilage injuries heal naturally? An experimental study in humans

• Award winner: Kathryn Else
• Institution: University of Manchester
• Value: £427,776

Educating macrophages in vivo

• Award winner: Angela Suzanne Attwood
• Institution: University of Bristol
• Value: £148,304

Developing alcohol labelling interventions: the “what”, “who” and “how”

• Award winner: Thomas Wills
• Institution: University College London
• Value: £386,370

The post-natal development of hippocampal memory networks

Royal Society

Newton Advanced Fellowships

• Award winner: Ana Luchiari
• Institution: Swansea University
• Value: £73,133

Fish like us: refining the use of fish in translational research

• Award winner: Qi Zhao
• Institution: University of Bristol
• Value: £110,400

Evolution of avian locomotion

• Award winner: Gong-Bo Zhao
• Institution: University of Portsmouth
• Value: £110,000

Cosmological implications of the eBOSS survey

In detail

Natural Environment Research Council

Award winner: Timothy Hill
Institution: University of Exeter
Value: £654,799

Lightning: an invisible driver of tree mortality in the tropics?

Tropical forests mitigate climate change by locking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An increase in the mortality of these tropical forest trees, however, is sapping the strength of this carbon sink. Lightning strikes – which are frequent and powerful in the tropics – are partially responsible for tree deaths, and they may increase by as much as 60 per cent by 2100 as a result of climate change. Because of the impossibility of knowing where lightning will strike, lightning-induced tree death has not been much studied. Timothy Hill and his team will investigate the phenomenon by deploying sensors on 20,000 trees in sites in Nigeria and Cameroon, which will enable the researchers to observe a large number of lightning strikes. They will study how the trees are affected by the strikes, how the carbon storage of the forest is affected, and make predictions about how this could be affected by climate change.