MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
The MRC is providing about £7 million to establish three regional hubs that will give UK researchers access to high-throughput DNA sequencing machines. The cutting-edge equipment will support fundamental genetics research. The hubs are in Scotland, the North and the East of England, so all UK researchers will be able to use them.
Award winner: Mark Blaxter
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Award winner: John Todd
Institution: University of Cambridge
Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council/British Academy
Middle East fellowships worth a total £78,548 have been awarded. They give early-career researchers from these areas an opportunity to carry out collaborative research with UK academics with the aim of fostering new partnerships and developing ideas for more joint research proposals in the future. The winners spend up to six months undertaking a research project in the UK with their host academics. The winners of the South East Asia fellowships will be listed next week.
Award winner: E. Abdollahzadeh
Institution: Iran University of Science and Technology, Iran
Partner: G. Saldanha, University of Birmingham
Value: £7,446
Hedging in graduate student theses: a cross-cultural corpus study
Award winner: S.Z. Aksoy
Institution: Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey
Partner: G. Nonneman, University of Exeter
Value: £7,500
The normative aspects of Turkish foreign policy during the 2003 Iraq War and beyond: Turkey's order and justice perspectives towards Iraq
Award winner: E. Almagor
Institution: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Partner: C.B.R. Pelling, University of Oxford
Value: £4,302
Characterisation through animals in Plutarch's Lives
Award winner: S. Butbul
Institution: Ben-Zvi Institute, Israel
Partner: P. Alexander, University of Manchester
Value: £7,300
A study of the Arabic and Judeo-Arabic material in the Genizah collection of the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester
Award winner: M. Farah
Institution: American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Partner: A. Newman, University of Salford
Value: £7,360
Understanding customer- switching behaviour in financial services: an application of the theory of planned behaviour
Award winner: U.J. Golomb
Institution: Israel Music Institute, Israel
Partner: N.J. Cook, University of Cambridge
Value: £6,690
The fifth Evangelist, the impassioned rhetorician and the practical musician: recreating Bach's vocal music in the age of recordings
Award winner: B. Kirkici
Institution: Bakent University, Turkey
Partner: H. Clahsen, University of Essex
Value: £6,740
The processing of inflectional and derivational morphology in L1 and L2 Turkish
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Award winner: W. Meier-Augenstein
Institution: University of Dundee
Value: £25,048
Isotope profiling of drugs: a tool to disrupt organised crime, detect serious crime and reduce volume crime
Award winner: C.J. Pickard
Institution: University College London
Value: £1,338,601
Ex nihilo crystal-structure discovery
Award winner: B.G. Heydecker
Institution: University College London
Value: £29,383
Visiting fellowship for Juan de Dios Orthzar
IN DETAIL
Award winner: Neil Hall
Institution: University of Liverpool
The award will establish a high-throughput genomic analysis hub for the North of England. Although it will be based at the University of Liverpool, it is a partnership with the universities of Manchester, Sheffield and Lancaster. The hub will expand the capacity of Liverpool's Advanced Genomics Facility. Neil Hall, the principal investigator, said: "There is a pressing need to understand the basis of genetic variation and to use it to define the most appropriate treatment for each patient with a particular condition. This 'personalised medicine' will require establishing the DNA sequence of particular genes in those patients. Such research will benefit greatly from the new hub."