Grant winners - 5 September 2013

National Institute for Health Research

Health Services and Delivery Research programme

• Award winner: Sarah Byford
• Institution: King’s College London
• Value: £675,578

The cost and cost-effectiveness of models of care for child and adolescent anorexia nervosa

Arts and Humanities Research Council

Responsive Mode Research Grants

• Award winner: Mark Westgarth
• Institution: University of Leeds
• Value: £187,987

Antique dealers: the British antique trade in the 20th century – a cultural geography

Royal Society

Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowships

The scheme is designed for scientists who would benefit from a period of full‑time research without teaching and administrative duties. Recipients’ institutions receive the full salary cost of a teaching replacement. Fellowships cover all areas of the life and physical sciences, including engineering, but excluding clinical medicine.

• Award winner: Zafar Bashir
• Institution: University of Bristol

The hippocampal-perirhinal-prefrontal cortex circuitry

• Award winner: Juliet Coates
• Institution: University of Birmingham

Is there a genetic toolkit for green multicellularity?

• Award winner: Mark Danson
• Institution: University of Salford

Terrestrial laser scanner measurement of forest canopy biomass dynamics

Wolfson Research Merit Awards

Awards are worth £10,000-£30,000 a year, which is a salary enhancement

• Award winner: Frederick Manby
• Institution: University of Bristol

Novel electronic structure theories for molecules and solids

• Award winner: David Richardson
• Institution: University of Southampton

Realising petabit/s: communications using multiple spatial modes in optical fibre

• Award winner: Andrew Steele
• Institution: University College London

A search for the origin of life on Earth through the exploration of Mars

Leverhulme Trust

Research Project Grants
Sciences

• Award winner: Chris Wendl
• Institution: University College London
• Value: £151,035

Intersections in low-dimensional symplectic field theory

• Award winner: Andrew Wilson
• Institution: University of Leeds
• Value: £244,987

Towards bionic proteins: tertiary structures from non-natural building blocks

In detail

Award winner: Kathleen Rastle
Institution: Royal Holloway, University of London
Value: £161,537

Moving beyond the monosyllable in models of skilled reading

“This project will exploit behavioural, neuropsychological and computational modelling approaches to understanding how people read,” said Kathleen Rastle, professor of cognitive psychology. It will consist of a “mega-study” examining how adults pronounce a large set of disyllabic non-words, and a set of experiments to determine the nature of the cues that people use to assign stress in reading non-words aloud. The team will test whether the generalisations uncovered in these two research streams predict how adults read aloud disyllabic words. Finally, these generalisations will be tested further by investigating how individuals with dyslexia acquired through brain damage read aloud these same disyllabic words. The team expects “significant applied implications in the clinical diagnosis of reading impairments, and in the development of evidence-based strategies for literacy education”, Professor Rastle said.