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Welcome to our April newsletter, a range of news from across our network reflecting and informing our community.
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The third funding call of UKAN+ will be launched at our annual event on the 14th September. The call framework will mirror our previous two successful calls. Details of which are available on the Funding Information - The UK Acoustics Network.
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To support individuals with applying to the funding call, UKAN+ are exploring a number of avenues. The first we are pleased to announce is the collaboration with Dr Elaine Massung and Professor Dan Allwood.
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“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” – John Steinbeck
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This five-session programme was developed by Dr Elaine Massung (Academic Smartcuts) and Professor Dan Allwood (Peak Writing) to help ECRs learn how to approach idea generation, preliminary project research, and horizon scanning to ensure that they have a solid foundation in finding and evaluating their proposal ideas. The aim is to help participants move beyond fixating on trendy topics or the latest buzzwords, and instead stand out from the crowd in a positive way. After all, it’s difficult to show that you’re leading the research agenda or carrying out state-of-the-art research if you’re doing what everyone else does!
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Each session guides researchers through practices that will support them in developing viable research ideas. This will then make writing a proposal much more straightforward, with less scrambling to retrofit the idea to a funder’s framework.
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This programme is ideal for those who are interested in applying to the forthcoming UKAN+ funding call (September-October 2023) as well as researchers beginning to think about applying to UKRI for a standard mode grant, fellowship, or New Investigator Award.
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There are very limited spaces. In the initial instance we are looking for individuals to register their interest and confirm availability at the sessions indicated below. We particularly encourage applications from under-represented groups, including women, people from Black groups, and people with disabilities.
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Sessions will run from 9:30 am – 12:30 pm on the following Tuesdays:
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Proposal Audits: Pre-submission Feedback on Complete Proposals
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Beyond providing training courses to support applicants as they navigate the proposal creation process, Dr Elaine Massung (Academic Smartcuts) and Professor Dan Allwood (Peak Writing) also provide pre-submission proposal audits. These are designed to help researchers produce a robust proposal. They are intended to take place after applicants have incorporated feedback from subject-area experts, and each audit concentrates on the following aspects to ensure the proposal clearly communicates the PI’s intent to the audience:
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· The proposals are edited to improve or clarify the language.
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· Based on her experience as a portfolio manager at the Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPSRC), Elaine identifies what could potentially be strengthened to help ensure the proposal is seen by the ideal panel or reviewers. She will also flag up areas that may potentially cause a problem when the proposal is processed.
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· As a regular reviewer for EPSRC and successfully funded PI, Dan uses his expertise to ensure the structure and content of the proposal is cohesive and consistent, with the goal of preventing “plot holes”—areas that reviewers can potentially question or pick apart.
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Although they cannot provide scientific or technical feedback about the project, Dan and Elaine serve as fresh eyes and a final check before a proposal is handed over to the reviewer. If you are interested in having a proposal checked before submission, please contact Zoë Hunter (z.hunter@acoustics.ac.uk) for further information.
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On 28th February, Dr Antonio J Torija Martinez, Prof Charlotte Clark and Prof Anna Hansell acted as expert witnesses in environmental noise to give oral evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, for a public inquiry on the impacts of noise pollution on human health. During this inquiry they provided evidence about the state-of-the-art in environmental acoustics, effects of environmental noise on human health, and also described the research and policy gaps to be addressed in the UK.
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Pete Stollery has featured on two BBC programmes to discuss the UKAN+ funded project.
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On the 15th March, Pete Stollery featured on the Today programme (2hrs, 22mins, 27 secs), you can listen for a limited time only on BBC sounds.
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Hearing, Audio and Audiological Sciences Meeting
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The UK Acoustics Network “Hearing, Audio and Audiological Sciences Meeting” took place in Southampton University on the 12-13 September 2022, hosted by the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research.
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This meeting represented the post-pandemic reboot of the Basic Auditory Science meeting, a long-running meeting of UK hearing scientists, which was originally conceived of as The British Society for Audiology Short Papers Meeting, the brainchild of auditory physiologist Ted Evans. The ethos of the meeting is to facilitate the friendly exchange of work and ideas, while providing an excellent value for money. This year, 115 students and academics attended the meeting.
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Across two half-day sessions there were 21 talks across covering a wide range of topics across 7 sessions: Hearing-Assistive Technologies; Spatial Hearing and Immersive Audio Rendering; Advances in Our Understanding of Hearing from Neuroimaging; The Physiology of Hearing; Measuring and Understanding Hearing Loss; Modelling and Measuring Hearing and Hearing-Assistive Devices; and New Technologies for the Hearing Sciences. In between talks, attendees met around the 49 posters which covered a wide range of topics. The full programme, with abstracts, can be accessed here: https://acoustics.ac.uk/uk-hearing-audio-and-audiology-sciences-meeting/.
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In the evening, attendees enjoyed a BBQ banquet, an auditory-themed pub quiz, and live music from The King Snakes.
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The conference coordinators were ISVR director Stefan Bleeck (Southampton), Mark Fletcher (Southampton), and Hearing SIG coordinator Chris Sumner (Nottingham Trent University). They are indebted to the seven colleagues who curated and chaired the talk sessions, to Esma Akis who offered invaluable help with local organisation, and to Jessica Fairless for devising the quiz.
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The Basic Auditory Science 2023 meeting will be held at Imperial College, on 21-22 September 2023, and will be jointly supported by the Spatial Acoustics and Hearing SIGs.
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Abstract submission will open in May. Come and join us!
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Analysis of Anonymous UKAN+ Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Data
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As we note on our UKAN+ website “our network is committed to equality of treatment, to increasing diversity and participation in acoustics of under-represented groups, and to providing an inclusive and supportive environment for all network members”. Underneath this commitment we list concrete actions that we are carrying out in support of these commitments.
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One of these is to monitor diversity of representation in UKAN+ activities, reporting on this monitoring to our Academic Management Board and our External Advisory Board, with a view to this discussion and analysis informing our future actions.
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- Data on the over 250 new UKAN+ members who have joined since September 2021, suggesting that we are making some progress, through acquisition of new members, in increasing the female, early career, disabled, and Black, Asian, and ethnic minority composition of our members.
- Data on our UKAN+ Webinar speakers, suggesting that we are meeting the expectations in our Diversity of Speakers Policy of at least 30% female and at least 30% male speakers, and at least 30% speakers at an earlier career stage.
- Data on the diversity of the principal applicants (PIs) in the responses to our two funding application calls to date.
While all the above monitoring shows strong representation from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic participants taken as a whole, we noted at the Academic Management Board the low Black representation in the UKAN+ membership, and have asked to have a wider discussion of issues around that at the Institute of Acoustics EDI Working Group Strategy Meeting on 27 April.
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Hasina Begum, Simon Chandler-Wilde, Zoë Hunter (UKAN+ EDI Team)
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The 2021 European Conference on Acoustic & Mechanical Metamaterials
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MetaMAT brings together the UK, European and wider international metamaterials research communities in partnership with the UK Acoustic Network, Imperial College London, the research institute FEMTO-ST (CNRS, University of Franche-Comté ), the Laboratory of Acoustics of Le Mans Université and CNRS (LAUM), in France and the European Association of Mechanical, Acoustic and Thermal Metamaterials, by organising weekly webinars in the fields of metamaterials for researchers working in the physical and engineering sciences.
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The purpose of the MetaMAT platform (https://meta-mat.org) is to disseminate research results in acoustic, thermal and mechanical metamaterials through the organization of online seminars, symposia, conferences, summer schools and workshops with industry and the academic world.
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The idea of organising online seminars originated in spring 2020, due to the pandemics conditions at the initiative of the members of the European Association of Mechanical,
Acoustic and Thermal Metamaterials Contact us!; the CNRS-Imperial & International Research Laboratory https://www.imperial.ac.uk/abraham-de-moivre.
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We would like to thank UKAN+ and BTU Trust for their financial support to assist establishing the infrastructure for the online seminars.
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MetaMAT Ltd, in London and BTU trust SAS, in Paris are the main industrial partners of MetaMAT and are interested in establishing a vital link between research and academia and industry in material sciences, civil engineering and arts, providing an unifying approach applicable in several technological fields, exploiting the similarity of the related physics.
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Bogdan Ungureanu, with the assistance of his colleagues Sébastien Guenneau and Muamer Kadic, has brought together more than 100 global experts from the field of metamaterials to the METAMAT platform. The novelty brought by MetaMAT besides organising free access, weekly livestream webinars is that each webinar remains freely and perpetually accessible (notably though the YouTube MetaMAT channel) and receives a citable DOI and searchable transcripts.
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Aeroacoustics SIG webinar:
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If you have any news for our May newsletter do drop us an email before the 24th of April. We are interested to hear a range of news, perhaps you have a recent publication, or you would like to offer a blog for our community or maybe you know of some industry news we could share.
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