Dr Emma Anderson, Dr Rachel James, Dr Peter Dunne and Dr Sinead English have been selected for their work on dementia, climate change, respecting trans and non-binary identities and nutrition and immunity in pregnancy, respectively.
Dr Sinead English of the School of Biological Sciences is aiming to understand consequences for mothers and offspring of mounting an immune response in pregnancy, and how these depend on maternal nutritional state. She explained: "Pregnancy is a critical period determining health outcomes for mothers and children alike. Across the world, pregnant mothers face many challenges from exposure to infectious disease through to lack of access to nutrition. My project will take an innovative approach, bringing insights from evolutionary biology, to understand how these challenges interact to determine maternal and child health. My team will tackle these questions using mathematical models, experiments on unusual model insects - flies and cockroaches which give birth to live young, and analyses of cross-cultural cohort studies, including the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (UK) and from the Early Nutrition and Immune Development trial (The Gambia).”