Pre-defined projects
Below you can find a list of pre-defined research projects available for 2024. This is currently being updated and more projects will be added in due course. Please note that you need to discuss how you would approach these projects with the respective project sponsor and they will also need to complete the Laidlaw Supervisor reference template to indicate that they support your application.
Pre-defined projects offered by St Andrews based academics
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Dr Richard Streeter, Geography & Sustainable Development
[email protected]Volcanic ash from Iceland reaches the UK with surprising frequency, and when it does so it has profound impacts on aviation – most recently this occurred in 2010 and 2011 with the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and Grímsvötn. Icelandic ash from ancient eruptions is widely found in the UK – but we do not have a clear understanding of why particular eruptions are preserved in the long-term sedimentary record, yet others appear to be lost. To resolve this, and other taphonomic issues around volcanic ash preservation, a new approach is required. The aim of this project is to find and measure the abundance of ash shards from the most recent eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull and Grímsvötn in lake and peat sediments which were collected from sites in Shetland in October 2021. The scholar will examine these sediments microscopically, identifying ash shards and measuring their size and morphology. This information can then be combined with information collected during the eruptions (e.g., satellite records, information about ash collected in water gauges and weather conditions during the ash fall) to improve our understanding of the processes of preservation of volcanic ash. There will be the opportunity to collect further sediment samples from mainland Scotland.
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Prof Ian Smith
[email protected]The project will investigate the impact of UK university research in Economics. It will do this using as a data source the impact case studies submitted by economists at British universities to the Research Excellence Framework in 2014 and 2021 – see https://results2021.ref.ac.uk/impact. The aim is to classify the channels of impact, their importance, attributes and domains. The project will also study the distribution of impacts across different markets, institutions and sectors (banking and finance, employment, immigration, tax and benefits, economic growth, environment, competition etc.) to determine where economists think their research makes a difference. This project will be of particular interest to students who wish to pursue a career as economists or economic advisers, either in private consulting, think tanks, government, journalism, regulatory agencies or national/international institutions.
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Dr Joanne Boden, Earth & Environmental Sciences
[email protected]
Dr Eva Stüeken, Earth & Environmental SciencesLife may be present elsewhere in the Universe, but to know what to look for we must first understand the various forms that life has taken on Earth over the last 3,500 million years and how they have impacted physical aspects of the planet’s surface and atmosphere. Our group investigates this by interrogating organism’s genomes for hints about microbial life around hydrothermal vents (a potential cradle for the first life) and how ancient microbial life interacted with its environment generally on a global scale. In this project, the Laidlaw scholar will contribute to this growing body of research by conducting an investigation into the evolution of exoenzymes which enable microbes to source nutrients from complex organic molecules, or into the diversity of phosphate/metal transporters which help organisms to meet their phosphorus requirements. In order to do this, the scholar will use a command-line interface to survey genomic databases for genes encoding key enzymes and reconstruct their evolutionary history, so experience or a willingness to learn how to apply scripts and software for genetic analyses is essential. As the project is computer-based, we will accept applications from any Laidlaw university provided that the scholar is content to attend supervisor meetings via video call.
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Prof Isobel Falconer, Mathematics & Statistics
[email protected]
In the early modern period almanacks occupied a position at the intersection of astronomy, astrology, and the popular press. The most successful sold extremely well, and we know the names of many of their male editors. We know far less about the rest of the team involved and its structure. In particular, how, and from whom did editors source the complex mathematical calculations needed for their calendar predictions of daily sunrise and sunset times, eclipses of the sun and moon, and conjunctions of the planets? In some cases there is evidence that it was from their wives and children, raising the possibility that almanack or calendar production was a collaborative family enterprise. This project will seek out and pull together evidence from primary and secondary sources to investigate this possibility. Depending on the background and interests of the student, they may focus on a selection from questions such as:
*In what ways did calendar and almanack production generate income/resource for the editor and their team?
*What roles were needed in the production team?
*How was work distributed or labour divided among the team?
*What methods were used for calendar calculations and what mathematical skills did they require?
*Who had such mathematical skills?
*How can the teams be characterised? Is there anything like a ‘typical’ team
*Were family or household teams the norm or an occasional anomaly?
*Do we see changes over the 200 year period?
*What societal conditions afforded this type of production and economic model? -
Dr Hana Jurikova, Earth & Environmental Sciences
[email protected]
Dr James Rae, Earth & Environmental Sciences
[email protected]During the last 500 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon, Earth witnessed transitions between greenhouse and ice house climate states, along with a number of fundamental events, such as mass extinctions and ocean anoxic events. CO2 has been suggested to play an important role in many of these changes in the Earth system, but despite recent progress, past changes in CO2 levels remain poorly constrained. In this project, you will have the opportunity to look into Earth’s past CO2, climate and ocean chemistry using novel geochemical techniques. The project is designed to be flexible, with options to explore different fossil, sedimentary and evaporitic archives, trace element and isotopic approaches and time intervals.
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Prof Tristan Carter, Earth & Environmental Sciences
Dr Tim Kinnaird, Earth & Environmental Sciences
Dr Catherine Rose, Earth & Environmental Sciences
[email protected]Developing an understanding of how materials moved through the central Cyclades in antiquity relies upon provenance techniques. These provenance studies leverage physical and chemical variations to establish ‘fingerprints’ that can link artefacts to their geological sources. This pilot study builds upon previous work in the Aegean by assessing the petrographic variability of beach pebbles across Naxos, a single Cycladic island, to determine whether their physical heterogeneities can be used to determine their point of origin. These data will be compared with pebble artefacts discovered at a Minoan sanctuary, and these data will reconstruct the catchment and congregation area for the site during the late Bronze Age. Using the geological heterogeneity across the island, this work aims to constrain specific points of origin for the pebble artefacts, and determine if they were locally or regionally sourced. -
Dr Carolin Kosiol, Biology
[email protected]Evolutionary biologists have long been interested in the question how populations adapt to changing environments. In experimental evolution studies replicate populations are allowed to adapt to novel but controlled laboratory environments. The time-scale of laboratory experimental evolution is short; however, in the face of recent rapid anthropogenic changes to the climate and the environment, evolution over these short time-scales are now of urgent interest. Traditionally, experimental evolution has focussed on the dynamics of adaptation by studying the phenotypic changes in populations, rather than the underlying genetic changes that were not easily accessible.
Recent advances in sequencing technologies have provided a new experimental approach: evolve and re-sequencing (ER). ER experiments enable phenotypic divergence to be forced in response to changes in only few environmental conditions in the laboratory while other conditions are kept constant. The evolved populations are subjected to whole genome re-sequencing.
In this project we will explore new methods to analysed data from ER experiments. We have data sets for adaptation to new temperature regimes, and food resources and sexual mating systems in insects from experimental colleagues. However, we are also open to new ideas from Laidlaw research project students.
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Dr Jonathan Keeling, Physics & Astronomy
[email protected]We have recently developed a new approach to modelling quantum systems coupled to realistic environments, which can have memory of previous states of the system, and can thus describe “non-Markovian” dynamics. Applications include understanding the properties of different types of qubits for quantum computation, or questions associated with light interacting with organic or biological systems. The key idea in our approach is to make use of the idea of “matrix product states”, as a way to efficiently represent the effect of the environment. Mathematically, we use matrix product states to represent an object called the Process Tensor, which describes all effects of the environment.
The methods are made available in an open-source library https://oqupy.readthedocs.io/ (See papers linked there for examples of applications).
The goal of this project will be to explore new ideas we have had that may allow extensions to new classes of system. A particular idea we want to explore is methods to combine the Process Tensors from two environments to produce a single Process Tensor describing their joint effect. If successful, this has the potential to be very powerful, as repeated application of this would allow us to describe N copies of an environment with log(N) effort. Since the existing code base is written in Python, experience programming in Python would be desirable. In addition to the specific project described above, we would potentially be willing to supervise other projects extending or making use of the methods described above.
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Dr Frances Nethercott, Modern History
[email protected]Anglo-Russian relations during the nineteenth century were dominated by war and the threat of war. Russophobia was one obvious consequence of this as the press and politicians traded in negative stereotypes about the Russian menace as a military power and its cultural backwardness. This was nothing new, of course; analyses of travel accounts dating as far back as the sixteenth century evidence a long history of prejudice against the tyranny of Russian rulers and the barbarian practices of their people. The Victorians merely perpetuated these tropes. For the historian, they serve as a valuable index of ethnocentrism.
The period did, however, produce a body of knowledge about Russian history and popular traditions, songs, and folklore. Translated literature about Russia (mainly French and German), likewise, constituted the timid beginnings of a scholarly practice/tradition, while a small number of contemporary novelists – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov – enjoyed enthusiastic reception among creative writers and critics. Albeit later than countries on the European Continent, Chairs of Slavonic Studies were established at Oxford and Cambridge (1870s and 1880s) followed by others after 1900. Of note, here, is the fact that during the next few decades, advances in the subject area were largely due to the expertise of Russian emigres.This project, then, offers several lines of enquiry: the establishment of a ‘Russian corpus’; Victorian learning practices; the role of Russian emigres as conduits of knowledge and/or ‘opinion makers.’ I hope it will be of interest to students of History, English and /or Russian.
*(The proposal has some potential for research leadership experience: organization of a workshop with invited speakers specializing in any of the themes mentioned; interdisciplinary initiatives.)
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Dr Nicôle Meehan, Art History
[email protected]This project examines the digital activity of museum and heritage institutions in relation to the climate crisis. Digital technologies are often purported as one of the solutions to the climate crisis, however intersectional analysis reveals issues such as techno- and digital colonialism, a persistent digital divide and unsustainable extractive practices that disproportionately negatively affect the Minority World. Through guided research, analysing existing survey data, and conducting interviews with museum and heritage professionals globally, the successful student will analyse current understandings of the environmental cost of digital activity in the museums and heritage sector and set out recommendations for future activity.
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Dr Ruth Ezra, Art History
[email protected]Leaves of Glass: Mica Between Art and Science in Early Modernity comprises a cultural biography of Muscovy glass from its extraction in Siberia and movement in Anglo-Russian trade to its use as an ersatz window in objects as diverse as sundials, hand-held fans, raised-work cabinets, portrait overlays, butterfly boxes and a perspective treatise. The project considers how, as a foliaceous mineral, mica lent itself to modeling across disciplines, extending the aesthetic and scientific imaginations of painters, poets and natural philosophers alike. Case studies also highlight the material ingenuity of female embroiderers, émigré miniaturists, instrument makers and jobbing printers, figures heretofore kept at the margins of traditional histories of European baroque art.
The project will appeal to students interested in the histories of art and science as well as pre-industrial economies of extraction and trade between Europe and its contact zones.
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Dr Andrea Burke, Earth & Environmental Sciences
[email protected]Volcanic sulfate aerosols have a major cooling effect on global climate due to reflection of incoming sunlight. As a result, the climate forcing from a volcanic eruption depends on the eruption season because of seasonal differences in the distribution of incoming solar radiation. Over the last 2000 years, there have been more than 200 major volcanic eruptions, and these are recorded as peaks in sulfate in polar ice cores. These sulfate records are used to estimate the volcanic forcing for state-of-the-art climate models that are used to understand climate sensitivity. However because the majority (>90%) of these eruptions are unidentified, they have been arbitrarily assigned an eruption date of January 1, generating a major uncertainty in the forcing used for IPCC-class model simulations of the last 2000 years. We can greatly improve on this state-of-the art by analyzing high resolution glacio-chemical records of seasonally varying aerosols recorded in polar ice. By determining the phasing of the volcanic eruption with respect to the seasonal aerosol records, we will be able to determine the season of eruption with an uncertainty of ~1 month. This will substantially improve the accuracy of records of volcanic forcing. As part of this project, the Laidlaw Scholar will develop several transferrable skills, including data analysis of large data sets and computer programming.
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Dr Nicola Allison, Earth & Environmental Sciences
[email protected]Reef building corals produce the calcium carbonate skeletons that form the backbone of coral reefs and provide valuable ecosystem services. In this project the Laidlaw scholar will explore how ocean acidification influences the coral biomineralisation process. Coral biomineralisation occurs via 2 crystallisation pathways, at both intracellular and extracellular sites. The scholar will conduct in vitro experiments to simulate the conditions at these sites under environmental change and will identify how ocean acidification affects the formation of calcium carbonate.
Reference: Sun CY et al., 2020. From particle attachment to space-filling coral skeletons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(48), pp.30159-30170.
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Prof Frank Sullivan, Medicine
[email protected]Early diagnosis offers the prospect of reducing premature mortality and addressing health inequalities through detecting and treating disease early. A considerable number of early diagnostic tests are in development or at various stages of human trial. Most consist of a front-end detection system backed by an artificial intelligence driven interpretation component. However, introducing these new diagnostic entities into exiting care pathways is not straightforward and the problem of ensuring that such tests are evidence based increases as the development and use of novel biomarkers and imaging investigations accelerates. The Sir James Mackenzie Institute for Early Diagnosis is planning a codesign workshop with the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford in Summer 2023 that will lead to an application to the National Institute of Health Research for a programme grant on this topic.
In preparation for the workshop the Laidlaw fellow will work with the supervisor and other members of the team to:
1. Define the solution space: visualise the known boundaries within which new services have to be designed.
2. Summarise literature about barriers to participation in screening and early diagnosis programmes, as well as conversations with citizens we will create an overview of the topic and identify valuable workshop participants.
3. Map out and prioritise relevant stakeholder groups (e.g., high risk citizens, healthcare) -
Dr Bernhard Struck, School of History
[email protected]In the early 1900s, the constructed language Esperanto spread rapidly across Europe and part of the globe around 1900. It was picked up in capitals but also in more peripheral places from the east coast of Scotland to Bulgaria or rural Finland. The new language attracted scientists, merchants, doctors, and indeed many women. Esperanto clubs, societies and journals mushroomed across and beyond Europe after 1900. The first international congress was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer (France) in 1905 and (with brief interruptions during both World Wars) congresses are still held today. Before 1914 numbers of Esperanto-speakers are estimated at around half a million before the language movement reached a quantitative peak in the 1920s. The language is active and alive in particular among a younger generation the flocks to new social forms of interaction and social media.
One of the many fascinating aspects of Esperanto and the language movement is the staggering variety of sources and objects it has produced. These range from letters, postcards, journals, annual year books, congress books, travel guides, photographs, posters, to literature, pins or t-shirts. How can we tell a history of Esperanto past and present through selected material objects? This is the guiding question that this Laidlaw Project proposes to ask.
This project will zoom into a select sample of sources and objects in order to tell the history of Esperanto – yet not along a more established timeline from then to now. But from different places, different moments in time, and through this fascinating and often scattered sources and material objects. The project will be based around the research project on “Esperanto and Internationalism, ca.1880s-1930” based at the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History. (see: https://www.transnationalhistory.net/esperanto/en/705ea-home/) and its wider outreach and impact activities.
With a focus on primary sources in various shape and form, it is the goal to identify objects and produce brief scripts and a sequence of shorter videos that explain these objects to a wider audience. The scholar will have access to resources of the group, will get an insight into collaborative research including outreach and producing media content. The scholar will be working along the lines of transnational and global history, a major and booming field over the past years. Ideally, this would be a project over the course of two years (AY2024/25).
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Dr Shona Kallestrup, School of Art History
[email protected]The renowned polar explorer, scientist, humanitarian and Nobel prize-winner Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) was Lord Rector of St Andrews from 1925–28. In addition to letters, photos and the Norwegian flag flown on Nansen’s ship Fram during his famous North Pole attempt in 1893–96, the University possesses various artworks gifted by Nansen, including two hand-drawn self-portraits and two signed lithographs of his polar sketches. One of the latter is hand-certified by Erik Werenskiold, leader of the Lysaker artists’ colony near Oslo, where Nansen and his wife built two homes that acted as a social focal point for members of the colony. This research project will consider the St Andrews artworks 1) in relation to other items in the Nansen collection, and 2) within the wider context of the Lysaker art circle where Nansen played an important role as both a patron of art and architecture and as an amateur practitioner. The project will widen our understanding of the works in our collection and cast new light on the considerable achievements of our former Rector.As part of the research for this project, there is the potential to travel to Oslo to view the work of Nansen and the Lysaker artists in the National Museum of Norway and to visit the former Lysaker colony, Nansen’s home Polhøgda (now the Fridtjof Nansen Institute) and the Fram Museum.
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Prof Andrea Di Falco, School of Physics and Astronomy
[email protected]Metasurfaces (MSs) are two-dimensional patterned surfaces that can be engineered to produce a desired optical behaviour with exceptional accuracy and freedom of design. For example, MSs can be used to implement computer-generated holograms (CGH), to create holographic images for augmented and virtual reality applications [1-2]. Optical MSs can also be fabricated in flexible substrates [3]. Flexibility brings additional advantages to MSs with respect to their rigid counterpart, in terms of scalability, conformability, and tunability but requires suitable approaches to design CGHs [4]. A widely used approach is the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm [5], which propagates the light field between the MS and the holographic image plane and back. At each iteration, the amplitude and phase of the field are corrected until the holographic image converges toward the desired pattern. However, this calculation is costly, particularly when considering curved surfaces.
This project will explore some speculative ideas about how to define efficient methods to create CGHs, where both the MSs and the image plane have arbitrary shapes, a case that is particularly relevant to practical augmented reality systems.
The starting point of this project will be to calculate and save the propagation matrix (relating input pixels to image pixels) for small problems. We will then explore finding efficient ways to parameterize this matrix (in particular a novel approach known as matrix cross interpolation [6]). Using these, we will then numerically minimise the difference between the desired and the actual image [7] to optimize the hologram design [8]. This project will involve developing code, and working with existing code written in Python.The project is co-supervised by Prof. Jonathan Keeling, with the support of Dr Donatella Cassettari.[1] G. Lee et al., Nat. Comm. 9, 4562 (2018)
[2] Z. Li et al., Science Adv. 7, eabe4458 (2021)
[3] A. Di Falco, M. Ploschner, and T. F. Krauss, New J. Phys. 12, 113006 (2010).
[4] J. Burch and A. Di Falco, ACS Photonics 5, 1762 (2018).
[5] R. Gerchberg and W. O. Saxton. Optik (1972) 35, 237.
[6] J. A. Veerman, J. J. Rusch,and H. P. Urbach. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A (2005),22, 636
[7] T. Harte, et al., Opt. Express (2014) 22, 26548-26558
[8] F. Shen and A. Wang. Appl. Opt. (2006) 45, 1102-1110 -
Dr Daphné Lemasquerier, School of Mathematics and Statistics
[email protected]Icy satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, such as Europa and Enceladus, are thought to host global oceans beneath their ice crusts. Constraining the ocean circulation is crucial to understand heat and material exchanges between rocky cores and ice shells. Exchange processes influence the long term geophysical evolution of satellites as well as their potential for harbouring extraterrestrial forms of life. Since no direct observations of subsurface oceans are available, the ocean dynamics is still very poorly constrained, and modelling the interaction of the multiple physical processes at play (turbulence, rotation, buoyancy, phase change, topography) is a challenge for fluid dynamicists. Using two-dimensional fluid dynamics simulations performed with the open-source solver Dedalus, the goal of the project is to adopt an idealized approach and explore how thermal convection interacts with a phase change boundary. In particular, the feedback of the topography on the ocean dynamics will be investigated, as well as the effect of the depression of the melting temperature with pressure.
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