Research and Innovation Services

Building foundations for monitoring viruses at the interface of wildlife and indigenous communities in Peru. Led by Jocelyn Ginette Pérez Lazo, the main goal of this project was to create new and strengthen recent collaborations, as well as build a network of researchers and Peruvian public-health authorities, to study and monitor viruses in the interface between wild animals and neglected indigenous communities in the province of Condorcanqui, Peru.

Bringing young people back into agriculture: developing a South-South partnership to collaboratively address generational renewal. Led by Marcela Ramos, this project facilitated South-South collaboration and knowledge exchange activities, identified a research agenda and a clear pathway to academic and non-academic outputs in relation to three key global challenges: sustainable food production capacity, gender equality and technology adoption in agriculture.

Human reservoirs and behaviours fuelling Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense transmission in Malawi. Led by Walt Adamson, this project enabled collaboration with Kamuzu University of Health Sciences and the Malawian Ministry of Health to investigate two key issues in relation to a Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense outbreak: the extent of infection and the attitudes and behaviours of people related to sleeping sickness in affected communities.

Empowering women and girls through collaborative filmmaking. Led by David Archibald, this project established a pilot to connect feminist activists in four historically-related cities (Havana and Matanzas in Cuba, Glasgow and Vilanova i la Geltrú in Europe), which sought to utilise affordable AV technologies to develop creative conversations amongst the activists and, consequently, empower women and girls.

Exploring the relational impacts of gambling among Tanzanian families: a pilot study. Led by Chris Bunn, this project explored the public health approach to gambling harms, an overview of the emerging literature on gambling and gambling harms in sub-Saharan Africa and exploration of the knowledge gaps in the field generally, as well as Tanzania specifically.

Living with Rabies: Reality and response on the ground. Led by Anna Czupryna, this project collected baseline data on the prevalence of dog culling activities and associated costs and interviewed livestock officers regarding the motivations behind dog culling activities. The team established a network linking human and animal health workers in Arusha, Meru, Monduli, Manyara and Karatu Districts. Human and animal health workers were registered and trained on using an IBCM mobile application for entering suspected rabies exposures. The team trained 50 health workers on the collection of rabies exposure data and linked them to the respective animal health workers in their district to facilitate the investigation of suspected rabies cases. They also trained 20 livestock and animal health workers on the collection of rabies samples from suspected rabid animals and the collection of associated data.  

Filling the gap, training the next generation of African parasitologists in spatial biology. Led by Alex Girard, this project provided specialized training in advanced transcriptomics and histology to two early-career researchers from the DRC and Uganda. This not only equipped them with the skills required to analyse the skin samples they had collected but also laid the groundwork for the transfer of these cutting-edge technologies to their home institutions. Second, the team used formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples reveal host immune responses to parasite colonisation of the skin. 

Learning for Informal and non-formal educators in refugee settings in Lebanon and Jordan (LINEs). Led by Maria Grazia Imperiale, this project  worked with teachers of refugees in Lebanon and Jordan to understand, articulate and develop the factors which strengthen their identity and agency. They used arts-based workshops, and participatory methodologies that include the voices of the whole community: teachers, children, parents and NGO representatives.

Revitalising Rwanda's 'silent hills' through co-creating sustainable cultural heritage eco-tourism initiatives: A pump-priming project. Led by Erin Jessee, this project completed a series of pump-priming activities with a new partner, the University of Rwanda’s Center of Excellence in Biodiversity & Natural Resource Management (CoEB) and an existing partner, the Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy (RCHA). The activities included a capacity strengthening workshop, a collaborative scoping study on indigenous knowledge of culturally significant plants, animals, and fungi and creation of an archival resource that is being used by the CoEB to develop audio and video materials to enhance its efforts to revitalise the National Herbarium of Rwanda and related initiatives.

Sustainable Cities: Indigenous Histories of Mayan Garden Cities and the Future of Urban Growing. Led by Julia McClure, this project expanded understanding of the possibilities for sustainable cities and food sovereignty by broadening and deepening historical knowledge about food sovereignty practices and historic urban agriculture in the Maya region of Chiapas and extended analysis to under-researched regions in Oaxaca, namely the Mazateca and the Chimalapas. This built upon previous research on the plan de vida (life plan) in the Lacandon, and developed new research into these different regions, and established a new dialogue between the people of the Lacandon and the people of the Chimalapas. 

A water quality testing laboratory for rural Cameroon. Led by Mark Symes, this project equipped Research and Development Without Borders with key pieces of equipment to enable water quality monitoring in Cameroon.

Resilience and adaptation to climatic and non-climatic factors: Role of large dams in India. Led by Cecilia Tortajada, this project explored resilience and adaptation of local communities to extreme events such as floods.

Non-Endemic Leishmaniasis in Nepal. Led by Richard Burchmore. Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) is a neglected tropical disease affecting some of the poorest communities worldwide. Recently, Nepal has seen emerging cases of CL in high-altitude non-endemic regions. This provides a unique opportunity to isolate and genotype the etiological agents of this emerging zoonosis. We aim to pioneer a Glasgow-Nepal research network between the University of Glasgow and the Research Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology (RIBB) by organising expert meetings both in Glasgow and Nepal to assess knowledge gaps and complement expertise, as the basis of a larger grant application.

Trust in the healthcare system in a rural setting in Cameroon: an economic experiment. Led by Sergi Alonso. Patient trust is a key health determinant as it enhances healthcare utilisation. Healthcare access remains low in remote and poor areas of low-income countries like Cameroon, and more evidence is needed to understand the role of trust in care seeking behaviours. This project will measure the determinants of trust in rural Cameroon by conducting an economic experiment. It will identify discrepancies in trust due to health, gender and other socio-demographic factors. This research is the foundation to understand and further investigate compliance to key health interventions, such as the adherence to mass drug administration for neglected tropical diseases.

Building capacity for carbon cycle research in tropical Africa by deploying portable, low-cost, CO2 analysers. Led by Philippa Ascough. The project will develop, deploy, and test a cheap, reliable alternative for measuring soil CO2 to empower academics in LMIC countries by building expertise and capability in the field of carbon cycle research. The collaboration with ANPN Gabon expands on a lab-built instrument, developed at the University of Glasgow, that is easy for users to operate, repair, and construct themselves from low-cost components. By optimising the instrument, and developing a training programme for LMIC field use, the collaboration will enable Gabonese academics in a more comprehensive program of soil carbon flux measurements to feed directly into national carbon accounting databases.

Low-cost and Rapid Detection of Faecal Coliforms in Drinking Water using optics-informed AI. Led by Daniele Faccio. Faecal contamination of drinking water causes deaths of nearly a million people around the globe. Lowcost and rapid detection of faecal contamination has been a long-standing challenge. Building upon our work on sensing minute changes in the optical path of a laser beam for heart and brain diagnostics, we aim to develop a demonstrator to address this completely new challenge. We will collaborate with the Nepalese partner active in this area for the past three years, with the goal of developing a strong partnership, and obtaining research grants that leads us to highly impactful implementation in Nepal.

Healthy Aquaculture in Tanzania: Assessing current Challenges and potential Solutions (HATACS). Led by Taya Forde. Fish farming in Tanzania is rapidly developing, providing an increasingly important source of food, income and employment. To ensure that aquaculture practices remain sustainable, farmers need knowledge on the importance of health and welfare in their stocks. Promoting healthy fish will not only secure quality food and employment locally, but through a One Health approach, contribute towards reducing antibiotic treatments and lowering the risk of antimicrobial resistance, as observed in other aquaculture systems. Focusing on Lake Victoria, an interdisciplinary approach will provide essential data to identify the current challenges faced by the fish farmers to develop specific health management strategies.

Green precarity. Led by Giedre Jokubauskaite. This project brings together researchers from Glasgow, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador to explore the dynamics of precarisation that underpin a market-based, financialised transition to low carbon economy in Latin America and in Scotland. The project has two aims: (a) to develop a new critical lens of ‘green precarity’ that combines insights from labour law, study of informal labour market and community empowerment, and social reproduction theory; and (b) using qualitative research, to identify and examine an initial set of case studies from four countries to develop a larger project on green precarity going forward.

Setting the Stage for Sustainability: An Environmental Impact Baseline Study of QCinema International Film Festival. Led by Michael Kho Lim. This project conducts a baseline study of the environmental impact of QCinema International Film Festival in the Philippines. It serves as a pilot case study that lays the foundation for assessing environmental impacts of cultural events like film festivals. It offers a holistic perspective and an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the sociocultural, economic, and ecological dimensions of film festivals by utilising mixed methods drawn from the arts and humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences. This study sheds light on the environmental implications of events and provides evidence to festival organisers in rethinking their practices in response to the climate emergency.

Understanding the Effects of Climate Change on Remote Fishing Communities in the Brazilian Amazon. Led by Shaun Killen. Rural Amazonian communities are critically reliant on artisanal fisheries for food and financial income. These communities are economically deprived, but we lack information on their income, infrastructure, and fishing practices. Worldwide, fisheries are experiencing detrimental effects of climate change, with tropical fishes being particularly vulnerable to further warming. This project will combine studies of socio-economics and fish biology to examine how Amazonian fish species will be affected by changing climates and how this will affect remote fishing communities.

CityCashTransfer - Evaluation of Urban Sustainability in Municipal Cash Transfer Programs using
Digital Local Currency. Led by João Porto de Albuquerque. This project will undertake an interdisciplinary pilot study on Cash Transfer Programs (CTPs) which use local currencies, and their contribution to climate and economic development agendas. A Brazil-UK multidisciplinary team (with expertise in urban analytics, public health, information systems and demography) will investigate innovative cases of municipal CTPs in Brazil and develop a novel methodology to map and evaluate the flow of digital local currencies across the urban territory with regards to effects on climate, health, socio-economic, and environmental variables. The team will co-create a proposal for a large collaborative project together with local governments and civil society stakeholders.

Bridging the information gaps to retaining and raising girls’ interest in STEM education. Led by Yee Kwan Tang. The project investigates critical information gaps and factors that impel girls and women to lose interest in STEM as they progress in formal education. It will collect empirical evidence through surveying secondary- and tertiary-level students and teachers in two African countries-Botswana and Zambia; and pilot an interactive platform for target beneficiaries’ improved access to helpful information, advice and interaction, to enable informed STEM study choice and education innovations. A network of partners and supporters will be established to continuously explore opportunities and initiatives to bridge gaps identified, increase female STEM participation at the onset, and improve gender parity in STEM.

Socio-ecology of freshwater use conflicts along mangrove coasts in Mexico and Colombia. Led by Alejandra Vovides. Increasing freshwater demand for food production in the coastal zone of Mexico and Colombia threatens the ecological water requirements and hence the survival of coastal habitats such as mangroves. Mangroves, growing in saline and brackish water, however, provide often undervalued ecosystem services such as carbon storage and nursery functions for commercially important fish at low water-use cost. This project will pump-prime a new partnership between an interdisciplinary team from the University of Glasgow with Mexican and Colombian researchers to assess the socio-ecology of coastal water use conflicts along mangrove costs addressing biodiversity, poverty and climate related SDGs.

Establishing Research Networks: An Overseas Institutional Visit to the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Led by Katarzyna Borkowska. The main purpose of this project is to create strong research links that will form the basis for a future collaborative research project with partners from the University of Sao Paulo (SPU), Brazil and other potential stakeholders. We propose an overseas institutional visit to the SPU to establish research connections and collaborate with Prof Marcos Alvarez, the Violence Studies Centre (NEV-USP) (https://nev.prp.usp.br/), local NGOs and/or women’s rights groups.

Storytelling for change: hand hygiene at primary school. Led by Zoe Strachan. We propose to develop and enhance emerging partnerships between colleagues in Glasgow and Kenya working in critical studies, theatre studies, social anthropology and health. Building on real-life scenarios developed from interdisciplinary research (microbiology, epidemiology and social anthropology) exploring hand and water hygiene, we further developed culturally appropriate stories designed to promote behaviour change, reduce contact with infectious diseases, and reduce gendered inequalities for primary schoolchildren and their carers. By developing and creating new partnerships, we plan a collaborative grant proposal to use storytelling and story creation to convey complex healthcare messages to improve hand hygiene and disease transmission.

Digital tools to support small ruminant health in Tanzania. Led by Harriet Auty. Sheep and goats are particularly important in supporting the livelihoods of the rural poor, but often neglected in animal health. This project aims to build new collaborative working relationships with key actors in the Veterinary College of Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania, with the intention of ongoing collaboration on digital clinical decision-making tools for small ruminant health. Funds will support visits to collaborators, collection of qualitative data from potential digital tool users, and generation of pilot data on sheep and goat clinical diagnoses to validate digital tools and to build data on small ruminant health.

Sand Routes: Mapping Sand Mining on Volcanic Slopes in Indonesia. Led by Adam Bobbette. There is a global sand crisis. Sand is one of the most used resources on earth and is currently extracted to feed urban and infrastructural growth faster than it can be replaced. The demand for sand is driving miners in Southeast Asia to increasingly dangerous sites of extraction, including volcanic slopes. This project aims to map the sand commodity chain for the first time through a study of mining on Mount Merapi volcano, Indonesia. We aim to create new interdisciplinary methods for monitoring the movement of sand to improve management of this scare resources and its environmental and cultural consequences.

Pilot data on malaria diagnostic efficacy for the OpenFlexure Microscope. Led by Richard Bowman. Healthcare technology in Africa is often hamstrung by proprietary, imported devices that cannot be locally maintained or use generic consumables. Dr Bowman led the co-development of the OpenFlexure Microscope with Tanzanian partners at the University of Bath since 2017, working with Ifakara Health Institute to develop an instrument capable of reliably scanning blood smears. This project will perform a clinical validation of locally produced prototypes, generating pilot data for a larger application that will support medical certification. This will lead to the first domestically produced microscope in Tanzania, breaking new ground for their medical devices sector.

Archaeological Pasts and Sustainable Futures in Iraq’s Marshlands. Led by Daniel Calderbank. Iraq’s marshlands (the Ahwar), and the unique cultural heritage of its Ahwari inhabitants, are rapidly disappearing due to regional hydro-politics and the unmitigated effects of climate change. Archaeological interpretations of the region’s past, developed in a colonial context and perpetuated post-independence, have long contributed to the shaping of unsustainable water management policies and the social exclusion of Ahwari communities. This project combines 1) a historiographic investigation of the archaeology of the marshes with 2) a pilot participatory research program with Ahwari communities to understand their (dis)connection with archaeological heritage and the potential impacts of developing more inclusive, multi-vocal archaeological stories.

Addressing Global Inequalities by Empowering Girls Through Integrated Education in Delhi’s outskirts, India. Led by Joemon Jose. Gender equality and women's empowerment, highlighted in the UN's SDG-5, rely on education's pivotal role. Indian rural areas, and across the world, face barriers to girls' education. 132 million girls globally are out of school, many in rural regions (UNESCO). We propose to integrate education into daily life, acknowledging cultural nuances, to empower impoverished girls. Leveraging smartphone technology, with a 71% penetration in India, rising to 96% by 2040, we aim to develop edutainment applications to address educational disparities. We will organize workshops with all stakeholders, drawing from the epistemology of the Global South for the co-creation of solutions.

Exploring freedom and human rights of children and young persons with albinism in Malawi. Led by Paul Lynch. Persons with albinism are vulnerable to negative physical, psychological, social, and educational outcomes, particularly in Africa, where prevalence of albinism is up to 5 times that in Europe. In our research – co-created with persons with albinism – we listen to the voices of learners with albinism, educators, carers in Malawi to better understand the challenges and opportunities to exercise their human rights. These stories will inform strategies to make positive changes to the lives of persons with albinism in Malawi and its regional neighbours. This project will establish a sustainable for this research team, building capacity both in Glasgow and Malawi.

Rapid response to an outbreak of sleeping sickness in Ethiopia. Led by Annette MacLeod. African sleeping sickness has proved difficult to combat as sporadic outbreaks can occur in areas long after the disease was assumed to be eliminated. Such an outbreak has occurred in Ethiopia more then 30 years after the previous reported case. This new collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute aims to identify the outbreak’s source. We propose using surveillance and innovative genomic analysis, which we have developed in Glasgow, to investigate this outbreak. This initiative is likely to result in future funding and so marks a crucial step towards establishing in-country capabilities for disease management and research.

Scaling responses to tuberculosis in urban informal settlements: gender-sensitive understandings of TB exposure surveillance methods. Led by Peter MacPherson. Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading infectious killer and Nigeria has the largest TB epidemic in Africa. Emerging changes in TB epidemiology means that hotspots are emerging in urban informal settlements. We have piloted a new surveillance approach, where children under 5-years old attending primary clinics are tested for recent TB exposure using a blood test. This surveillance approach has high potential, however understanding and acceptance by health workers and people living in communities will be critical for scale-up. We adopt a gender-sensitive approach to investigate the perceived benefits and harms from TB exposure surveillance to inform successful implementation models.

Fighting Disinformation through Civic Education: An Interdisciplinary Case Study in Turkey. Led by Aykut Ozturk. Disinformation is one of the primary developmental challenges of our age. Relying on an interdisciplinary framework, bringing philosophy, political science, and information studies together, this project will explore how we can build communities more resistant to disinformation in the Global South. Civic education programs promoting epistemic virtues, i.e., the affective and intellectual dispositions necessary to seek out high-quality information, offer great promise in the fight against disinformation. In line with this, we will collect survey and experimental data from Turkey examining the relationships between epistemic virtues, epistemic vices, and susceptibility to disinformation.

Social-ecological transformation to sustainability at the regional scale in global south. Led by Md Sarwar Hossain Sohel. Transformation to sustainability (T2S) is highly context-specific that include perceptions of stakeholders, and governance and political structure and intention of that context. Thus, scholarships of T2S requires co-production of knowledge from the shared views of stakeholders to identify different social-ecological systems (SES) and plausible pathways of T2S. This project aims to operationalize in the Global South (Bangladesh, and Zambia) and to co-produce knowledge on types of SES, data gaps, stakeholders’ perceptions and pathways of T2S. The outcome of the project will be evidence-based information to inform policy for the SES sustainability in the context of global climate change.

Closing the Loop on Energy Transitions: Accelerating Circular Economy Approaches to Low Carbon Supply, Demand and Delivery in East Africa. Led by Jamie Cross. Facilitated by expert technical support, this project aims to accelerate closed loop innovation across the energy access ecosystem, bringing the UK's sustainable electronics research expertise to bear through joint projects and partnerships with established original equipment manufacturers and start-ups, distributors, trade/industry bodies, and governments, working to secure and insulate Africa’s future energy transitions from global supply chain interruptions.

Education in Conflict (EiC). Led by Maria Grazia Imperiale. The ongoing war has destroyed all universities in the Gaza Strip and several academics were killed. The eradication of educational infrastructure will have long-term impact on Palestinian education. This project aims to support institutional capacity building, especially of the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), which has been a partner of UofG on several projects for over 10 years, and to reduce isolation through a
contextualized response to the education emergency in the Gaza Strip.

Research Management Workshop for Capacity Strengthening and Network Development. Led by Mary Ryan. A 3-day workshop for research managers and administrators from the UK and sub-Saharan Africa to develop inter-sectoral relationships while strengthening key skills and capacities for effective research management and research assurance for collaborative research projects. Specific topics will be responsive to the identified needs to the attendees, offering participants the chance to shape the programme, address key skills gaps, and develop professional networks with colleagues from across Africa and the UK.