JIF award for the Bristol Glaciology Centre
Some of the mysteries of the vast climate changes which have taken place over millions of years can be solved by studying glaciers and their influence on geology. The large ice sheet which covered much of Northern Europe about 18,000 years ago left the most recent evidence, but over the past two million years or so variations in the climate have produced a distinctive geological record, which includes huge submarine fans of sediment. These formed during periods of glaciation when fast-flowing ice streams reached the edge of the continental shelf.

This year has seen several important developments. First, in June 1998 the University appointed Julian Dowdeswell as Professor of Physical Geography, and shortly afterwards the Bristol Glaciology Centre was established with Dowdeswell as its Director. The Centre is based in the School of Geographical Sciences where there were already several glaciologists and it also has links with other departments in the Science Faculty. In May 1999 Dowdeswell heard that he was to receive a £2 million grant from the Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF), recently set up to enable UK universities to finance essential building, refurbishment and equipment to ensure that they remain at the forefront of international scientific research.

Icebergs and see ice in an East Greenland fjord

Julian Dowdeswell is to act as Chief Research Scientist on a marine geophysical expedition in the Arctic next summer on the RSS James Clark Ross, the UK’s ice-strengthened vessel. The Natural Environment Research Council has funded this work. The JIF grant will enable him to buy and install a multi-beam echo sounder. With this he will collect evidence of what has happened to the oceanography and the climate of the Polar North Atlantic over the past few 100,000 years. The echo sounder and side-scan sonar equipment will be used to produce detailed contour maps of the sea floor and the underlying sediments, and core samples will also be drilled from the undersea sediments to reconstruct the glacial history of the area.

Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research
People living in areas of Britain where population has decreased by a fifth or more since 1971 have a chance of dying 25% above the national average. George Davey Smith, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, and Daniel Dorling and Mary Shaw in the School of Geographical Sciences, have found that ‘middle-class people who are better off and more highly educated than their working-class counterparts are more likely to migrate out of less desirable areas. This differential migration seems to be a driving force behind the differences in mortality rates by area.’

This research, which has implications for policy, was carried out by researchers attached to the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research, officially recognised this year as a University Research Centre. The 1980s and ’90s witnessed a steady growth in wealth worldwide combined with a dramatic increase in poverty. The Director of the new Centre, Peter Townsend, Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow, has an international reputation for developing scientific methods of measuring poverty. Members of the Research Centre are drawn from the Departments of Clinical Medicine, Social Medicine, Economics, Geographical Sciences, Politics, the School for Policy Studies and the Graduate School of Education. Their interests include topics as diverse as the role of education as a means of alleviating poverty, the associations between poverty and disability, disease and crime, and the manifestation of poverty in rural societies.

Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship
This year, in which ethnic cleansing, racial intolerance, institutional racism and genocide have been all too prominent in many parts of the world, has seen the establishment of a University Research Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. Since 1970 Bristol has run an MSc course in ethnic relations, and over 125 students, from home and overseas, have graduated from it since 1991. In this period six have completed PhDs on this topic and 11 are currently working for their PhDs.

Staff research activity and publications in this important field have been increasing in recent years and Bristol’s profile has been strongly enhanced by the appointment of Tariq Modood as Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy. He is now the Director of the new University Research Centre.

A recent report by Tariq Modood, Steve Fenton, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, and John Carter, Research Associate, has caused universities to examine their attitudes and practices. Ethnicity and employment in higher education is the first major research project to look at ethnicity in higher education. The report was commissioned by a consortium of higher education organisations working with the Commission for Racial Equality. Its conclusions are that ethnic minorities are more likely to hold fixed-term research posts, which offer little security of employment, and to experience discrimination in applying for posts, in promotion and in harassment. While some ethnic minority groups (for example Chinese and Africans) are more likely to be employed in higher education than could be expected from Britain’s population distribution, others (for example Pakistanis and Black Caribbeans) are under-represented. There is, however, some good news in that ethnic diversity in academic life seems to be increasing and some minority groups are moving up in the profession.

The University had already this year approved a new Equal Opportunities Policy, and is now taking a fresh look at its own practices in the light of this important report.
Ethnicity and employment in higher education by Tariq Modood, Steve Fenton and John Carter. Policy Studies Institute, 1999.

Implant Research Centre
How many people do you know with replacement hip or knee joints? Millions of individuals formerly crippled with arthritis are now active again thanks to successful implants. In the UK alone over 40,000 hips and 30,000 knees are replaced each year at a cost of approximately £350 million per annum. Yet it is estimated that about 30% of these joints will ultimately fail. Therefore it is essential to investigate and improve the long-term survival of these implants.

A new building was completed in February 1999 for the Bristol Implant Research Centre housed in the Avon Orthopaedic Centre at Southmead Hospital, the largest centre for elective orthopaedic surgery in England. A generous equipment grant from The Wolfson Foundation supplied essential equipment, and further funding is needed to complete equipping and staffing the laboratories. Under the leadership of Ian Learmonth, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, it will bring together expertise in clinical medicine with biologically-based research, epidemiology, bioengineering and geochemistry.