Two new St Leonard’s World-Leading Scholarships for Medicine
Congratulations to Chair in Public Health Prof. Peter Donnelly and Lecturer Dr Robert Hammond on their success in the recent St Leonard’s College World-Leading PhD Scholarship application round! Prof. Donnelly and Dr Hammond will be jointly supervising projects with colleagues in the Schools of Computer Science and Physics and Astronomy respectively. The 3.5-year opportunities come with fees paid and a full stipend.
Definitely Maybe? Communicating Uncertainty in Medicine through Data Comics
The student supervised by Prof. Donnelly and Dr Areti Manataki (Computer Science) will examine uncertainty visualisation in medicine and healthcare, with the following objectives:
- evaluate existing uncertainty visualisation techniques in the context of health data, with a focus on bias in decision making (e.g. at diagnosis or treatment selection);
- develop data comics with different levels of interactivity for visualising uncertainty in medicine, allowing for different levels of support for interpreting uncertainty; and
- extensively assess the impact of interactive data comics on health decision-making under uncertainty, including comparison to existing uncertainty visualisation techniques and text-based alternatives.
Interdisciplinary methods will be employed across the fields of information visualisation, risk and evidence communication, cognitive and perceptual psychology, and health communication. Novel visualisation methods will be developed, and extensive experiments will be conducted with patients, medical experts and health policymakers, allowing the student to make important technical contributions and advance current understanding in the field.
Photodynamic therapy of Diabetic foot ulcers
The project offered by Dr Hammond and his Physics and Astronomy colleague Prof. Ifor Samuel will focus on non-classical antimicrobial therapy, building on previous work in their respective research groups.
Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) is a serious condition that frequently requires invasive debridement and antibiotic therapy. Where multiple pathogens are present, and with the increasing issue of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), antibiotic treatment of this condition is becoming more challenging. Photodynamic Therapy is an antibiotic-free therapy that has been shown to be highly effective in DFU. More importantly, it does not drive resistance and therefore, drive AMR. The incorporation of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology and SLIC technology makes this project not only extremely clinically important but highly innovative and pioneering in the field of non-classical antimicrobial therapy.
Congratulations, Prof. Donnelly and Dr Hammond!