Precarious migrant entrepreneurship: gendered in-work poverty for new migrants in the UK

This research project examines whether self-employment leads to social and occupational mobility for migrant entrepreneurs or traps them in low-value, low-pay sectors. The project focuses on the gendered experiences of work, highlighting the implications for men and women in precarious self-employment (low-paid/low-valued) and the support available to them. Previous studies have found that entrepreneurship for migrants can offer an alternative source of employment to overcome racialised discrimination in the labour market and achieve self-realisation and positive integration in the countries of settlement. Advantages of working self-employed include being able to escape precarious paid employment, fulfil professional aspirations, and have more independence and control in daily work life. However, previous research has also shown that migrant entrepreneurs make paltry returns on their businesses. This may lead to them experiencing ‘in-work’ poverty. While in-work poverty has been studied in terms of paid employment, there is little research on this area linked to business activity and less on migrant entrepreneurship

Price optimization for round trip car sharing

Car sharing, car clubs and short-term rentals could support the transition toward net zero but their success depends on them being financially sustainable for service providers and attractive to end users. Dynamic pricing could support this by incentivizing users while balancing supply and demand. We describe the usage of a round trip car sharing fleet by a continuous time Markov chain model, which reduces to a multi-server queuing model where hire duration is assumed independent of the hourly rental price. We present analytical and simulation optimization models that allow the development of dynamic pricing strategies for round trip car sharing systems; in particular identifying the optimal hourly rental price. The analytical tractability of the queuing model enables fast optimization to maximize expected hourly revenue for either a single fare system or a system where the fare depends on the number of cars on hire, while accounting for stochasticity in customer arrival times and durations of hire. Simulation optimizationis used to optimize prices where the fare depends on the time of day or hire duration depends on price. We present optimal prices for a given customer population and show how the expected revenue and car availability depend on the customer arrival rate, willingness-to-pay distribution, dependence of the hire duration on price, and size of the customer population. The results provide optimal strategies for pricing of car sharing and inform strategic managerial decisions such as whether to use time- or state-dependent pricing and optimizing the fleet size

Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) at different cortical targets on cognition in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): an exploratory analysis

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) holds promise as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Patients with OCD show impairment in specific domains of cognitive flexibility and response inhibition. We previously reported that tDCS produced a positive clinical effect on OCD symptoms. Here, we report a secondary analysis of neurocognitive data. In this randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, crossover, multicenter feasibility study, adults with a diagnosis of OCD according to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5) received three courses of clinic-based tDCS, targeting the left orbitofrontal cortex (L-OFC), bilateral supplementary motor area (SMA), and sham, randomly allocated and delivered in counterbalanced order. Cognitive assessments were conducted before and 2-h after the first stimulation in each arm. Nineteen adults were recruited. tDCS of both the L-OFC and SMA significantly improved cognitive inflexibility, while sham treatment did not (paired-sample t test, baseline vs. 2-h after stimulation). No significant effect of tDCS was found for motor impulsivity (stop-signal reaction time) in any of the three arms. In a small sample of patients with OCD, a single administration of tDCS to the L-OFC and SMA produced a rapid improvement in cognitive inflexibility but not in motor impulsivity. A definitive randomized, controlled trial of tDCS targeting both the OFC and SMA, including cognitive markers, is indicated.</p

Inviting nature into the room: a conversation with clinical psychology

The evidence-base documents the wide array of benefits that being in nature has for human health and wellbeing. This thesis aimed to explore the role that nature could play in the field of clinical psychology. Firstly, through furthering an academic understanding of how and why nature is beneficial for psychological wellbeing, and secondly through exploring clinical psychologists’ current practice of working with nature. This thesis firstly presents a chapter outlining the creation of this project and its importance and relevance for the field of clinical psychology, in the context of current NHS and health narratives in the UK. The thesis continued with a systematic review of 10 articles aiming to understand if nature connectedness influenced the relationship between nature exposure and psychological wellbeing. The results offer a complex and nuanced picture, whereby nature connectedness does appear to play a role in this relationship, however various factors limit the ability to draw robust conclusions. This has implications for how clinical psychologists can incorporate elements of nature into their work and whether to prioritise patient’s emotional and cognitive relationship with nature. To further understand clinical psychologist’s current experiences, the empirical study interviewed 16 clinical psychologists, focusing on participants perceived benefits and barriers of working with nature, and why this is important to their overall practice. A thematic analysis was conducted which generated four themes. The themes summarised the ways that psychologists defined nature and how they have creatively and curiously incorporated this into their work. Moreover, nature was defined as enabling connection both intra and interpersonally. Psychologists explored the construct of risk and safety, and how nature fits into this continuum. The final theme explored issues of power and permission. This thesis has offered an exploratory yet persuasive argument for why and how clinical psychologists can innovate and improve practices within the profession through exploring ways of working with or in nature

Gain of visceral adipose tissue rather than low skeletal muscle mass is associated with overall survival in patients with colorectal liver metastases; results from the NewEPOC study

Introduction: sarcopenia and adiposity at diagnosis are important prognostic factors in cancer. Ongoing changes in body composition during chemotherapy treatment may have additional prognostic relevance. This study aimed to investigate the association between body composition changes during neoadjuvant treatment and survival in patients with colorectal liver metastases.Materials and methods: in this subgroup analysis of the newEPOC RCT (NCT00482222), pre- and post-treatment CT-scans of patients undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy for colorectal liver metastases were studied. The total cross-sectional area of skeletal muscle tissue (SM), Visceral Adipose Tissue (VAT), Subcutaneous Adipose Tissue (SAT), Intra-Muscular Adipose Tissue (IMAT), and radiation attenuation for skeletal muscle (SM-RA) were determined.Results: during neoadjuvant therapy, SM-index decreased from 50.6 ± 8.7 to 47.6 ± 8.6 cm2/m2, p &lt; 0.001 for men and 40.5 ± 6.1 to 37.7 ± 5.9 cm2/m2, p = 0.002, for women. SM-RA decreased from 37.7 ± 7.8 to 36.0 ± 7.6 HU, p &lt; 0.001 for men. VAT- and SAT-indices did not change significantly during treatment. Sarcopenia, SM-loss, SM-RA as baseline as well as change in SM-RA were not associated with overall survival, while intervention arm (HR1.96, 95 %CI1.21-3.19, p = 0.009), undergoing resection of the metastases (HR0.19, 95 %CI0.09-0.40, p &lt; 0.001) and gaining &gt;2 % VAT-index over 12 weeks (HR2.05, 95 %CI1.12-3.76, p = 0.025) were.Conclusions: the body composition features SM and SM-RA decreased during chemotherapy, but were not associated with survival. On the contrary, although VAT did not significantly change, the gain of VAT was an independent prognostic factor for survival. These results should be validated in independent cohorts but may indicate that in this selected patient group, adipose tissue might be a more important prognostic factor than sarcopenia.</p

Development of method for large scale manufacturing of ON constructs

Oligonucleotide therapeutics rapidly advanced in recent years, with several studies being conducted in the biological and medical fields. Therefore, it has become imperative to develop methodologies for the large-scale synthesis of oligonucleotides, with chemical modification to match the barriers that need to be overcome, namely instability, tissue delivery and affinity, immunogenicity and off-target effects. The primary objective of this research project is to synthesise linkers that can be used in oligonucleotide solid-phase synthesis, enabling conjugation between these oligonucleotides and biological macromolecules via click chemistry. The initial phase of the work involved the chemical synthesis of linkers, continuing ongoing studies in the host laboratory on amino and alkyne linkers. While the alkyne linkers enable conjugation with macromolecules through copper-catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, the amino linker provides orthogonality through amide bond formation with biological entities, such as peptides. In addition, linkers based on dibenzoazacyclooctyne (DBCO) were investigated as DBCO can react with azide-handle biomolecules via copper-free click chemistry in biological conditions. The DBCO-based linker was designed using 5,6-dihydrodibenzo[b,f]azocine as key intermediate. This core structure can be acylated to yield the desired DBCO, followed by the reaction with amino acids or analogues. Given the requirement that the linkers undergo oligonucleotide solid-phase synthesis, a phosphoramidite moiety was incorporated into the linkers. This was achieved by introducing an aminodiol building block. This common scaffold contains an amine group for bonding with the click chemistry moiety via amide bond formation and two hydroxyl groups, one for phosphoramidite group introduction; other, DMTr-protected ensures compatibility with solid-phase oligonucleotide synthesis, enabling elongation of the oligonucleotide chain, as well as the incorporation of linkers at any position. The aminodiol building blocks studies in this project were a linear aminodiol, a cyclic aminodiol and the serinol. The second phase of the research project involved the comparison of the efficiency of the synthesized linkers in the oligonucleotide solid-phase conditions, as well as evaluating their behaviour during the handling processes after the synthesis, including cleavage, deprotection from the solid support, and purification. In addition, the conjugation of DBCO-containing oligonucleotides with biological molecules, such as peptides and monoclonal antibodies, was also investigated in this project

Partial learning for MIMO detection

Reliable and efficient multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection remains a central challenge in modern wireless receivers. Optimal maximum-likelihood (Max-L) detection delivers the best performance. However, its exponential complexity is prohibitive, while linear schemes such as zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) are computationally attractive yet they suffer from poor performance. Fully learned detectors improve robustness but introduce substantial parameter counts and computational complexity. Building on prior work on partial learning (PL), this thesis contributes a unified detection framework based on PL that addresses these trade-offs by applying learning only where it yields the most benefits: a subset of the weakest symbol streams, with the remaining streams detected using low-complexity linear detection. The first part of the thesis designs a soft-output PL demapper implemented with a small fully connected neural network (FCNN) for quasi-static channels and embeds it into an iterative detection. The inner MIMO detector produces log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) that are exchanged with an outer convolutional decoder. EXIT charts and decoding trajectories are used to analyze convergence. Across representative 2×2 and 4×4 quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) systems, the iterative PL (Iter-PL) technique closes most of the gap to iterative Max-L and full-learning detectors while operating at a fraction of their complexity. Operation counts are reported and related to the number of learning-assisted streams d, demonstrating explicit performance versus complexity trade-off. The second part extends Iter-PL to time-varying channels, while also considering channel state information (CSI) error. The same FCNN-based soft demapper is trained using CSI errors. Results show that Iter-PL retains its iterative gains under 5% CSI error and remains markedly superior to purely linear detection. An adaptive PL strategy is further introduced to select d based on the average received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), thereby achieving a near-constant target bit error rate (BER) with reduced average complexity. The final part addresses scalability in dynamic multi-user uplinks. A graph neural network (GNN)–based PL detector is proposed, where an approximate message passing (AMP) frontend supplies soft symbols and variance estimates to the GNN. The GNN then detects only the d weakest users, while ZF detects the remaining users. By operating on user graphs, the model generalizes across changing activity masks without requiring retraining and maintains a low parameter count. Simulations over multiple activity patterns consistently confirm low BER and favorable performance–complexity trade-offs. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that PL enables near-optimal soft detection, accompanied by clear and quantifiable reductions in complexity, and that GNN-based partial learning offers the same benefits in multi-user scenarios. The proposed technique offers a practical approach to scalable, low-latency MIMO detection, making it suitable for evolving wireless systems

Liver fibrosis and the risk of coronary artery disease, stent thrombosis, restenosis, and adverse clinical outcomes

Background and aims: liver fibrosis may be associated with coronary artery disease (CAD) and adverse cardiovascular outcomes, but data remain limited. This study aimed to explore the relationship between liver fibrosis and the incidence of CAD, stent thrombosis (ST), in-stent restenosis (ISR) and long-term clinical outcomes.Methods: two cohorts were analysed: the UK Biobank (UKB) cohort examined liver fibrosis and CAD incidence and clinical outcomes in the general population, while the Wenzhou cohort assessed its relationship with ST and ISR and long-term outcomes in post-PCI patients. CAD incidence was defined as coronary stenosis ≥ 50% or clinical events, such as myocardial ischaemia, myocardial infarction and acute coronary syndrome. ST was confirmed via angiography, and ISR was defined as ≥ 50% stenosis within the stent. Major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) included all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction, heart failure and stroke. Liver fibrosis was assessed using FIB-4, categorised as ≤ 1.3, 1.3–2.67 and &gt; 2.67.Results: 394,625 participants were included. In the UKB cohort (n = 380,638), 7102 (1.9%) had FIB-4 &gt; 2.67. Over 14.4 years, FIB-4 &gt; 2.67 was associated with higher CAD incidence (aHR = 1.41, p &lt; 0.001) and MACE (aHR = 1.69, p &lt; 0.001). In the Wenzhou cohort (n = 13,987), 3173 (22.7%) had FIB-4 &gt; 2.67. Over 3.0 years, FIB-4 &gt; 2.67 was associated with increased risks of ST and ISR (aHR = 1.34, p = 0.001) and MACE (aHR = 1.97, p &lt; 0.001).Conclusions: liver fibrosis is common among patients with CAD and is associated with CAD incidence, stent thrombosis, restenosis and long-term cardiovascular risk

Advancing Justice in Marine Biodiversity Conservation

Drawing on contemporary political theory, this paper sets out several key normative standards that can be applied to the conservation of marine biodiversity. Such standards ensure that progress in mitigating the biodiversity crisis is achieved fairly and inclusively. The paper suggests that the costs of heading off the marine biodiversity crisis must be allocated in line with contribution to the problem, and ability to pay, and that there can be no justification for leaving the most disadvantaged to bear significant conservation costs. It also clarifies what kinds of activities can count as biodiversity conservation policies, in order to keep the environmental consequences of unsustainable consumption in the global North firmly in view. Finally, it argues that decision-making about marine biodiversity should be opened up much more widely, at all stages of the policy-making process, to ensure that all of those affected by conservation policies have a fair chance to be involved in formulating policies and priorities