Gender issues in the university research environment

Recruiting and retaining females within science, engineering and technology continues to challenge many European Higher Education Institutions. This study looks at female self-perceptions relating to effective research work and career progression. Focus groups are used to examine the attitudes and experiences of females, and a questionnaire used to explore perceptions in four main skills areas: group work; communication; personal awareness; and project planning and management. The study indicates consistent female concerns on issues pertaining to effective female role models, negative work-role stereotypes and the work-life balance of an academic career. For all four skills areas, the average confidence scores of the female participants fell below that of males, but these differences were only statistically significant for perceptions on group work and communication skills, and prior to an intense skills development course. Based on these findings, a student workshop on gender issues has been developed, an outline of which is presented

Age Related Changes in Cerebrovascular Reactivity and Its Relationship to Global Brain Structure

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study was funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) and the Aberdeen Biomedical Imaging Centre, University of Aberdeen. GDW, ADM and CS are part of the SINASPE collaboration (Scottish Imaging Network - A Platform for Scientific Excellence www.SINAPSE.ac.uk). The authors thank Gordon Buchan, Baljit Jagpal, Nichola Crouch, Beverly Maclennan and Katrina Klaasen for their help with running the experiment and Dawn Younie and Teresa Morris for their help with recruitment and scheduling. We also thank the residents of Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, and further afield, for their generous participation.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Investigation of the inter- and intra-scanner reproducibility and repeatability of radiomics features in T1-weighted brain MRI

Open Access via the Wiley Agreement Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Industrial Centre for AI Research in digital Diagnostics (iCAIRD) which was funded by Innovate UK on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) (project number: 104690) and the Roland Sutton Academic Trust (RSAT).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Structural brain complexity and cognitive decline in late life : A longitudinal study in the Aberdeen 1936 Birth Cohort

Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPostprin

Cortical Thickness and Surface Area Networks in Healthy Aging, Alzheimer’s Disease and Behavioral Variant Fronto-Temporal Dementia

Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the support of the Maxwell compute cluster funded by the University of Aberdeen. We also gratefully acknowledge study investigators and the generosity of study participants.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Analysis of teaching pattern's motivational valued from the point of view of engineering students

One of the major problems of current concern of educational research in the field of higher education is the analysis of the characteristics of learning environments that facilitate motivation, self-regulation and academic performance. This issue is currently being studied from three perspectives. Researchers are trying to identify, first, the motivational value of each of the teachers' educational patterns that shape the classroom motivational climate; second, the effect on performance of the different "motivational climates" or classroom goal structures- formed by different sets of teaching patterns; and, third, the effect that modifying some of the teaching patterns that shape such climates has on performance. This paper focuses on the first perspective. We ran a comparative study between Spanish and British engineering students in an attempt to identify whether there are differences in the motivational value attributed to the different teaching patterns and whether this perception is modulated by the motivational characteristics of students. The study methodology involved in-depth surveys, with Spanish students and students from Imperial College London. According to the results of this study, it seems clear that the quality and effectiveness of motivational teaching performance guidelines are not absolute; they can be influenced by cultural values and motivational orientations of students

Fuzzy approximate entropy analysis of resting state fMRI signal complexity across the adult life span

Acknowledgment The authors would like to acknowledge the work of the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM) fMRI community in creating the resting state database and making it publicly available within the framework of the 1000 Functional Connectomes project (https://www.nitrc.org/projects/fcon_1000/). M.O. Sokunbi was supported by an MRC grant G1100629.Peer reviewedPreprin

Degeneration of basal and limbic networks is a core feature of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia

Acknowledgment We would like to acknowledge the support of the Maxwell Computer Cluster funded by the University of Aberdeen. We also gratefully acknowledge study investigators and the generosity of study participants. Funding This study was sponsored entirely by TauRx Therapeutics Ltd (PAR1577). The Maxwell Computer Cluster is funded by the University of Aberdeen.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Klotho, APOEε4, cognitive ability, brain size, atrophy and survival : A study in the Aberdeen Birth Cohort of 1936

We thank the cohort participants who contributed to these studies. The study was supported by the University of Aberdeen Development Trust; the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC); the Wellcome Trust; the Chief Scientist Office (Scotland); and the Alzheimer’s Research Trust (now ARUK).Peer reviewedPostprin