Professional development in teaching and learning for early career academic geographers: Contexts, practices and tensions

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Geography in Higher Education on 16th May 2011, available online: doi: 10.1080/03098265.2011.563380This paper provides a review of the practices and tensions informing approaches to professional development for early career academic geographers who are teaching in higher education. We offer examples from Britain, Canada, Nigeria and the USA. The tensions include: institutional and departmental cultures; models that offer generic and discipline-specific approaches; the credibility of alternative settings for professional development in teaching and learning; the valuing of professional development and of teaching in academic systems of reward and recognition; and the challenges of balancing professional and personal life. We summarize concepts of good practice and suggest opportunities for future research

International genome-wide meta-analysis identifies new primary biliary cirrhosis risk loci and targetable pathogenic pathways.

Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) is a classical autoimmune liver disease for which effective immunomodulatory therapy is lacking. Here we perform meta-analyses of discovery data sets from genome-wide association studies of European subjects (n=2,764 cases and 10,475 controls) followed by validation genotyping in an independent cohort (n=3,716 cases and 4,261 controls). We discover and validate six previously unknown risk loci for PBC (Pcombined<5 × 10(-8)) and used pathway analysis to identify JAK-STAT/IL12/IL27 signalling and cytokine-cytokine pathways, for which relevant therapies exist