Placing student voices at the heart of institutional dialogue

This article is based on a workshop delivered by the two authors at the SEDA Spring Conference 2008 on Engaging with Student Expectations (Flint and Oxley, 2008)

Learning from Internal Change Academy processes

A 2007/8 Research and Development Grant from SEDA under its Supporting and Leading Educational Change programme provided Sheffield Hallam University with the opportunity to undertake an extremely interesting and timely piece of work on learning from Internal Change Academy processes. A presentation to the SEDA Spring Conference 2009 focused on understanding the value of Internal Change Academies as a model for leading educational change and demonstrated how a simple benchmarking exercise may provide a rich source of data in leading change processes. This article focuses on the broader lessons learnt about change rather than on the practicalities and the different models of running an Internal Change Academy. That information is available in the project final report (Flint and Oxley, 2009)

Effect of Electrolyte Concentration on the Capacitance and Mobility of Graphene

The use of graphene field-effect transistors as a biosensor is increasingly being used to study biological phenomena, due to the sensitivity and low reactivity of graphene. To further improve sensitivity in biological environments, we examined how different salt concentrations affect the mobility of capacitance of the graphene. Samples were also measured after an annealing process. We report on the positive correlation between sensitivity and electrolyte concentration and speculate on methods to improve future detectors. Mobility of the device was found to change from 1.07*103cm2/ (V*s) in de-ionized water to 2.78*103cm2/ (V*s) in a 500 mM potassium phosphate buffer solution

Development of a cell population migration assay

Cellular migration is central to many physiological and pathological processes, from wound healing and the immune response to cancer cell invasion. Many in-vitro assays have been developed to study these processes and can be classified by the nature of the assay, for example migration of single cells or entire populations, as well as migration on a planar surface or through a 3D structure. This work concerns the development of an assay to study the migration of whole populations of cells across a deformable planar substratum, which may be coated in adsorbed adhesion molecules. The technique detailed below was developed from the Teflon fence assay