Dr Stephanie Coen will work with Dr Victoria Downie at the UK Sport Institute (formerly the English Institute of Sport) to investigate what can be done to address gender disparities in sports injury. Concussion and ankle sprain rates are twice as high in girls/women^1,2, while ruptures of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) occur up to six times more frequently³. Dr Coen and Dr Downie will analyse the experiences of former elite women athletes to understand how aspects of women’s sport environments (e.g., social norms, gendered assumptions) contribute to women’s elevated injury risk. This information will inform recommendations for the sporting sector to help close the injury gap between men and women. 

Dr Helen McCabe will work with Ann Bonner at Honour-Based Abuse (HBA) charity Karma Nirvana to gather evidence to develop best practice in sharing data related to this crime which will help inform effective policy and interventions. Currently, policy to combat and end HBA, and to support survivors and identify those at risk is not well-based in evidence. Data-gathering on the issue by relevant bodies including the Home Office, police forces, local authorities and health professionals is also patchy and differs greatly. Dr McCabe and Bonner intend for this research to contribute to the formation of a national shared database enabling the analysis of this data, and developing support and interventions that are supported by this robust evidence source.   

Dr Larissa Sandy will work with Sam Richardson-Martin at the charity POW Nottingham to develop a tool to improve serious violent crime reports for sex workers in the city. Estimates suggest street-based sex workers are twelve times more likely to die from workplace violence than other women⁴. Discriminatory relationships between sex workers and the police have resulted in inconsistent experiences accessing justice and very low reporting rates. The project will explore whether a well-designed reporting tool, partnered with a police liaison officer operating separately from the police can lead to improvements in reporting and victims’/survivors’ access to justice. 

Dr Aris Georgopoulos will work with Dr Richard Freeman at Vamstar, a business-to-business healthcare marketplace platform, to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to integrate sustainable standards into the UK’s Healthcare Procurement Framework. Supply chains in healthcare procurement (namely the purchasing of goods like medical gowns, PPE, other medical equipment and services) are becoming more complex and unpredictable due to fast-changing market conditions (for example COVID-19, shortages, inflation). There is an increasing pressure on the NHS and its suppliers to reduce costs and overall inefficiencies that affect ultimately the quality of the provided care and patient backlogs. New technologies such as Generative AI, deep learning and knowledge graphs, are expected to contribute to achieving these efficiencies. However, these solutions need to inhabit an ever-changing environment of ethical, legal and policy (net zero, social sustainability) standards.  

Professor Richard Hyde will work with Faith Reynolds at Amplified Global, a start-up dedicated to improving information disclosure (details that consumers receive from businesses) in the legal sector. They will work together to analyse how the design and layout of legal texts online in the financial services sector can improve consumers’ understanding and cause a change in behaviour – i.e. taking the necessary action the legal text calls for. The project will look at information pre-contract, at the point of contracting, and post-contract, and consider, for the first time, how the different contexts and emotional situations may alter consumer responses. The project will build and test disclosures and produce guidelines setting out what good information disclosure looks like.