Hypertension is a very common health problem, and is perceived by the public as an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Better understanding of how genetic risk of hypertension interacts with environmental factors such as dietary sodium is important if members of the public are to be persuaded to alter lifestyle. We have already had experience of the interest that the lay public has in this area through the high level of participation in the Bright Study. The development of the UK Biobank programme over the next few years will offer an important DNA resource that will allow any key candidate genes that might have an important environmental interaction for a common disease to be studied in greater detail, and we propose to ensure that our links with the Biobank proposal through local and national collaborations are exploited in due course.

The key objective of this ambitious and adventurous program of research is to develop an entirely new method of spacecraft orbit transfer and orbit control using solar sails, driven only by solar radiation pressure. The new method will enable ultra-low cost libration point missions, with numerous applications in space science, Earth observation and telecommunications. To achieve this goal, orbit transfer and orbit control for such libration point missions will be investigated using modern dynamical system theory with solar radiation pressure. This provides a key advantage over conventional thrusters, since a solar sail does not require propellant, thus reducing spacecraft mass and launch costs while significantly lengthening mission duration. Through this programme of research, practical control strategies will be evaluated and engineering requirements on solar sail size and performance assessed. The programme of research will be supported by the interdisciplinary Space Glasgow Research Cluster and the host’s extensive network of international collaborators on solar sailing (ESA, NASA, NOAA). The host supervisor is the acknowledged international leader in the rapidly developing field of solar sailing. The therefore project offers a golden opportunity to link the Experienced Research’s prior work on real-world solar sail mission operations at the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) with the host’s extensive expertise in solar sail orbital dynamics.

People with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) cannot move their limbs under a level of the injury. In addition, one thids of SCI patients have severe chronic neuropathic pain that often does not respond to medications. Although patients experience neuropathic pain as a pain in one part of their body, its origin is actually in the brain, which is being confused by the lack of sensations from the paralysed limb. This project proposes a novel method for treatment of neuropathic pain that does not require medications. It is a brain train method based on so called neurofeedback . In this method, patients brain waves are recorded using surface electrodes (electroencephalography) and processed in real-time on a computer. A certain features of the brain activity, that are related to the pain, are displayed on a computer screen almost simultaneously while they are recorded. The patient is asked to voluntarily modify those features, and in that way to reduce the experience of pain. Although the method might seem difficult, experience with a similar ?neurofeedback? therapy to suppress epileptic seizures show that people can fairly easily learn how to modify their brain waves. The main advantage of the ?neurofeedback? therapy is that once patients learn to use ?the brain train? strategy, they can practice it at home, without a feedback from a computer. If successful, this therapy will greatly improve the quality of life of people who are already strongly debilitated with paralysis of their limbs and would free them from a daily use of pain-killers. For some of the patients that might even mean getting back to work. It is expected that the new therapy will also reduced NHS costs for patients treatment. The same therapy can be used for the other groups of patients with neuropathic pain, such as stroke patients and amputees.

Leukaemia is a cancer that results from a disruption in the normal development of cells within the blood. This disruption can occur when regulatory elements responsible for controlling white blood cell development malfunction. We recently discovered that a disturbance in the function of a ubiquitously expressed element protein kinase C during white blood cell development, initiates a specific type of leukaemia, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). CLL is the most common adult blood cancer in the Western world, for which there is currently no cure. While many research groups are engaged in investigating the mechanisms that can induce CLL cell death in patients as a mechanism to remove the leukaemic cells, little is known about the origin of CLL cells. Until now it has been almost impossible to address this question, as the factors responsible for this initiating this leukaemia have remained elusive. However, our novel mouse model provides us with a unique opportunity to gain fundamental knowledge about the cellular origin of CLL, and may assist in the generation of novel treatments to cure CLL. Within our university-based research laboratory, we will perform established cellular and molecular techniques to identify which cell is responsible initiating CLL. In parallel with these experiments, we will characterise the CLL-initiating cells in CLL-patient cell samples. In this way, we will uncover important information regarding the cell of origin for CLL.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has allowed us to make measurements of high energy particle interactions with unprecedented accuracy. Recently, previously unexplored particle masses and decays are being measured with such high precision that they are starting to show signs of disagreement with predictions from the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. As the precision of experimental results from the LHC continues to improve, and new measurements are made, the precision of the corresponding SM predictions will need to be improved as well in order to provide a stringent test of the theory. However, many previous and current SM predictions rely on approximations which are not expected to be valid at the precision the LHC is starting to reach. Moreover, many of these decays involve composite particles; hadrons made up of two or three elementary particles called quarks. Studying these from first principles, without approximations, requires a special computational technique known as lattice quantum chromodynamics (lattice QCD). In lattice QCD, the continuous space-time of the SM is discretised onto a grid or "lattice", with quarks living on the points and gluons, the particles which carry force between the quarks, living on the lines connecting the points. The physics of the quarks can then be studied using lattices with different edge lengths (or "lattice spacings") in order to obtain results in the continuum limit at which the lattice spacing goes to zero. This technique requires the use of large supercomputing facilities, and has worked very well for studying the physics of lighter quarks, such as up, down, strange or charm quarks. Many of the signs of disagreement with theory, and hints of new physics beyond the SM, seen at the LHC are in the physics of bottom quarks. These are much heavier than up, down, strange or charm quarks and require the use of lattices with a very small lattice spacing. This is in turn much more computationally expensive and, until only very recently, doing these calculations without additional approximations remained intractable. However, advances that I have made allow for the high precision study of bottom quark decays using lattice QCD, reaching the level of accuracy required for comparison to projected LHC measurements. Utilising the new upgrade to the UK's STFC high performance computing resources, DiRAC-3, the first objective of my project is to apply these new, state of the art techniques to six different, but complementary bottom quark decays. These decays are under intense ongoing scrutiny by the experimental and theoretical physics community with upcoming measurements at the LHC. I will analyse my results for these decays, incorporating the results from the LHC, searching for hints of new physics and providing a guide for possible future measurements. The second focus of my project is the study of bottom quarks appearing in exotic particles known as "tetraquarks". These are composite particles with four quarks rather than the normal two or three that we see predominantly in nature. The LHC experiment has very recently observed both a four-charm tetraquark and a one-charm tetraquark, while a two-charm tetraquark was observed back in 2003 by the Belle experiment. It has become clear that observations of other types of tetraquark are likely to be made in the future, with compelling theoretical arguments for the existence of tetraquarks with two bottom quarks. However these have not yet been observed, no precise theoretical predictions for their masses have been made, and, furthermore, their internal structure is currently completely unknown. My aim is to make high precision predictions for the masses of these states, as well as to study their internal structure using a novel method of adding electric charge to lattice simulations.