New Wellcome Trust Investigators in Medical Humanities announced
12 March 2013
Recipients of the latest awards are researching a broad range of important topics, from an exploration of how the introduction of IVF was navigated (and what can be learned from this specific case of rapid technological change) to the changing place of the public within public health in postwar Britain, and a philosophical analysis of whether and when crime-preventing neurointerventions may permissibly be offered, imposed or provided by the state or medical profession.
The awards, which range from approximately £500 000 to just over £1 million for up to five years, are made to scholars in established academic posts depending on their career history, ambition and vision and the resources required to realise this vision. The Awards are made to researchers at two levels - New Investigators and Senior Investigators - depending on their experience. They complement existing schemes, which support scholars in the medical humanities at all stages of their careers.
Like the Investigator Awards in biomedicine, the Investigator Awards scheme in medical humanities marks a departure from funding medium-term project and programme grants, which can tie researchers into a cycle of focusing on securing grants rather than tackling major research problems.
The full list of recipients is as follows:
Thomas Douglas (New Investigator), University of Oxford
Neurointerventions in crime prevention: an ethical analysis.
David Kirby (New Investigator), University of Manchester
Playing God: exploring the interactions among the biosciences, religion and entertainment media.
Alex Mold (New Investigator), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Placing the public in public health: public health in Britain 1948-2010.
Sarah Franklin (Senior Investigator), University of Cambridge
Fertilization through a looking glass: a sociology of UK IVF in the late-twentieth century.
Mark Jackson (Senior Investigator), University of Exeter
Lifestyle, health and disease: changing concepts of balance in modern medicine.
Simon Swain and Emilie Savage-Smith (Joint Senior Investigators), University of Warwick and University of Oxford
A literary history of medicine: the best accounts of the classes of physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi`ah (d. 1270).
Steven Sturdy (Senior Investigator), University of Edinburgh
Making genomic medicine.
David Stuckler (New Investigator), University of Cambridge
Social welfare and public health: analysing quasi-natural experiments from the 2007 recession.
Mark Thomas and Ian Barnes (Joint Senior Investigators), UCL and Royal Holloway, University of London
Human adaptation to changing diet and infectious disease loads, from the origins of agriculture to the present.
