Funding.
My group has received 3 million pounds worth of funding in past years to investigate varios aspects of environmental pollution and health.
Recent awards include:
EU FP7 Marie Curie Incoming European fellowship (IEF) to Dr A David. £169,945, June 2012-March 2014. FISHMETABOLOME: Fishing for effluent-related biomarkers using metabolomics. This proposal was scored at 93.7% by EU assessors.
EU FP7, £368,888, to Susssex May 2008 to Oct 2012. CONTAMED: Contaminant mixtures and human reproductive health - novel strategies for health impact and risk assessment of endocrine disruptors. (PI of consortium Prof A Kortenkamp, Brunel University)
EU FP7 Marie Curie IEF to Dr C Liscio, £151,494, April 2010-April 2012. EDCsANTIANDROGENS: Integrative water sampling for the detection and identification of antiandrogenic contaminants in European rivers.
EU ERDF Interreg, £619,159, Feb 2009- May 2013. DIESE : Determination of pertinent Indicators for Environmental monitoring; a Strategy for Europe. co Pi with Prof C Minier and J Rotchell.
NERC award £577,000 (£296,727 to Sussex) Jan 2008 - Jan 2011PI (co-PI Prof C.R Tyler, Exeter University) The significance of antiandrogens in disrupting sexual function in wild fish in UK rivers.
Collaborations.
My group has ongoing collaborations with Prof C.R. Tyler, a fish physiologist, at the University of Exeter. We are currently working with Dr A David, an EU Marie Curie fellow, to discover how mixtures of contaminants that bioconcentrate in fish exposed to wastewater effluents impact their health and metabolism. We are using chemical profiling and metabolomics approaches to identify mixtures of contaminants and metabolites in microliter volumes of blood samples.
We collaborate with Prof C Minier and others at Le Havre University to investigate the impact of environmental contamination in marine estuaries as part the EU- funded DIESE project. We are currently identifying a number of anti-androgenic compounds which are prevalent in estuarine sediments and may accumulate in marine bivalves and other benthos.
I have active collaborations with Prof A Kortenkamp at Brunel University and other members of a current EU consortium (CONTAMED), including partners in Copenhagen and Spain, investigating the effect of antiandrogenic contaminants on sexual development of newborn infants.
In other environmental health work we have started a new collaboration and pilot project with Dr Brian Jones at School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences, Brighton University and in BSUH on the identification of biomarkers of colon cancer in human stool samples. This work makes use of our expertise in metabolomic profiling to investigate how the gut microbiome influences colon biochemistry and progression of disease.
We have a number of chemical ecology projects incluidng with Prof Sue Hartley at York University to investigate how microbial infections influence plant defence chemistry and tolerance to subsequent herbivory. Also with Professor Jonathan Bacon at Sussex to identify trail pheromones in ants in order to further understand the role of chemical communication in the behaviour of social insects.